Category: Inspiration

Bill Harney jnr and snr

I recommend Born under the Paperbark Tree 1996 and Grief Gaiety, and Aborigines 1961 for an accurate picture of NT early last century from multiple racial perspectives.
Bill Harney jnr is a phenomenal man born into unbelievable circumstances like many others at the time. His performance of a mosquito at the ‘Barks, Birds and Billabongs’ symposium was the most remarkable and intense indigenous performance I’ve ever seen.
I hope to see him again in April on his Jankangyina tour of Wardaman country and the Lightening Brothers Rock Art.

Booderee National Park and the Wreck Bay Community

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.

Kunwinjku kunwok

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.

Barks Birds and Billabongs

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.

Biodiversity summit and Artworlds symposium

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 2 degrees 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 land use 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.

White local ochre and Samson and Delilah

ochremix
The local white rock when ground became a skin tone, symbolic transformation.
wiradjuridetail11
Upon the brown red ochre, a dialogue between skin develops, the figure and ground constructs the exchange.

Samson and Delilah by Warwick Thornton was inspirational. I noted the positive connections to country, kinship laws and language, the humour and the negative affects of the urban environment and fossil fuels.