Floating life: contemporary Aboriginal fibre art

91 Endnotes 1. See LD Satterthwait, ‘Aboriginal Australian net hunting’, in Mankind , vol.16, no.1, April 1986, pp.31–48. 2. See DS Davidson, ‘Australian netting and basketry techniques’, in Australian Netting and Basketry Techniques , p.257, reprinted from the Journal of the Polynesian Society , vol.42, no.4, 1933. 3. See Leonie Oakes and Jeffrey Mellefont, ‘John Bulun Bulun: The welcoming of strangers’, in Signals , no.38, March–May 1997, pp.4–6. See also ‘Monsoon traders (Macassans)’, < www.nt.gov.au >, viewed June 2009; and ‘Macassan contact with Australia’, < www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Macassan_contact_with_Australia> , viewed June 2009. The Macassan voyages to the north coast of Australia appear to have begun around 1720, though some writers suggest they began 300 years earlier (about 1400). The voyages were prohibited by Australian authorities around 1906. Mary Wandjirrma’s Dhumala (Canoe sail) 2001 is the only object of its kind in the exhibition, but noteworthy for its links to canoe fishing and back to another time when the Macassan visited Arnhem Land. For hundreds of years, traders from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi sailed to northern Australia to collect trepang (sea cucumbers), a marine invertebrate prized for its culinary and medicinal values in Chinese markets. Some writers refer to their wooden sailing boats as the ‘real’ First Fleet. The Macassan introduced technologies such as seaworthy dug-out canoes, which allowed Arnhem Land communities to fish the ocean for dugongs and turtles. The contact is still celebrated by both cultures. 3 In these collected objects for fishing, the utilitarian becomes sculptural. The innovative nets and traps take on a new life where utility, craft and art are perfectly united. The past becomes the present and the present evokes the past. They float, literally, both in their new world and, metaphorically, back to a previous one. Dorothy Bienenwangu Dullman Dangbon/Kunwinjku people NT b.1951 Wollobi (Fish net) 2007 Knotted sand palm leaf, bark fibre string with wood 122 x 122cm Acc. 2008.086 Purchased 2008 Opposite An-gujechiya (Fish traps) Twined pandanus palm leaf with natural dyes Dimensions variable Left to right: Shirley Malgarrich (Acc. 2005.038, Acc. 2004.246), Sally Garromara (Acc. 2004.207, Acc. 2004.206), Shirley Malgarrich (Acc. 2005.037)