'The Town Grew Up Dancing is Wenten Rubuntja’s story. It provides a rare view of events that shaped the life of an Arrernte man who has made a major contribution to the art and politics of his time. Wenten was a key figure in the land rights movement in Central Australia in the mid-1970s and has since played a lively and formative role as an Aboriginal statesman in his home town of Alice Springs. He is highly respected for the depth and breadth of his traditional knowledge and for his unique skills as a negotiator. This book reveals the humour and wisdom of an Aboriginal man skilled at engaging in both the traditional and the contemporary worlds. The story is told in Wenten’s own words – in his first language, Arrernte, with accompanying translations, and in Aboriginal English. The book also includes the voices of many who have been close to Wenten, including members of his own family, and others who have worked with him over the years. Additional commentary is provided by linguist and artist Jenny Green and historian Tim Rowse. This fascinating and innovative book weaves together autobiography and biography in a powerful story of recent Indigenous history in Australia. The book features Wenten’s own commentary on his paintings, and photographs in colour and black and white bring his story and Alice Springs’ colourful past vividly to life.' (Source: IAD Press website)
'This article engages with the otherwise worlds of Arrernte caterpillar children living in the Aboriginal fringe camps around Alice Springs, in Central Australia. It traces the constitutive relationships between these children’s kinship identities and belongings to country, the materialities of the desert environment in which they live, the adaptive and inclusive past and present Arrernte ‘Caterpillar Dreaming’ stories, Arrernte interspecies relational ethics, and the impact of colonial dispersals and interventions upon Central Australian Aboriginal people’s lives. The author poses the question of what we might learn about children’s postcolonial natureculture relations from these caterpillar children’s otherwise worlds. Picking up on Elizabeth Povinelli’s suggestion that the mutually constituting relationship of geographies (places) and biographies (human lives), or geontologies, function as indigenous survival strategies, the author questions whether or not these adaptive caterpillar geontologies can survive in a world irrevocably changed by colonisation and subject to ongoing neo-colonial assimilatory interventions. To make these tracings and to pose these questions, the author draws upon a combination of personal recollections, traditional Arrernte stories and philosophies, and recountings of colonialist and neo-colonialist historical events.'
Source: Author's abstract.
'This article engages with the otherwise worlds of Arrernte caterpillar children living in the Aboriginal fringe camps around Alice Springs, in Central Australia. It traces the constitutive relationships between these children’s kinship identities and belongings to country, the materialities of the desert environment in which they live, the adaptive and inclusive past and present Arrernte ‘Caterpillar Dreaming’ stories, Arrernte interspecies relational ethics, and the impact of colonial dispersals and interventions upon Central Australian Aboriginal people’s lives. The author poses the question of what we might learn about children’s postcolonial natureculture relations from these caterpillar children’s otherwise worlds. Picking up on Elizabeth Povinelli’s suggestion that the mutually constituting relationship of geographies (places) and biographies (human lives), or geontologies, function as indigenous survival strategies, the author questions whether or not these adaptive caterpillar geontologies can survive in a world irrevocably changed by colonisation and subject to ongoing neo-colonial assimilatory interventions. To make these tracings and to pose these questions, the author draws upon a combination of personal recollections, traditional Arrernte stories and philosophies, and recountings of colonialist and neo-colonialist historical events.'
Source: Author's abstract.
