Signposted by song: Cultural routes of the Australian desert (original) (raw)
Related papers
Wangkarra: communication and the verbal arts of Australia’s Western Desert
International Journal of Intangible Heritage, 2019
In this paper we situate the verbal arts of the Ngaanyatjarra people of the Western Desert of Australia within the discourse surrounding the UNESCO concept of Intangible Cultural Heritage. We describe the rich heritage of oral traditions that exist in the Ngaanyatjarra region, how they emerged, how they are being sustained and the forces of change that reveal their fragile state today. We give an account of the Western Desert Verbal Arts Project, a documentation project that has, since 2010, collected, recorded and archived a spectrum of practices including oral narratives, sand storytelling, alternate sign language and special speech styles. These practices are embedded in a speech community where the everyday indigenous spoken language is also considered endangered. We consider ways to not only safeguard these rarefied and extremely fragile verbal arts traditions, but also to bring them to the fore as an integral aspect of the living heritage of the Ngaanyatjarra people.
Aboriginal Dreaming and aridity
Animals of Arid Australia, 2007
The Aboriginal songline or Dreaming track system may be examined from the point of view of an adaptive strategy for high mobility which makes it possible to map consumers on resources in a dominantly dry continent with highly variable weather patterns�� The Dreaming track adaptation operates on four main principles: acquisition of Dreaming track songs; complex social organisation; reciprocity; and information flow�� Such an adaptation may have been prompted by the intense aridity of the last glacial maximum of 18,000 years ago, or perhaps by about 6,000 years ago when the current climatic regime became established�� The archaeological evidence for its presence at these times is inconclusive�� However a strong case for the Dreaming track system being in place can be made by about 1500 years ago in western New South Wales and about 1200 years ago in the Northern Territory�� At a global scale, the Dreaming track system can be seen as a social and economic institution which provided an adequate supply of resources for Aboriginal people and was an alternative for the adoption of horticulture in Australia��
Beneath Horizons: Australian Desert Landscape
While playing classical piano music written by European composers in arid Winton, QLD, my mother grew up wishing she was elsewhere. In 1929, aged thirteen years, her dedication to the European canon was rewarded with a music degree conferred by the London College of Music. My mother was not alone in her desire for recognition and acclaim by European culture. White Australians obsession with British and European culture, landscape and history throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, is well documented. In fact, the tendency to deny those aspects of Australian reality that are perceived to be strange, unpalatable or inconvenient continues in Australia today. My research Beneath Horizons: Australian Desert Landscapes, analyses preconceptions such as fear of a vast and dangerous void, that are held by many urban-dwelling Australians who cling to the metaphorical rim of the continent, rarely venturing inside to experience the desert for themselves. Consequently, our concept of the desert is configured from cultural histories, mythologies, maps, televisual and cinematic constructs. We imagine the desert, but without going there. We don’t immerse ourselves in the desert space, experience the freedom of endless space, or see expansive horizons that activate our senses and transform the desert into a spiritual place. The installation Red Desert Project for example, offers urban-dwellers a micro-experience of being out there in the red sand desert. My research focused on the ground beneath me to locate my presence as an observer at a particular time and place in the desert landscape. I engaged daily with the forces of nature that continually transformed the desert floor of that place. I made three journeys to the desert, camping in remote sites significant to colonial explorers to experiment and record my experiences with the forces of nature and to map ever-changing details of the living desert. I wanted to gain insights into why my mother avoided the arid landscape of her childhood and why most Australians avoid the central deserts of Australia. This research aimed to map the perceived emptiness of the desert landscape and contribute to an increased perception and awareness of the movement of time and space in the imagined desert landscape of Australia, so that people may be encouraged to treat the land, along with its Indigenous custodians, with more insight, empathy and respect.
Contemporary Aboriginal Art from Australia᾽s Desert: Context, Debates, and Analysis
Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts, 2019
The interest in Aboriginal art in Europe and in the whole Western world has grown exponentially since the late 1980s. Larger and smaller, more and less prestigious institutions and galleries are staging Aboriginal art, trying to simultaneously remove it from the ethnographic field, and introduce it into the global art market. Visual accordance between Aboriginal art-especially acrylic paintings from the Desert-and Western modernist painting makes the former desirable objects on the art market, but it also leads to laziness in learning about their real meaning within Aboriginal culture as well as to debates on their artistic and anthropological significance, interpretations, and values. In this article, I briefly present ongoing debates on the artistic character of Aboriginal artefacts and the aesthetic values of Aboriginal paintings from the Desert, in order to argue that the specific conditions of the painting production process should be considered in their interpretation. These conditions have their roots and explanations (I prefer narratives here) in Aboriginal traditions related to the Dreamtime, that is, their mythical past in which their ancestors created the land, which is not past history, but the continuous past-present influencing contemporary forms of life. I will address four important features of acrylic paintings from the region of the Desert. First, the change of medium-from coloured sand in the desert, to acrylic painting on canvas laid on the ground. Second, the realistic character of representing landscape in the form of painted topographic maps. Third, the importance of the use of traditional images and stories, and the simultaneous impossibility of using sacred images and symbols, which develops the discussion about the originality of Aboriginal paintings. Fourth, the collective method of artistic work. These issues are broadly discussed in Australian artistic research. However, they are sometimes overlooked in Western presentations of Aboriginal art. Our understanding of Aboriginal art should not devalue it by forcing it into our ready Western concepts of art, for example, those of modernist painting. Instead, we should explore its histories more deeply and examine Aboriginal within its own context.
Australian Aboriginal Studies
The Pilbara–Western Desert nexus provides us with contrasting landscapes, distinct language groupings and different territorial social arrangements. The Pilbara is an upland desert with well-defined major valley systems draining to the Indian Ocean. There are numerous gorges, many with deep pools, which are likely to have provided refuges for people since the initial settlement of the continent. In stark contrast to the Pilbara, the Western Desert has internal and uncoordinated drainage. Dispersed ranges with spring-fed rock pools provide focalised resources, including suitable media for rock-art production, among the vast sandy dune fields. We are interested here in contrasting the likely settlement patterns through time in these adjacent and contrasting landscapes — and modelling how these patterns may have affected the use of rock-art in negotiating social interactions