Songlines: tracking the seven sisters.

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Aboriginal art, National Museum of Australia, songlines, the Seven Sisters

The story is written in the country now, in the rock holes, hills, and dunes.

The story is also told at the National Museum of Australia in a stunning exhibition of paintings, holograms, wooden bowls, ceramics, woven baskets, woven figures and cinematic immersion.

Songlines: tracking the seven sisters traces the pursuit of seven sisters by an ancestral shape-shifter over vast expanses of Australia through three different tribal lands: the country of the Martu (the western desert in central Western Australia); the Ngaanyatjarra (between Alice Springs and Kalgoorlie – 3% of Australia); and the Anangu/Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytatjara (in the northwest of South Australia).

by Josephine Mick, born about 1950

The names of the characters might change (the pursuer is Nyurla and Wati Nyiru; the sisters collectively Minyipuru, Kungkarrangkalpa and Kungkarangkalpa) and the story darken, but there is continuity as the journey forms the landscape, until finally the sisters escape into the sky and become the star-cluster of the Pleiades.

The representations begin with an arrangement of striking woven figures.

The information panels are written in language, as well as English, and many of the paintings have an interpretation of the symbols. The colours are breathtakingly vivid, traditional Aboriginal dots and symbols emerging from the dark walls. I’ve offered close-ups with some trepidation at taking them from the whole image, since the image carries so much meaning.

“Minyipuru” (“Seven Sisters”) laid out on the ground at Kilykily (Well 36 on the Canning Stock Route) where it was painted in 2007 Source: http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/yiwarra_kuju/artworks/minyipuru_jukurrpa

Detail from “Kuru Ala” 2016: Estelle Inyika Hogan, Myrtle Pennington, Ngalpingka Simms, Lorraine Davies, Debbie Hansen, Tjaruwa Angelina Woods

A collection of woven baskets offers the configuration of the Pleiades.

Every now and then you are confronted by tall videos of Aboriginal women, talking about their version of the story.

A digital dome with a circular couch and headrests allows you to look into the sky, and to see the Walinynga (Cave Hill) rock art, which begins 3500 years ago and continues into the present.

A second collection of woven figures, dance and cast their shadows as we move in to Ngaanyatjarra lands. There too is a room of ceramics, yet another way to tell the story.

In the APY lands, Wati Nyiru checks his footprints and counts his toes -7? 5? 3?. He recognises himself as a sorcerer at last and this answers the question he has been asking himself: “Why don’t they like me?”

Tjungkara Ken dreamed about painting on a round canvas to track the journey of Kungkarangkalpa across 600 kilometres from the Northern Territory to South Australia to Western Australia. What she and her sisters painted is an encyclopaedic map conveying the knowledge carried in Songlines about bush medicine, bush food and water sources.

“Kungkarangkalpa”: Tjungkara Ken, Yaritji Young, Maringka Tunkin, Freda Brady, Sandra Ken – circle painting, interpretation and detail

Tjunkaya Tapaya is a traditional owner at Atila. She says “I have painted this Tjukurpa (Creation of country) on many canvases, and my Tjukurpa has gone out to many places sharing this important story.”

The last lot of woven figures show the Seven Sisters escaping into the sky to become the star cluster, Pleiades, the end of their story. My photos don’t do them justice, but you can see the figures and learn about their making here.

Coda

Songlines were given legal authority in the Australian Federal Court in 2005 when it recognised the Ngaanyatjarra people’s claim to 180 000 square kilometres. Celebrations included dancing the Seven Sisters.

“Land rights”, 2011 by Eunice Yunurupa Porter

For the Seven Sisters story told on-site in language (with captions), click here

For quality reproductions and photos of the artists, click here.

If you want to know more about what Songlines are, click here

My apologies if I’ve made any protocol mistakes, omissions or mis-attributions.

Virtually real

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“Collisions”, National Museum of Australia, virtual reality

I enter the theatre at the National Museum of Australia and sit on one of its scattered chairs, a bulky headset, goggles with headphones neatly entwined ensconced on my lap. I have no idea what to expect. I follow instructions meticulously but fail to register the one that says “Press to start”. I hear people muttering “Oh my god” and wonder why. Finally, the penny drops and I too press start.

I am face to face with an old Aboriginal man against a background of his community. He is Indigenous elder Nyarri Nyarri Morgan and I am on the lands of the Martu in the remote Western Australian desert. I’m travelling through the outback in the back of a ute, and then high up on a pinnacle looking down on a landscape of red soil and stunted trees. Entranced, I’m watching the night sky, the fire stick burning, the life of the community. Then the explosion of the Maralinga atomic bomb, the cloud in the sky, animals dying. These are the memories of Nyarri Nyarri Morgan, from a place far away. This is the collision of the title: traditional lifestyle, with the modern world in the form of an atomic bomb. Nothing could be a starker or more horrifying contrast.

For more about this experience and a short video, click here.

Two artists from different worlds

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Arnhem Land, “Midawarr”, John Wolseley, Merrklyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Mulkun Wirrpanda, National Museum of Australia, plants

Bukmak dhuwal mala ngatha ga borum nganapurrung manikaymirr ga marryun nganapurr ngunhiwal wängalil

(And every plant, every food: we sing it, we dance it.)

Midawarr (Harvest) is an exhibition of paintings done over ten years in harvest season, as Mulkun Wirrpanda and John Wolseley meet to collect, eat and paint the edible plants of Yolgnu country in Arnhem Land on the north coast of Australia. It’s richly diverse country: salt water, open forest, woodland, flood plains, freshwater wetlands, monsoonal vine forests and trees fringing river systems. Mulkun, an expert in Yolgnu cultural and botanical knowledge, paints mainly on bark, using gangul (yellow ochre), gurrngan (manganese, a black pigment), meku (red ochre), and gapan (white clay pigment) ground on a gunda (grinding block); and John, a renowned landscape artist depicts the same plants on a vast scroll.

Mulkun says she had to find a new way to paint beyond the sacred identity of plants, and find their secular identity. “The way they grow, the way they look and express themselves. This gave me their rhythm or their pattern.” For her, the paintings hold knowledge that it’s important to pass on to her people. John’s dilemma is different: he has to find a way for a painter of another culture to “make a work about a site of great power and sacred importance, and do so with reticence and reverence. I have painted the land at one remove, as seen through a veil.”

Along the sinuous panel beneath the paintings there is information about the plant, its use as food and medicine, and also an image of the same plant taken from John’s painting.

This is Gunga, the spring pandanus, used as a painkiller for teeth. “When little kids lose their teeth we chuck them into the tree so their new teeth come back sharp and strong.”

Butjuwutju / Mona (bush potato) has a tuber like a spinning top, but its grass-like stems are hard to see amongst other grass. People no longer know about this food. It’s been replaced by flour.

Nyathu (cycad) is probably the oldest food plant in the world, and sacred bread for the Yolngu. The nut is poisonous and has to be carefully processed. Community leader, Merrklyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, says that two Yolgnu clans still use this as an analogy for good governance: if proper processes aren’t used to make decisions, the outcome is poisonous and people will be killed.

John’s vast scroll is sort-of captured in a slide show where each frame duplicates a bit of the preceding one, and in a collage of close-ups.

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A short video shows the two artists at work, searching for plants and painting them, as John learns their Yolngu names.

I can’t leave this post without telling Mulkun‘s story. Her mother was taken by a policeman when she was out collecting räkay (water chestnuts) with other women, her child perched on her shoulders. Her father speared and killed the policemen and he never returned. Such is Australia’s shameful history.