The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 172 Projects Nawurapu Wunungmurra Macassan pot 2015 Ceramic with earth pigments and polyvinyl acetate / 40 x 40cm (diam.) / Courtesy: Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala Margaret Rarru Dhomala (Macassan canoe sail) (detail) 2019–20 Woven pandanus ( pandanus spiralis ), hand-rolled kurrajong ( Brachychiton populneus ) bark string / 150 x 281cm / Commissioned 2019 with funds from the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Three houses on a white-sand beach, in a palm-fringed cove, inside a pristine harbour. Sparkling blue water. Only one other small homeland is visible across the bay. Massive granite rocks like statues stand out of the water and line the shore. This is Bawaka — home of the Burarrwanga arm of the Gumatj Clan. Their ownership is embedded in the epic song cycles which encode the intimate knowledge of place. But that hidden history is also ours. Because within those songs is material that is intrinsic to the history of the whole continent and everyone on it. Snatches of Islamic and Bugis influence have been preserved through meticulous cultural discipline. There are verses which landowner Djawa Burarrwanga sings that he does not know the full meaning of. Some are excerpts of the Bugis creation myths which have been suppressed and lost in their place of origin. There are also audible references to Allah and Mohammed sung within traditional Yolngu manikay (sacred song). Intimates of Bawaka recognise its Bugis name — Gambu Djiki. At least that is the Yolngu alias. A rendering of Kampong Zikir (Heavenly Village). Imagine being able to go to a beach where you are certain to collect a handful of centuries-old pottery shards in half an hour. Where you can scan the brilliant white sand looking for worked earthenware, sometimes marked with its maker’s fingerprints, and once collected and appreciated, return it to nature. This has been my joy for 20 years at Bawaka. As the years passed, I started to wonder ‘How can there be so many shards here?’ It is an extreme climate. The fragile ceramics have laid here through scorching sun and cyclones for more than 100 — perhaps 500 — years. And yet there is literally an inexhaustible supply of ancient pottery here. Allowing for hundreds of years of exchange, involving thousands of vessels, still couldn’t explain how these fragments were surfacing in such volume. Nawurapu and Jamie Wunungmurra and I went to Sulawesi. I will never forget the afternoon when we met Abdi Karya at the famous Rumata Art Space in Macassar city. I told him of my quest to understand this conundrum and showed him a picture of the fragments on my phone. ‘Have you any idea where these pots could have come from?’ He laughed with his twinkling eyes and pointed to the ceramic pots lining the courtyard, and said: Here they are! Haha! They are made by the Torajan people of the village of Soreang in the Takalar regency nearby. They are rice and corn farmers who excavate paddy terraces from the clay on the hillsides. They form these pots and when the harvest is over they fire the vessels with the discarded husks. In the historic times they would trade these with the seafaring Bugis and Bajau sailors who would use them to carry their trade goods as they plied their trade from island to island. But I was still confused, even though I now knew where the pots came from. I knew that they hung from the decks on the trading pinisi or perahu sailing vessels of the Bugis traders. I knew that Yolngu and Macassans worked side by side to harvest the dharripa trepang (sea cucumbers). And from the very formal, respectful greeting the Bugis employed when addressing their hosts the landowners, I knew that Yolngu called outsiders ngapaki. But I still could not fathom the amount of material in the sands of the Heavenly Village. Eventually I turned to Djawa and again asked the simple question I was trying to solve. Again he laughed, saying: You already know the answer to this. You know the songs, don’t you? The songs of Bawaka!? Its right there — Buthuḻu baḏaw ! Buthuḻu baḏaw ! The songs tell us why there are so many rupa (pots) here. The songs tell us of the harvest working together side by side, sharing and trading. And at the end, a great party. Our friends bring out all of their fine goods. We laugh into the night. We celebrate our hard work. We sing and dance. And then when it is finished and we have drunk all the nanitji and eaten all the fine food, we smash the bottles and they burst and explode! Surely you knew that? The associations Yolngu had with the seafaring Macassans are recorded in the ancient songlines of the Dhalwangu, Gumatj, Munyuku and Rirratjingu clans. Some of these songs tell of the first rising clouds on the horizons — the first sightings for the year of the Macassan perahus ’ sails, which appear like these clouds. They lament the setting of the sun, which correlates to the passing of a loved one. The red sails in the sunset are part of Djapana (Yothu Yindi’s famous 'Sunset Dreaming' song) which means sunset in Yolngu matha, and farewell in Bugis. The grief of returning sailors, who raised their masts and departed to Sulawesi with Bulungu (the south-easterly winds of the early Dry season) is incorporated in Yolngu mortuary ceremony. But as the sun also rises, so the return of the Macassans with Lunggurrma (the Northerly Monsoon winds of the approaching Wet) is an analogue of the rebirth of the spirit following the appropriate rituals. In, and through, this exhibition the sun rises again, and the spirit of our ancestral connections are renewed. The pots are on the move once more. Will Stubbs