Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 [Review] Wanarn Painters of Place and Time: Old Age Travels in the Tjukurrpa
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Wanarn Painters of Place and Time: Old Age Travels in the Tjukurrpa does indeed take us into the world of older Ngaanyatjarra painters – born into a time and place that is fast disappearing – who are spending their last days in the Kungkarrangkalpa Aged Care Facility at Wanarn in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in the Western Desert. Beautifully written and illustrated with colour plates of the paintings, this book weaves together social history, anthropology and art history. Through painting, the authors David Brooks, an anthropologist, and Darren Jorgensen, an art historian, take us into the historical circumstances that have formed the Ngaanyatjarra identity. The book describes the establishment of the Wanarn Painters program from Warakurna Arts by Eunice Porter, who was one of the directors of Warakurna Art, and others. The Wanarn painters are in their final stage of life, much of their strength and short-term memory has gone, and while this comes through in the way they paint, their long-term memory and links to Tjukurrpa (the Western Desert term for the Dreaming) remain strong because of their regular links to family, ceremony, song and dance.'

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Date: 2017
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Aboriginal History no. 41 2017 17480676 2017 periodical issue non-fiction

    "The articles in Volume 41 bring to light historical sources from the colonial frontier in Tasmania (Nicholas Brodie and Kristyn Harman) and South Australia (Skye Kirchauff) to provoke reassessments of colonial attitudes and expectations. Karen Hughes brings into focus little-known, intimate aspects of Indigenous women’s experience with African American servicemen on the World War II Australian home front. Diana Young’s study of accounts of Pitjantjatjara women’s careful productions in the Ernabella craft rooms in the mid-twentieth century deepens our understanding of a relatively neglected aspect of the art history of ‘first generation, postcontact Indigenous art-making among Australian Western Desert peoples’. Nikita Vanderbyl explores records of tourists’ visits to Aboriginal reserves in the late 1800s and early 1900s, focusing on the emotive aspects of the visits, and making the links between such tourism and colonialism. Janice Newton provides a close examination of the cross-cultural signs implicated in a documented ceremonial performance in early Port Phillip. Heather Burke, Lynley Wallis and their collaborators compare a reconstructed stone building in Richmond, Queensland, with other reputedly fortified structures, and find that the historical and structural evidence for this interpretation are equivocal, pointing to imaginaries of the violent frontier as much as tangible experience."

    Source: ANU Press.

    2017
    pg. 225
Last amended 31 May 2021 17:07:30
225 [Review] Wanarn Painters of Place and Time: Old Age Travels in the Tjukurrpasmall AustLit logo Aboriginal History
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