Teaching or learning about Indigenous culture and history? See the following clips, produced during development of the exhibition Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route.
Warning: Aboriginal people are advised that some of these videos show people who have passed away.
Martu elder Friday Jones leads Birriliburu artists and Canning Stock Route project team members to Jilakurru where they introduce themselves to the Country.
When Aboriginal people visit Country they’ve never been to before or have not visited for a long time, they introduce themselves. Martu people do so by throwing handfuls of sand into the water. Many waters are inhabited by powerful ancestral beings — and in this way they are introduced to people through their scent. Once properly introduced, the Country protects its visitors and Countrymen. Aboriginal people from other areas introduce themselves to important sites in similar ways, sometimes rubbing a stone on their skin and throwing it into the water.
Birriliburu artist Vera Anderson explains as Mangkaja artist Mervyn Street cuts a ‘spear tree’. Then, Vera describes how old people used to make spearheads from stone, fixing them to their handles with spinifex glue.
Ngurra artists, Putuparri Tom Lawford and Kuji Rosie Goodgie, prepare a resin used to make glue and bush medicine. Kirti or jinalpa is a special kind of glue, made from the shiny black resin which ants gather from spinifex. Aboriginal people collect the resin from inside termite mounds, clean it of debris and soften it in the fire. Kirti can be used to attach blades to spear handles and, when it hardens, it forms a super-strong adhesive.
This resin has a beautiful fragrance. It is also used as bush medicine for cold-sickness and is placed on the fontanels (the gap in the skull) of newborn babies.
Vera Anderson draws stories in the sand for her granddaughters.
In April 2008 Martumili artists congregated at Kunawarritji (Well 33) for a major painting and weaving workshop. At this workshop Kunawarritji kids produced their own collaborative painting of Kunawarritji Country. It now belongs to the community’s Rawa School.
Birriliburu artist Clifford Brooks describes how his family encountered the tracks of Len Beadell’s bulldozer on the Talawanna track.
Artists from six remote art centres congregated at Well 36 for the largest painting workshop of the 2007 return to Country trip. Many paintings were produced at this workshop. The thrill of family reunion and the opportunity to return to Country after many years inspired and energised the artists involved in these special painting workshops.
Men from five art centres collaborated on a painting depicting the Country from wells 33 to 38. Jeffrey James, Helicopter Tjungurrayi, Tom Lawford, Patrick Tjungurrayi, Charlie Wallabi Tjungurrayi, Peter Tinker, Clifford Brooks and Richard Yukenbarri plan their painting of Canning Stock Route Country. Jeffrey James names each of the waters depicted on the finished canvas.
Martumili artists, and sisters, Muni Rita Simpson, Mantararr Rosie Williams and Jugarda Dulcie Gibbs, paint their story of the Seven Sisters at Kilykily, Well 36. The Seven Sisters travelled through this Country in the Dreamtime making many of the waters that would later become stock route wells.
About the clips
The above videos were produced for One Road, an eight-metre long multimedia interactive featured in Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, an exhibition developed by FORM, an arts and cultural organisation based in Western Australia, with the National Museum of Australia. One Road features around 150 videos made by Nicole Ma (Nicole Ma Productions) and emerging Aboriginal filmmakers Curtis Taylor (Martu Media), KJ Kenneth Martin (Kimberley Language Resource Centre), Morika Biljabu (Martumili Artists) and Clint Dixon (Goolarri Media). Most of the raw footage in these videos was shot between 2007 and 2008 on the FORM Canning Stock Route Project.
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