Floating life: contemporary Aboriginal fibre art

30 31 The tomb of a native being railed around with trees seven or eight feet high, some of which were carved with stone or shell, and further ornamented by rings of wood, also carved, on the tops of these poles were placed the waddies of the deceased. Around the grave were several little baskets made of fan leaf palm. 5 The antiquity of the types of the works in this exhibition is breathtaking, going back thousands of years — for example, the ceremonial feathered bag of Joyce Gumburrawuy Gandangu; or the fish nets of Kathleen Korda and Dorothy Bienenwangu Dullman. The marvellous yawkyawk water spirits in ‘Floating Life’ are part of the lineage of spirit figures in the great painted caves of western Arnhem Land, and baskets and mats by Leanne Namanyilk or Elizabeth Mipilangurr are recognisable in the rock paintings of ancient human and spirit figures. In the netted and twined baskets of Wilma Walker or Desley Henry, there is a memory of stencilled red ochre paintings of nets on the steep cliffs of Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland. Research into the central place of fibre, as part of early interactions between Europeans and Indigenous Australians, is continually expanding. The far-reaching investigations of Philip Jones, Senior Curator at the South Australian Museum, have explored how baskets were at the heart of trade and interaction since the earliest contact with Aboriginal peoples. 6 In 1905, DM Sayers, an Adelaide merchant visiting Darwin, had bought the rare textiles of bark and fibre now in the collection of the South Australian Museum, artefacts that were identified with the burial and initiation ceremonies of Bathurst and Melville Islands. In ‘Floating Life’, the Maryanne Mungatopi print depicts compelling objects used in the Kulama ceremony from the Charles Mountford Collection, which she drew on a visit to the South Australian Museum, and Pedro Wonaeamirri and Timothy Cook show Tiwi bark baskets that continue very old traditions. 7 continent with the stored knowledge of millennia. She describes how the tide flows in the bloodstream: It was high tide. Will knew how the tide worked simply by looking at the movement of a tree, or where the moon crossed the sky, the light of day, or the appearance of the sea. He carried the tide in his body. Even way out in the desert . . . a thousand miles away from the sea he felt its rhythms. 3 Speculating that it is hard for many displaced Indigenous people to have a close relationship to the land, Wright asks what is happening to the land within, and what is holding together the inner sovereignty, the uncharted ‘country of the mind’. The metaphorical import of hunting and gathering, no longer necessary for survival, remains fundamental for makers using fibre – just as it is for storytellers such as Wright. Searching for materials across country is a vital tactic for re-sensing a way of being. ‘Floating Life’ is significant because of the passionate presence of the country within the objects. To list the materials used is to hear an ancient litany, combined with the industrialised materials of post- contact history. The variety of plant components across the spectrum of the collection evokes a precious knowledge of the dense intricacy of coastal bush, dry inland plains or dense rainforest. Materials for containers, ornaments and sculptures are derived from pandanus palm, cabbage palm, paperbark, stringybark, kurrajong, banyan, lawyer cane, jungle vine, native dye plants, kapok, sand palm, sedge grass, rushes and spinifex. Birds have ancestral and ceremonial meanings: objects are constructed with the feathers of kookaburra, whistler duck, red-winged parrot, red-collared lorikeet, brolga, magpie goose, Torres Strait pigeon, pelican, bustard and galah. Human hair, beeswax and echidna quills are powerful materials. The sea provides kelp and varieties of small threading shells, as well as the iridescent pearlshell, and the earth has ochre pigments. As well, artists such as Jonathan Jones, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Margaret Yam and Danie Mellor mimic or blend the twining of flexible natural materials by hunting and gathering in the postcolonial world, using electrical cable, light fittings and bulbs, flywire, rabbit-proof fencing wire, car parts, plastic twine, synthetic polymer paint on wood, pen on paper, commercial wool, nylon thread, raffia and even bronze. Fibre as a tangible record of culture and history In the morning they paint her body and the father of the girl goes and puts a feather head-dress (pirmirtiki) on her head, and a goose feather ball (pukupunawu) around her neck. Her aunties put an armband (pamajini) and hairbelt (wurlirrima) on her. Then the grandmother will go and put bark around her. They smash the red ochre, white ochre. They get a stick and paint her up all over her body with a lot of care. They put a necklace around her and dress her up. 4 This description by Tiwi writers Donald Kantilla and Fiona Kerinaiua alludes to a long cultural history showing how fibre artefacts are essential to key ceremonies of initiation and funerals. Textile artefacts are worn in transformative, transitional points of life — such as puberty, when girls and boys enter adulthood; or death, when the spirit passes to other worlds. An early British traveller in the Tiwi islands, Sir Gordon Bremer, wrote in his journal in 1824 that he saw: Opposite Boiling gunga (pandanus) leaves in chips of bark from the djundum ( Coelospermum reticulatum ) tree to dye them yellow at Mapuru in north-eastern Arnhem Land Photographs: Peter Liddy Left Minnie Manarrdjala Na-kara people NT 1929–2007 Galaburdok (Conical basket) 1997 Twined pandanus palm leaf with raised stitching, natural dyes, with bark fibre string 42 x 30cm (diam.) Acc. 2002.042 Purchased 2002. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant Right Mary Jin.guwaraba Anbarra/Burarra people NT b.1933 Burlupurr (Conical basket) 1997 Twined pandanus palm leaf with raised stitching, bark fibre string, with natural pigments 49 x 28 x 18cm Acc. 2002.035 Purchased 2002. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant