The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre
Professor Kay Lawrence
This is a verbatim transcript and may contain grammatical and
spelling errors, particularly in the case of Njarrinderjeri and foreign
words.
KAY LAWRENCE: As well as acknowledging our presence here on Kaurna land
tonight I would also like to acknowledge the assistance that I have
received in developing this lecture from my colleagues like Dianna
Wood-Conroy and Jillian McCracken but I would also like to acknowledge
the generosity of the Njarrinderjeri artists who shared their culture
with me but also spoke to me about their work, Ellen and Tanya Trevorrow,
Veronica Brodie and Yvonne Kilmatrie.
So when Matthew Flinders and Nicholas Baudin met at Encounter Bay off
the coast of the Njarrinderjeri land in 1802 this encounter only
involved the British and the French. The Europeans made no contact with
the indigenous peoples who lived along the coastline although the smoke
from their fires and their empty dwellings betrayed their presence.
Flinders and Baudin each mapped the coast of what we now call South
Australia, endowing it with names that celebrated their connections and
their countries' achievements. So Gulf St Vincent and Cape Jervis was
named by Flinders after Admiral John Jervis, the first Earl of St
Vincent, and Cape Jaffa was named by Baudin to celebrate Napoleon's
victory in Palestine.
Of course, some of the names noted the features of the land or animal or
bird life like Kangaroo Island, named by Flinders in gratitude for so
seasonable a supply of meat and Cape Rouge that was named by Baudin for
the appearance of its reddish granite. A few of the names marked events
like the catastrophic loss of six of Flinders' crew at Cape Catastrophe
or the memorable meeting of Flinders and Baudin at Encounter Bay. As
Greg Denning recently put it in his recent lecture in this series,
Flinders stood on the edge of the land, looked at it and put a boundary
around it and you can see this in the two maps resulting from these
voyages, Flinders' general chart of Terra Australis or Australia which
was published in 1814 and the other map by Louis Claude Freycinet which
was based on Baudin's voyage.
Both of these maps show the continent as a fringe of names surrounding
an empty centre because as they named the features of the coast the
Europeans were unaware of the vast web of language that encompassed the
continent. In South Australia alone the land supported over 40
independent descent groupings of indigenous people, each with a clearly
defined territory recognised and respected by outsiders. These maps have
been taken from the one on the other side, from the South Australian
Museum book on the Njarrinderjeri and the one on my side from Tyndale's
map which was developed in the 1930s.
They both show the area around Encounter Bay which extends north to
Murray Bridge and south along the Coorong. This was home to the many
clans of Njarrinderjeri people, the Ngurulta, the Warki, the Portalin,
the Uruldi, the Rumingerri and the Tangunyi. It was a cultural
landscape, intimately known and named for both its physical and its
spiritual associations. So names evoked the tangible presence of
powerful dreaming stories integral to Njarrinderjeri cultural and
spiritual life like the story of Nurrinduri whose present encompassed
the whole extent of Njarrinderjeri country and was embodied in names
like Longqua which is now called The Bluff at Encounter Bay, where
Nurrinduri threw his fighting club to the ground.
Names could also indicate the very rich food and technological resources
of the land as marked on this map of the Punkamidden on the far side and
another map which was based on information given to Norman Tyndale by
Albert Karlowan from Millerum during the 1930s. In the names of places
all along the coast whispers of these Njarrinderjeri names still exist
in their English variants like Carrickalinga, Goolwa, Waitpinga and
Coorong. However, in 1802 without contact with the indigenous people
that lived along the coast Flinders and Baudin had no idea or no
knowledge of this dense linguistic web of meaning which they overlaid
with their own place names.
While the continent was filled with language it was also filled with the
manifestations of other symbolic systems like dance, music and art. Only
glimpses of these systems seen from the records of the Europeans from
their perspective are evident in the drawings and the written records of
the Flinders and Baudin voyages and actually none were recorded along
the South Australian coast. It is this absence that marks the beginning
of my discussion about the meanings embodied in some of the woven
artefacts of the three cultural groups involved in this encounter, the
British, the French and the Njarrinderjeri.
Woven objects were an important part of the material culture of each of
these groups. They were integral to everyday life as clothing, coverings
and carriers but they also had a symbolic function. They carried meaning
beyond their physical forms. Like language, the processes of making
textiles and the objects themselves can be regarded as part of a
symbolic system encoded with quote complex meanings so that domestic
textile objects made for everyday use have very different meanings than
luxury textiles made to symbolise power and authority.
