Floating life: contemporary Aboriginal fibre art

127 Shirley MacNamara: ‘The Spinifex amazes me’ Lynne Seear ‘The Spinifex amazes me. Every time I learn something more about it: the fragility; the strength, the colour . . . It is the colour of the earth itself. That is the country isn’t it?’ 1 Shirley MacNamara, a descendant of the Indilandji/Alyawarre people, was born in Mount Isa and grew up living and working on cattle stations. She has worker’s hands, and she needs them. Throughout the year, MacNamara gathers spinifex runner roots, the colours changing from a pale yellow to deeper gold and red in dry weather. It is arduous work. Strand by strand she pares, twists, weaves, tucks and moulds the prickly grass into graceful sculptural forms. She is careful to collect and use only the ‘runner’ strand, the one that spreads out, and puts down roots for the new young plants to grow; the mother root, if you like, picked from the earth after it has done its motherly duty. Mount Isa, over 2000 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, close to the Northern Territory border, is Queensland’s largest provincial city west of the Great Dividing Range. It is twice as far from Brisbane as Sydney, and just as different, an industrial oasis in the middle of ‘spinifex country’: a tough, arid, enigmatic landscape of low-nutrient soils covering rolling plains and rocky hills. Though hummock grasses (of the genus Triodia ) dominate vegetation over more than 20 per cent of Australia, occurring in all states except Tasmania, it is in and around Mount Isa that spinifex, or porcupine grass, is identified with the fabric and character of a particular place. Schools, shops and motels are named after it; when historian Geoffrey Blainey was commissioned to write a history of Mount Isa mines in the early 1960s, he titled the book Mines in the Spinifex . 2 Shirley MacNamara has lived in this country all her life. She used to paint it, but many years ago, after the death of her husband, she turned to spinifex to find a new medium, twisting the roots as she had been twisted by grief, letting them find their way into shapes, becoming whatever they wanted or needed to be. The forms that resulted were bold and direct but also allusive and ceremonial — practical things that could be used to carry eggs, seeds or rocks; nests that might provide sanctuary for small, mysterious creatures. The ‘guutu’ (the traditional word for vessels or containers in Shirley MacNamara’s language) are now the heart of her practice and are made from a combination of man-made and natural materials; shop-bought nylons and synthetic glues; spinifex from above the ground, ochre from below. Their colours and shapes remind her of times and places of personal significance. The spinifex circlets contained in some vessels may signify things to be gathered and carried, but can also be read as links, between past and present, between the living and the dead. One of the vessels in this exhibition is lined with the feathers of a dead emu, found at the roadside near her property at Mount Guide Station. Spinifex is not a pretty grass but it has historical and ideological consequence for Indigenous Australians. It is hardy and resilient, abundant in inhospitable places. The strong and durable fibres were used in the construction of shelters, and for medicinal purposes; its seeds can be ground to make bush damper; its resin extracted and used as a binding agent, once to make weapons, now more likely to repair punctured tyres on stony outback roads. MacNamara’s grandmother filled mattresses with spinifex, and the artist remembers its pungent, resinous smell as something that belonged to the comfort of her home. The trajectory from that warm pragmatic place to MacNamara’s studio is clear to see. After the recent terrible drought, when nothing thrived at Mount Guide, good rains have produced abundant spinifex runners which Shirley has harvested. They wait, slung over tree branches, to be put to good use. Shirley MacNamara Indilandji/Alyawarre people QLD b.1949 Guutu (Vessel) 14 2001 Twined spinifex with nylon thread, synthetic polymer fixative and emu feathers 24.3 x 22.5 x 21cm Acc. 2002.008 Purchased 2002. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant