Floating life: contemporary Aboriginal fibre art

71 Over the last two decades the resourceful people of Jumbun in the rainforest near Cardwell have been laboriously regaining skills in making jawun, eel traps and several other forms, and they present these today in exhibitions as conscious testaments to their distinctive culture; as recently as May 2009, new weavers exhibited their baskets in Melbourne in an exhibition that included paintings and baskets made in conscious celebration of rainforest peoples’ heritage and future. 3 Even more intriguing, the recent revival of basket-making in the remote northern community of Lockhart River has been directly stimulated by the success of the community’s young women painters, such as Rosella Namok, Samantha Hobson and Fiona Omeenyo; in response, in an assertion of cultural pride and authority, some of the ‘Old Girls’, as the senior generation is affectionately known, have taken to making the puunya of their youth, with their knowledge still intact. Their re-invention is now flourishing in delicate and witty decorated baskets that are testaments to knowledge and skill, exemplary items of beauty that speak to both past and future. Finally, the weavers of the west Cape York, from Aurukun and Kowanyama, continue to make their elegant string bags, distinctively striped in beautifully proportioned horizontal rectangles, with handles just long enough to fit over the shoulder — perfect all-purpose gathering bags, similar to a popular modern style used by urban women across the world. These exquisite bags are still made in natural fibres, sometimes in knowing combination with nylon string, and lately from vivid polypropylene strings. The pale, undyed strands in the original natural fibre bags are now mimicked in the changes of tones in the brilliant nylon bags; the same insistent rhythms apply, with darker colours anchoring floating, bright lines weaving in and out of the upper layers. These new bags testify to the great variation in basic bag and basket styles across great expanses of country and cultural borders; yet, by using the vivid modern polypropylene, and weaving it into beautiful, useful and saleable bags, the Indigenous artisans of the north tell us again about millennia-long expertise that turns circumstance to advantage. For the bag and basket-makers of Queensland, the future is truly behind them. Opposite Clara Yam Olkola/Egng ochow people QLD b.1931 Abmin (String bag) 2007 Open-knotted cabbage palm leaf with natural dyes 33 x 32cm Acc. 2008.175 Purchased 2008. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund Ruby Ludwick Kuku Yalanji people QLD b.1945 Basket 2002 Coil-woven pandanus palm leaf with natural dyes 14.2 x 39.5 x 39cm (complete) Acc. 2003.053a–b Commissioned 2002 with funds from the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Endnotes 1. See Kate Khan, Catalogue of the Roth Collection of Aboriginal Artefacts from North Queensland , vols.1–4, Australian Museum, Sydney, 1993–2004. Khan reports on the extensive notes and drawings made by Roth in his role as the government Protector of Aborigines between 1898 and 1905. In 1905, Roth sold his collection to the Australian Museum. 2. See Julie Ewington, ‘Working in the river: baskets of the rainforest’, pp.158–63, and Trish Johnson, ‘Jawun: an interview with Desley Henry’, pp.166-69, in Story Place: Indigenous Art of Cape York and the Rainforest [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2003. 3. See the exhibitions entitled ‘Girringun’, a group show featuring both baskets and paintings from the Jumbun community, and ‘Tony Albert: Optimism’, for two linked exhibitions held at gallerysmith, Melbourne, April 2009.