During this talk I am going to discuss weavings by contemporary South
Australian artists drawn from two utterly traditions of weaving, the
woven artefacts of the Njarrinderjeri and the tradition of woven
tapestry in Europe. In Njarrinderjeri culture woven artefacts were
fundamental to daily life and the practices of coiled weaving bound the
community together in daily and ritual activity. In the European
tradition tapestry was a sign of power, made by specialist weavers in
professional workshops to demonstrate the wealth and cement the
alliances of their patrons. Contemporary artists are able to draw upon
these different traditions to re-think the past and as a way of making
sense of the present.
In one sense this is an arbitrary juxtaposition of weaving from two very
different cultures based on an encounter that didn't take place and yet
the contemporary woven artefacts arising from these separate traditions
have a symbolic resonance of particular relevance to the story of power,
dispossession and loss which unfolded in South Australia over the next
two centuries. I am going to look at two different threads, the first
one, the tradition of woven tapestry. Woven tapestry has been one of the
most powerful visual forms for symbolising wealth, status and power
across Europe since the 11th century, based on a very simple woven
structure but capable of creating elaborate and complex imagery in a
very dense, flexible cloth. Tapestry is highly specialised and a
time‑consuming technique used to create expensive luxury textiles.
The time in a specialised skill involved in designing and weaving large
tapestries meant that most tapestry was produced in large professional
workshops. Sometimes they were run by a professional master weaver who
sought commissions and sometimes they were in the service of the court
like Les Gobleins in Paris which still exists today or a very
short‑lived royal tapestry workshop at Mortlake in Britain that were
both founded in the 17th century. Now, these workshops were staffed by
very skilled journeymen weavers who frequently changed workshops for
professional or economic reasons but also in response to religious and
political strife. So from the 15th to the 18th centuries in Europe,
French and Flemish tapestry weavers wandered amongst the cities and the
provinces using their skills to create tapestries that demonstrated the
wealth and power of their patrons, spreading an iconography of imagery
drawn from religion and myth that crossed both ethnic and language
boundaries.
Between 1520 and 1530 King John III of Portugal commissioned a series of
three great woven tapestries called The Spheres from the Brussels
workshop of George Evesler to commemorate the 15th century voyage of the
discovery begun in the time of his forebears, Prince Henry the Navigator
and King Alfonso V and I am showing two here. The far one is called
Hercules supporting the celestial sphere. Closer to me is Atlas
supporting the armillary sphere. During the 16th century a very
flourishing trade relationship had existed between Castille and Flanders
where Portugal exported primary products and importation of luxury items
came from Flanders, which included tapestries.
During the 16th and 17th centuries when the Netherlands became part of
the Spanish kingdom the tapestry workshops of Brussels filled many
commissions for the Spanish and Portuguese courts, including this
commission of The Spheres which exalt the heroic or exploits of the
Portuguese navigators by linking them to Greek and Roman myth. Each of
the three tapestries was intricately woven in gold and silver, silk and
wool by a team of weavers working for years to translate each cartoon
into a sumptuous cloth 3.5 metres high and over 3 metres wide.
The third tapestry of the set shows Earth under the protection of
Jupiter and Juno and the crowned figures of Jupiter and Juno extend
their protection over the globe, which shows the sights of Portuguese
discoveries marked by Portuguese flags in Africa and the East Indies.
This actually has prompted speculation that the figures of Jupiter and
Juno also represent King John III of Portugal and his wife, Catherine,
of Austria. So the symbolic meaning of such a cloth was indicated both
by its iconography and its manufacture. The virtuoso technique, the
extravagant materials and the human labour dedicated for years to its
construction was as much a demonstration of power as a representation of
the king and the queen as the supreme deities of Roman mythology with
dominion over the earth.
The link between territorial and expansion and the power of the monarch,
which is shown so clearly in this tapestry, prefigures the territorial
ambitions of the other European powers which led to the voyages of
Flinders and Baudin in the service of Britain and France 2½ centuries
later. In August 1763 the Englishman, George William, who was the sixth
Earl of Coventry was in Paris to pass his time buying glasses and
tapestry. He commissioned a set of tapestries from Les Gobleins for his
house, Croon Court, in Worcester in England which was being renovated by
Robert Adam.
The set of tapestries based on designs by leading French artists at the
time, including Francois Buchet, comprised 12 wall coverings and 33
pieces of furniture upholstery to create a veritable tapestry
environment. The tapestry woven walls simulating silk damask was set
with woven images of gilt-framed medallions of mythological themes on
the Roman allegories of the elements. All the panels were garlanded with
flowers and birds and musical instruments and the trophies of the hunts
and as you can see, the chairs were covered with bunches of flowers held
with striped ribbons.
Such decorative schemes were popular amongst the aristocracy of Britain
and France in the latter years of the 18th century as a sign of wealth,
culture and taste albeit it was rather old-fashioned taste as fashion at
this time was beginning to demand wallpaper which looked like tapestry
rather than tapestry. Sets of this particular design were commissioned
for at least four other stately homes in Britain at the time, while
across the channel Louis XVI commissioned sets woven from the same
design which were presented as gifts to cement his alliances with
Prussia, Austria and Russia.
So these tapestries installed in palaces and stately homes across Europe
signified a network of power and privilege and wealth that was going to
be torn apart, of course, later at the turn of the century. Tapestry in
Australia came from this tradition which eventually made its way to
Australia in the mid 20th century. It was carried first by the
professional weavers who came to Australia after the second war who
taught the skills to local weavers, but tapestries celebrating the
creation of important public institutions post war like the National
Library in Canberra still had tapestries commissioned from Europe and
made in French workshops like those of Orbisonne.
It was only in the buoyant economic climate of the seventies that the
first tapestry workshop was set up in Australia, the Victorian Tapestry
Workshop, set up in 1976 by the Victorian State Government to translate
the works of noted Australian painters into monumental tapestries for
public spaces. Now, speculating about why a tapestry workshop was
developed in Australia at this particular time, the textiles theorist,
Dianna Wood-Conroy has commented:
I suspect the main impulse in establishing a tapestry workshop is
essentially conservative in a time of rapid change. To incorporate
eminent traditions in a land with few ceremonious artefacts. The archaic
technique gives resonance and solidity to the vigorous and questioning
image makers of Australia and substantiates a claim to the past.
Of course, the past in this case is represented by European traditions
rather than the past of indigenous cultural traditions which I will now
turn to. During the 1990s the South Australian Museum staged an
exhibition, Nurrinduri, that presented the culture and the beliefs of
the Njarrinderjeri people and this is a diorama from the exhibition
showing the centrality of woven objects to daily life of the
Njarrinderjeri. There is a sitting mat, there is a winnower and
gathering and weapon baskets as well as fishing nets. Many of these
objects were actually recreated for the exhibition by contemporary
Njarrinderjeri people as little of their material culture before the
19th century has survived. The weapon basket, on my side, was made I
think in the 1930s.
What is now known about weaving and Njarrinderjeri culture in the late
18th century when Flinders met Baudin at Wunang, which is the
Njarrinderjeri word for Encounter Bay, has been passed down from person
to person through the oral tradition as well as being pieced together
from documents and images in the historical record or surmised from
looking at the surviving artefacts. Of course, the other important form
of documentation of knowledge is documentation by anthropologists based
on the information given by Njarrinderjeri people in the earlier 20th
century.
As these drawings by George Fife Angus show, which are all made in about
1840, baskets and mats constructed from plant material were integral to
daily Njarrinderjeri life and made as part of a collaborative process by
men and women. Men and women are making a fishing net on the far side,
chewing the bulrush fibre before making it into string. On my side
Pellum Pellum Wolla from the Coorong is shown wearing a basketry cloak
as well as carrying a basket over her shoulders.
The rich and fertile environment around the Murray Mouth and along the
Coorong lagoon provided a ready source of material for the relatively
settled life for the Njarrinderjeri enabling a surplus of food to be
collected and stored in baskets and artefacts to be made for trade. In
fact baskets and cloaks and nets were traded with clans along the Upper
Murray for spears made from the mile tree that didn't grow in the Lower
Murray region. Woven artefacts also had ceremonial meaning for the
Njarrinderjeri. They were integral to the stories of the dreaming and
were used in ritual ceremonies. The string skirt indicated the status of
a young girl after her initiation as a woman and baskets were part of
the funeral rites where the bones of the deceased were wrapped and
placed in mats specially woven by relatives and these show two mortuary
baskets in the collection of the South Australian Museum.
While the complex meanings of Njarrinderjeri culture are perhaps most
evident in language and kinship systems rather than in material culture,
basketry and woven objects were a very important part of ceremonial
life, food gathering and other social practices. The making of these
objects, of course, depended upon the gathering of materials and the
retention of their lands. In 1836 when the British government grasped
the opportunity, opened up by Flinders' mapping of the coast, to set up
the colony in South Australia, this began a time when the lands of the
Njarrinderjeri people and their culture was severely impacted by the
colonial period.
While well-intentioned, the colonists had wished to establish a peaceful
settlement where Aboriginal people could be Christianised and partake in
the benefits of British culture - I think that is from their actual
words - this invasion began a process of dispossessing the indigenous
inhabitants from their lands, their language and their culture. The
processes of basketry and weaving survived during the 19th century when
the Njarrinderjeri were moved from their traditional lands and their
available materials and forcibly assimilated into the patterns of
British life in the colony is due to two reasons. Woven objects still
played a central role in daily life and basket-making was accepted, even
encouraged, on the Missions where the Njarrinderjeri people were
clustered as they were moved off their lands.
Louisa Karpeny and an unidentified woman is shown in the far slide with
baskets for sale and this was a scoop that it was still made at Ralcan
in 1900 that was used to sieve food. Baskets were useful items to the
missions, able to be sold to the colonists and basket-making was seen as
a sign of industriousness, a very Christian virtue as opposed to
idleness. In addition, the basket-making activities of the women did not
compete with the earning activities of white-collarness like the men's
farming activities did. It is believed that this is one of the reasons
why basket-making was retained by the Njarrinderjeri people.
Even so, the pressures placed on Njarrinderjeri family and community
life by the processes of dispossession, forced assimilation and the
suppression of their culture and language during the 19th and 20th
centuries severed the threads of connection between the generations and
as family members were separated elders were not able to pass on the
traditional skills to their children and grandchildren and knowledge was
sometimes withheld by elders in despair at the destruction of their
culture.
Aunty Veronica Brodie, a Njarrinderjeri elder who is living at Largs Bay
in Adelaide, was recently interviewed on the Away programme on Radio
National about her participation in the 2002 Adelaide Festival
Intertwine programme. This was a community event that brought
contemporary indigenous and non-indigenous artists together. Aunty
Veronica spoke about watching her grandmother weave at Ralcan when she
was a child. She said:
We could yarn with her while she wove but I didn't learn from her. By
the time I was ready to learn I couldn't because the government was
stopping our culture.
In 1994 Tom Trevorrow, a senior Njarrinderjeri man from Camp Coorong, in
an interview with Dianna Wood-Conroy discussed why some Njarrinderjeri
elders like Aunty Lola had died without passing the culture on. Tom
said:
You see, she had seen all the children taught Christian ways at the
mission and the land laid waste. In those days you couldn't have two
ways. Nobody was interested in Aboriginal culture then. There was strong
racism. When I went to Meningie school in the sixties I was punished for
talking the Njarrinderjeri language. Aunty Lola thought it was all lost,
the culture all gone and useless to pass it on only to be lost.
It was really only in the 1980s when the South Australian Museum
organised a weaving workshop with Aunty Dori Kartinyeri who is thought
to be one of the last people knowing the craft, weaving has again become
central to the rebuilding of Njarrinderjeri cultural and social life. In
the last decades of the 20th century these two very different traditions
have been gradually drawn together through the development of
relationships and inter-cultural exchanges between indigenous and
non-indigenous artists and drawing on their very separate traditions
these artists have begun to think about how we define ourselves in South
Australia as citizens and as a community by addressing questions like:
who is excluded or included as citizens with rights to fully participate
in democratic processes and how could communities torn apart through
dispossession and racist policies rebuild themselves?
The craft theorist, Sue Rowley, has noted that craft objects, stories
and performance are integrally bound up with our sense of identity, our
understanding of the past and our articulation of the unresolved
concerns of the present. The practice of making objects and considering
their meanings can enable us to sort of re-think and re-stage the events
of the past as a way of making sense of the present. Contemporary
artists are using these traditional forms to re-think some of the
unresolved issues arising from our particular history in South
Australia.
The representation of authority symbolised in the tradition of European
tapestry has been restaged to include those excluded from power in the
Women's Suffrage Centenary Community Tapestries which symbolically
insert women into the seat of power in the South Australian parliament.
Contemporary Njarrinderjeri people use weaving practices as a way of
mending the ruptures of the past and binding community relationships to
the present. I will discuss these re-weavings of the past in turn.
In 1992 the Women's Suffrage Centenary Steering Committee, which is a
group of members of parliament plus other women in South Australia,
decided to commission a tapestry for South Australia's parliament to
celebrate South Australia's unique and distinguished role as a democracy
with a sustained record of legislative reform aimed at justice and equal
opportunity for women. The choice of tapestry for the medium of this
work continues this European tradition of using tapestry as the most
appropriate symbolic system to celebrate great events, yet this system
was subverted by both the imagery of the work and the way it was made.
The iconography of the two tapestries, as it turned out, was drawn from
women's domestic work, from textile objects and processes and the work
was woven not by professionals but by ordinary people from the
community. Within Australia woven tapestry has actually developed quite
distinctive regional variations, so while tapestry in Victoria is
focused on the work of the Victorian Tapestry Workshop and the creation
of monumental works for public institutions, tapestry in South Australia
developed in the context of community based art practices in the
eighties, developing as a community-based as well as a professional
practice.
It was the community tapestry movement where communities worked with
professional weavers to learn the skills of tapestry weaving so they can
design and make public works and explore community concerns that
provided the model for the Women's Suffrage Centenary Community
Tapestries. I was invited to design the two tapestries in 1993 which
were based on both 19th and 20th century legislation which had been
passed by the South Australian parliament and gave women rights as
citizens. These included the right to vote, the right to own property as
well as a whole raft of other legislative reform which was designed to
make women equal with men before the law.
To enable the people of South Australia both to witness and participate
in the project, the tapestries were woven during 1993 and '94 in the
foyer of the ANZ Bank in King William Street by the Adelaide Community
Weavers, a particular group who had been drawn together and taught the
skills of tapestry weaving by Elaine Gardner and her assistant, Lutsi
Epicla. Passers-by could come in off the street and be taught the basic
weaving process so they could actually weave a pass and participate in
the project.
The first tapestry was actually based on the design of paintings in the
House of Assembly chamber but it subverts the 19th century conventions
of the painted and framed portraits of parliamentarians that hang in
this chamber. The woven frame of the tapestry, rather than enclosing a
single portrait of an eminent man, opens on to a collective portrait of
the three women who spearheaded the Suffrage movement in South
Australia, Catherine Helen Spence, Mary Lee and Elizabeth Nicholls, as
well as a section of the great petition of 11,600 signatures which was
collected supporting the granting of a vote to women.
If you look at the tapestry you can see that the frame has been cut to
reveal a coiled Njarrinderjeri rush mat overlaid with images that
signify the granting of the vote and rights over property to women in
colonial South Australia. This overlaying of the images also recalls how
Njarrinderjeri country was overlaid with European language in the maps
of Flinders and Baudin. In 1894 which this tapestry speaks about,
Aboriginal people had not been specifically excluded from the suffrage
and so by default both Aboriginal men and women had voting rights which
the Njarrinderjeri exercised during the 1890s before they were
systematically disenfranchised with other Aboriginal and non-white
groups by the Commonwealth after federation.
The second tapestry focuses on the 20th century legislative reforms that
expanded women's personal, parental and employment rights. The design is
actually based on women's domestic textile practices like the Depression
quilt made by Adolphina Knowle on the far side as well as petit-point
embroidery and aprons. The representation of these practices brings the
realm of the home into the parliament to disrupt the division between
private and public life that has served to keep women in their place. It
also disrupts the authority associated with tapestry by the inclusion of
everyday textile objects with very feminine and homely associations. I
always must admit it gives me great pleasure to see that little badge
with "mother" hanging in the South Australian parliament.
One section of the design, as we have here, visualises the way public
policy penetrated the home to deny women and indigenous people their
parental rights. In a fragment of a letter Nellie Seager on this side
pleads with the authorities for news of her children taken from her and
put into state institutions, or the image behind the letter shows, is
based on a drawing by Nullatjina, a young boy from Ernabella. The
drawing was made in the 1940s. These two images are juxtaposed with a
pair of newspaper clippings that report on two pieces of legislation,
one that removed the rights of Aboriginal parents and one that gave
mothers guardianship over their children.
The 1923 headline from The Register newspaper refers to the eloquent
protest by a Njarrinderjeri man, Matthew Karpineri, against the
provisions of the 1923 Aborigines Training of Children Act which enabled
the Protector of Aborigines to remove Aboriginal children from their
parents and commit them to state institutions for training. While
protests like Karpineri's calls for the administration of this
particular Act to be suspended, later legislation endorsed this policy
of removal. In front of it, the 1940 clipping from The Advertiser,
reports on the passing of the Guardianship of Infants Bill that granted
women equal custody rights, authority and responsibility in relation to
their children. I think it is a deep irony that while women's parental
rights were being recognised, the parental rights of Aboriginal people
had been taken away.
As well as celebrating legislative reform, these two tapestries also
insert texts and images drawn from the historical record to insert
women's voices and concerns into the patriarchal spaces of the
parliament and the faint traces of Njarrinderjeri culture and protest
included in each tapestry present an underlying sub-text of exclusion
and loss. These other voices subvert the power and the authority usually
associated with the medium of tapestry and it is not surprising that
even today, 8 years after they were made, that they are still seen as an
unwelcome intrusion into the space by some members of parliament and
schemes are devised to ensure their removal.
In 1982, the same year that the first community tapestry was made in
South Australia, Aunty Dori Kartinyeri was teaching the skills of
Njarrinderjeri basket-making at her workshop in Meningie and this shows
some of the participants gathering rushes from the sand dunes. It was
here that Ellen Trevorrow and Yvonne Kilmatrie learned to weave and
began their careers as contemporary artists. The basket on the right,
the shopping basket made by Aunty Dori in 1982. Both Yvonne and Ellen
draw upon Njarrinderjeri weaving traditions to explore the relevance of
traditional forms of contemporary life and also to participate in a very
important form of cultural renewal for their people.
Ellen Trevorrow, who was brought up in Tailem Bend, has spoken of a
sadness about not learning to weave from her grandmother who cared for
her until she was 11. Her grandmother made baskets but she also worked
as a housemaid to survive and with Ellen going to school, her
grandmother did not have the time to teach her to weave. Now Ellen
collects the rushes in the same place as her grandmother went to pick.
She said:
I loved it, to go back into my grandmother's steps. I still do it today.
My main aim is to teach, to share, because she never had that
opportunity.
Ellen and her husband, Tom Trevorrow, run the Race Relations Centre Camp
Coorong which was set up on Njarrinderjeri land just outside Meningie in
1986 to communicate the cultural traditions of the Njarrinderjeri to
both their own people but also to non-indigenous Australians. So while
Ellen teaches the traditional basket‑weaving techniques, Tom takes
visitors on bush walks, describing how his people used the land while
remembering his boyhood in the fringe camps around Meningie in the
sixties.
Both Ellen and Tom use weaving and story-telling to communicate their
culture to others but also to recreate it for their community. The
processes of collecting rushes and weaving baskets are accompanied by
yarning where the stories of the past are told as well as the telling of
the day's events. The past is linked to the present in an endless cycle
of story-telling that is very, very deeply embedded in Njarrinderjeri
culture. Ellen has said:
It is beautiful to sit and weave while you yarn together. I like weaving
with the old people because they yarn about things, the past, which is
the future for their children. Sometimes they tell secrets it's good to
share and exchange.
I think it is the circularity of this process of story-telling, the
repetition and the gradual release of information which is echoed in the
circularity of the weaving of Njarrinderjeri coiled mats and baskets.
Ellen remakes the traditional forms of Njarrinderjeri weaving as a way
of linking the present to the past and reconnecting the
inter-generational ties which were severed during the mid 20th century.
Here she is shown teaching basket-making to the children at Ralcan
school in the eighties.
Integral to Peter Sellars' vision for the 2002 Adelaide Festival was a
focus on weaving as a metaphor for reconciliation developed through the
Intertwine programme which was a series of exhibitions and
community‑based weaving events based in the city and the western suburbs
of Adelaide. A number of Njarrinderjeri participated, teaching weaving
and telling stories of community participants. You can see Aunty
Veronica Brodie teaching the weaving processes as well as telling
stories. She told the Njarrinderjeri story of a bony brim that has a
very appropriate moral of always sharing your food with strangers.
Ellen and her daughter, Tanya Trevorrow, exhibited a work called: Mat
and Seven Sister Baskets, during the Intertwine Exhibition Weaving
Communities which was held at the Charles Sturt Civic Centre in March.
This particular work refers to a traditional Njarrinderjeri story about
the seven sisters constellation. The story encodes Njarrinderjeri
beliefs about the formation of the world which is here expressed in
woven form. It also symbolised family relationships. The sister baskets
were made by Ellen and the mat was made by her daughter, Tanya,
reconnecting the passing on of inter-generational knowledge.
The two cupped forms of the sister basket and the one on the far side
was made by Ethel Watson in 1939 make visible a familial relationship
which is not confined to blood ties but is able to be extended to a
sisterhood which is based on deep affinities and common concerns. In
fact, the title of the Festival 2002 Exhibition of Contemporary Maori
and Aboriginal Women's work was called: Sisters. The work of Yvonne
Kilmatrie was also exhibited during Intertwine in the Sisters
Exhibition. Her work also draws on traditional forms but with a
different resonance, reflecting both the context of her own life and
Njarrinderjeri cultural renewal.
Her work is a burial basket and in many cultures textile objects have
been used to sort of mitigate the transition between life and death. In
traditional Njarrinderjeri culture the bones of the deceased were
carried by family members in these sewn and folded mats and Kilmatrie's
burial basket is also made from a folded mat but now reminiscent of a
human torso and open to reveal the emptiness within. It is a very potent
symbol, I think, of human loss. It is this contemporary re-staging of a
past ritual, the burial basket is also a sign of reconnection with
Njarrinderjeri cultural tradition.
In the same exhibition was a very extraordinary work made by Yvonne
Kilmatrie called: Prupie. In the late nineties, around the same time as
a development and the release of the stolen children report, she made
this work based on the traditional Njarrinderjeri story of Prupie as
told to Yvonne as a child by her mother and her grandmother. I will just
read out the text of Prupie as Yvonne wrote it:
In the beginning Prupie lived together with her clan in the camp. Prupie
though was not able to have children and she used to try and steal the
children of other people in her clan. The others, of course, did not
like this so Prupie went to live in a cave nearby. Away from her camp
and her people Prupie soon became a wild, slimy creature. Her legs and
feet disappeared, became short stumps with web-like flippers on the end.
But Prupie kept coming back to the camp to lure the children. When she
had lured them away she had turned them into wild, slimy things just
like herself. At night the women had to keep their children very quiet
because their crying would bring Prupie to the camp and she would try to
lure them away. The men in the camp had decided that they had to stop
Prupie doing these awful things to the children, so they made a net and
laid it across the path which Prupie took from the camp to the cave and
Prupie was caught and then killed and to get rid of her evil spirit the
clan ate her.
These issues of loss and reparation that engaged contemporary
Njarrinderjeri weavers are expressed through both the re-making of
traditional forms and the re-telling of traditional stories. So I think
the web of meaning that was invisible to Flinders and Baudin in 1802 and
which has been torn apart over the last 200 years is being very
patiently repaired and re-woven by the Njarrinderjeri people through
their reclamation of language, story and weaving and the imperial and
powerful fun of tapestry which was also in place when Flinders met
Baudin and is still in place in South Australia 200 years later, as the
Women's Suffrage Tapestry demonstrates is now very much changed and
altered in emphasis.
The meanings of these very different traditions are being now shared
across cultures through events like the Intertwine programme but they
are also being woven into public discourse by indigenous and
non‑indigenous scholars and artists as other histories are inserted into
the public domain. As in the recent Centenary of Federation Exhibition,
Weaving the Murray, which just came down from the Prospect Gallery
yesterday, this work explored the weaving of the Murray for indigenous
and non-indigenous Australians and was made collaboratively by artists
from both cultures. It was made by indigenous artists, Rhonda Agius,
Chrissy Heuston and Nicki Cumpston in collaboration with the
non‑indigenous artists, Sandy Elbert, Kirsty Darlaston, Karen Russell
and myself.
In this work, Weaving the Murray, these two very different traditions
intercept and talk about our different history but also our common
concerns for the future of the Murray River. I think both traditions
have proved to be very powerful tools for rethinking the past and
exploring issues of identity and community as well as for weaving
inter‑cultural relationships in the present. Thank you.
