Floating life: contemporary Aboriginal fibre art

122 Yvonne Koolmatrie: Hot-air balloon John Kean Anachronistic? Yvonne Koolmatrie’s Hot-air balloon 2006 conflates the aspirations of the romantic Enlightenment with the purity of traditional Ngarrindjeri culture — an artistic leap that excites our imagination, despite its wistful resonance. The invention of ballooning arose from an ‘age of wonder’, when many of the scientific discoveries that support the modern age took form. This was also the era when the ‘known world’ expanded to encompass the scattered islands of the Pacific. More ominously, the voyages of discovery undertaken by James Cook were followed by the formation of an ill-considered penal encampment at Sydney Cove. While the impoverished settlement was a mere pin prick on the body of an immense continent, it was soon to have far-reaching consequences, as smallpox carried by the colonists was transmitted via trade routes and waterways across Aboriginal Australia. Thus, the reverberations of white settlement were experienced by Ngarrindjeri before they encountered the k’rringgali (white people). The Ngarrindjeri were a confederacy of associated clans who lived on the lower Murray River; unlike the stereotypical nomadic hunters of arid Australia, they were settled people who lived in sturdy semi-permanent camps with a centralised system of government based on a collective of elders known as tendi. The most important item of Ngarrindjeri material culture was not the boomerang or the spear, but a tightly woven spiral mat made from coiled fibre. This basic form was used for a wide range of functions — as a clean, flat area to prepare food, or tied to the small of the back as a cloak to provide protection from the chilly breezes off the Southern Ocean, or with its edges gently folded and sewn together to make a cradle; alternatively, it was bound as a vessel for ancestral remains in mortuary ceremonies, completing the cycle of life, from cradle to grave. The Ngarrindjeri’s ‘world that was’ barely registered with colonists who flooded into the region in the nineteenth century, hungrily usurping well-watered grazing lands and bountiful lakes, and seizing control of the river. Traditional culture, already weakened by the smallpox epidemic, was swamped. Despite the onslaught, the intellectual heritage of the area shone brilliantly through the inventions of David Unaipon (1872–1967), such as the modified shearing handpiece and the concept for a helicopter. Just as Unaipon’s achievement was recognised by the academics of Adelaide, Ngarrindjeri women made the most of their traditional skills, weaving ‘sister baskets’ for the trickle of tourists who came to his birthplace, Point McLeay Mission on Lake Alexandrina. Yvonne Koolmatrie Ngarrindjeri people SA b.1944 Hot-air balloon 2006 Coil-woven sedge grass and river rushes 194 x 90cm (diam.) Acc. 2006.109 Purchased 2006 with funds from Cathryn Mittelheuser, am , through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation