Floating life: contemporary Aboriginal fibre art

42 Reveries of light and water Anna Haebich Men sing to banumbirr, the morning star, calling up their ancestors. As the moon sets, banumbirr flies up into the sky trailing a dangling feathered string. Far away to the west, Ngarinyin men dance to the morning star bearing towering song boards on their shoulders. A man traces shapes onto a board of stringybark. He sees the female yawkyawk spirits sinking into a waterhole; the feathered strings they carry become vines, their hair fragile flowing weeds and their bodies growing scaled fish tails. The man bends over the boards of stringybark, painting and singing the yawkyawks into being. Each object marks a charged crossing point of mythic stories, supernatural energies and sacred meanings that traverse time and space. The luminous beauty of truth in culture, country and the law radiates from them. The great creation myths of the Djang’kawu sisters begin as they journey across the sea paddling their bark canoe with digging sticks. In the painting Mumutthun (Paddle splash) 2006 by Wanyubi Marika, they travel by starlight, the sea’s surface glimmers, and the waters swirl around them. In the centre is a void, that momentary emptiness left as the paddle dips up out of the water. Clusters of dilly bags, feathered strings and conical mats surround us. In them, the Djang’kawu sisters carry sacred objects that they plant as they travel. Long feathered strings trail down from the bags and their arms. They stab the earth with their digging sticks and fresh water pours forth. They name places, plants and creatures. In each dhuwa clan territory, they create the first people and bestow on them language and culture. Then they lose their sacred dilly bags and travel west out of Yolngu lands, leaving men to control the law. In ceremonies re-enacting these journeys, men carry feathered dilly bags and strings. Women’s conical mats signify sexual power and fertility. In today’s art market, woven dilly bags and flattened mats bring another source of wealth for women artists and their families. The pearlshell riji from the west Kimberley coast are charged with talismanic power. They contain within them the forces of light and water — the luminous and the oceanic. Inscribed in their iridescent surfaces are designs rubbed with pigments of red or yellow ochre or charcoal to enhance the shell’s brilliance. In the Kimberley, small pieces suspended from hair string bands are worn as ornaments; large plaques possessing powerful energies are kept for ceremony. Passed along ancient trade routes that penetrate deep into the deserts of Central Australia, north to Katherine and down to the Great Australian Bight, the riji accrue occult forces called upon in sacred rainmaking ceremonies. Downpours replenish the land and call forth new life, carpeting the earth with green. The pearlescent brilliance lured another force to the Kimberley coast: the rapacious pearling industry centred in Broome that brought wealth and glamour to a network of colonial traders, but devastation for local men and women pirated to work on the boats. Today, pearls continue to entice visitors to the area, some seeking the pearlshell riji produced for the art market by carver Aubrey Tigan (Bardi/Jawu people). Far away in the Western Desert, Jackie Kurltjunyintja Giles (Pintubi/Ngaanyatjarra people) reproduces a pearlshell riji design on another surface bespeaking power and valour — a Chrysler Valiant car bonnet. Beautiful works draw together the crimson threads of colonial dispossession and destruction to create assertions of cultural survival and celebration. Richard Gandhuwuy Garrawurra Liyagawumirr people NT b.1940 Ceremonial armbands 1997 Bark fibre string with red-winged parrot and red-collared lorikeet feathers Two pieces: 3.5 x 13cm (diam.); 3.5 x 17cm (diam.) Acc. 2008.284.001–002 Purchased 2008 with funds from Margaret Mittelheuser, am , and Cathryn Mittelheuser, am , through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation