Laomedia

The indigenous summit held over the weekend 29th January – 1st February demonstrates the issues concerning indigenous Australians. The live video footage recording the presentations and debates is worth viewing for an understanding of the political realities. Thanks to WGAR in Canberra (The Working Group for Aboriginal Rights) for their important work.

In reading ‘In Defense of Animals’ edited by Peter Singer, a collection of essays by various authors and activists, it becomes overwhelming as to the extent of the war human animals continue to wage against the innocent. Our twisted laws that view animals as property without rights and their subsequent torture and massacre through factory farming, scientific testing, and mass killings. Although the examples supplied in the text were all unbelievably horrific, and extinction rates due solely to humans alarming, the Monkeys discovered in 1981 who were kept in small uncleaned putrid metal boxes without vet care for scientific experiments in a basement provided the worst image in my mind. Their limbs had been deliberately been disabled through surgical interference to record how they managed, they were strapped to chairs and given electric shocks or burnt with lighters to record their reaction and in another denied food to record their levels of frustration. The monkeys were neurotic and were resorting to self mutilation, biting or tearing their fingers off, the worst being a monkey that had torn open its own chest cavity as a result of the torture and even in that state was still subjected to further experiments. Human society is very sick and has been for a very long time.

Anyone interested in animal rights should explore Animal Liberation and organisations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, formed by Alex Pacheco and others who notified the world about the monkeys mentioned above, and particular to Australia Voiceless.

Summer in Canberra finally came, and my partner and I set up some new shroud experiments on the property of Tony and Steve. Many thanks to their support and to local hunter Paul for the rabbits.

Booderee National Park is owned by the Wreck Bay Indigenous Community. This is the country where my mother and I were raised and my mother’s family established themselves. The Shoalhaven High School I attended taught children from my village Vincentia and Wreck Bay Village in addition to surrounding villages on Jervis Bay and St Georges Basin waterways. Indigenous storytellers in the area important to my education concerning the country in my soul are Wadi Wadi man Barry Moore and Bidgigal man Laddie Timbery.
Now there are a primary and High School in Vincentia and I am very happy to see a local indigenous language program developed at the High School.

In the preparation of ethics information and consent forms to formally ask permission from Kunwinjku speakers living in Gunbalanya or nearby outstations to teach me language and culture, I attempted translation into Kunwinjku.
My only reference in Canberra was the 1998 edition on Kunwinjku Kunwok produced by Steven and Narelle Etherington in consultation with members of the Gunbalanya community. The Kunwinjku Language Centre’s current Kunwinjku Language Project is managed by Donna Nadjamerrek, Ngalnarridj skin (kunkurlah) and a Ngalmok woman from well known outstation Kabulwarnamyo established by her father Wamud, respected painter (bim) of bark (dolobbo) and rock (kunwardde) using traditional ochres (delek). I met Donna formally in Gunbalanya at the Rock Art Field School and we spoke informally at the Barks Birds and Billabongs conference at the Australian Museum. I hope she will agree to teach me Kunwinjku kunwok, as I am determined to learn this wonderful ancient language of Australia.

Painting with natural substances; animal, vegetable and mineral, really is right for me. It makes me feel everything is the way it should be, connected to country. The country I’ve been and becomes a part of me.

The image on the left uses canvas dyed in Gunbalanya with Clara and Juliet Nganjmirra from the root of the manjurndum plant. It was painted using ochres. The image on the left similarly dyed but using the root of the wirdil wirdil grass.

The National Museum’s recent International Symposium exploring the Legacy of the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land demonstrated the research and educational efforts, government funding and institutional support urgently needed to rectify indigenous and non-indigenous political relations in Australia.

The first and most important foundation, exemplified at the conference due to the diplomatic skill and vision of the steering committee Margo Neal, Sally May and Martin Thomas, is of course to allow indigenous communities to direct all matters concerning its members and the land, flora and fauna encompassed.

Only then is the true cultural exchange, desired by so many non-indigenous Australians, possible. Examples of such exchanges presented at the conference shone with inspirational clarity through the clouds and dispersed them. Yirrkala’s Mulka project is a Yolgnu multimedia archive dynamic in content. Both past and present expressions of cultural knowledge warrant this digital keeping place initiative, owned and orchestrated by the Buku-Larrnggay community.

Gunbalanya’s vision for a Arts and Cultural Innovations Centre where important material culture chosen by the community from museum and gallery collections such as paintings, sculptural and fibre forms or recordings of dance and song cycles, can be exhibited. Where current creative and cultural practice can also be valued and encouraged, and the cultural educational experience of children supported.

Databases used by museums to record indigenous material culture can only be enriched by the knowledge of indigenous people, therefore communities need such databases in their own cultural centre. Then work such as that carried out by Sabine Hoeng with artists of Croker Island, are enabled. Families can be reunited with items made by or connected to their ancestors and their histories remembered in the correct and most respectful ways.

At the National Library this month. Highly recommended, inspirational plateaus of intensity. I’ve been a couple of times and find the note books of lyrics consume me in a memory vortex. Multiple messages, meaning generators in darkened and private chambers.

A day of talks about biodiversity for climate protection: nature as climate solution, not casualty.
carbon and the terrestrial biosphere, our earth is a closed carbon system. The increase in the carbon circulating between air and ocean so ocean is degassing more than it is storing as sediment. After 100 years, 60% of a pulse of co2 is taken into sediment and after 700 years the last 20% is still very slowly being removed. The carbon debt due to land clearing is enormous. Clearing in developing worlds for soybean and palm oil production is currently rapid, and logging persists in developed nations like Australia who still have some virgin forest left. For a stable carbon sink, trees need to be permanent – old growth, a plantation is not a stable carbon sink (monoculture feast/famine), and what about biodiversity, habitat, ecosystems!!
50% of the world’s forests are gone, 25% are in primary condition, less than 20% are old growth, the rest are degraded due to human impact, such as selective logging.
For the temperature to be capped at approx 2degrees increase due to global warming, the co2 emissions must peak now, and be reduced as quickly as possible to shorten the very long recovery as temperatures come down very slowly. If nothing is done our temperature will be approx 6 degrees warmer by 2100.
Current carbon accounting systems used for Kyoto flawed, only deals with landuse change and so allows virgin forest to be replaced by plantation without accounting for carbon loss, yet the new planting is counted as a carbon credit, so logging industry lobbying has corrupted the carbon accounting system. The carbon credit system used to deal with fossil fuel emissions, allows developed nations to continue polluting by paying developing nations toward reducing forest clearing for industry development. Logging needs to be included as a carbon debt.
The rich get richer, the poor get the picture, and meanwhile, the 6th mass extinction of species on the planet rapidly continues, and it has been caused by humanity. Certainly cancels out the idea that human animals have achieved anything good since deciding to ‘transcend’ the hunter/gatherer nomadic and seasonal lifestyle.

I had the opportunity to present a paper at the Artworlds symposium at ANU called ‘Sharing Culture in a Global Market Economy: a case study from Western Arnhem Land’ which responded to Luke Taylor’s text Seeing the Inside: Bark Paintings in Western Arnhem Land 1996 an my experience in Gunbalanya for the Rock Art Field School.

Reflections on the rhizome “the line of ‘nomad’ thought”, the abolishing of hierarchical structures in the process of writing (or making). In psychoanalytical terms, Massumi explains, “The central perspective is…to promote human relations that do not automatically fall into roles or stereotypes but open into fundamental relations of a metaphysical kind that bring out the most radical and basic alienations of madness or neurosis.” A dissipation of constructed dualism in the cauldron of multiplicity. For the conscious embodiment of becoming we must be the sorcerer, the magician who, for Crowley, “brings all set ideas and judgments into question, which often makes him appear in a questionable light himself. As a creative creature, he knows no conscience.” Paths open are taken without judgment and what was hidden is revealed. Hierarchical laws imposing order are broken when convenient anyway, and are therefore grounded in hypocrisy. A clearer analysis of this feature of human law is proposed by Bataille, “When a negative emotion has the upper hand we must obey the taboo. When a positive emotion is in the ascendent we violate it.” Therefore the taboo is irrelevant when we follow our instinct. Becoming being our true state of instinctual negotiation, to always freely form alliances where borders to the known are sensed without the restriction of an external law. “A Thousand Plateaus is an effort to construct a smooth space of thought…an open system.” The human who is becoming unfolds the magic of life, and just like fellow animals negotiating nature, is free. Creative practice is, in essence, the space of becoming allowed to a select few. The continual work to reach a plateau which, as Massumi explains, is “when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax…A Thousand Plateaus tries to combine conceptual bricks in such a way as to construct this kind of intensive state in thought…The way the combination is made is an example of what Deleuze and Guattari call consistency…a dynamic holding together or mode of composition.” The relevance of this text to painting is invited, “lift a dynamism out of the book entirely, and incarnate it in a foreign medium, whether it be painting or politics…pry open the vacant spaces that would enable you to build your life and those of the people around you into a plateau of intensity.” That’s my kind of bible.