Spinifex — 25th Anniversary Exhibition — Essay

IT WAS AN ATOMIC EXPLOSION THAT SAW THE SPINIFEX PEOPLE’S WAY OF LIFE UPENDED. AND IT WAS A CREATIVE EXPLOSION THAT BEGAN A PAINTING MOVEMENT THAT STILL THRIVES TODAY. IF A POSITIVE CAN BE TAKEN FROM THE TOTAL DISPOSSESSION OF ONE’S COUNTRY, IT IS, THAT A SPIRIT AND CULTURE CANNOT BE SO READILY EXTINGUISHED AND THAT THE SPIRITUAL LANDSCAPE CAN BE MANIFESTLY WITHIN A PEOPLE AT ALL TIMES.

Throughout the Great Victoria Desert in the mid-century the Spinifex People carried their culture with them as they traversed great tracts of red sand country. They walked across vast spinifex plains and open woodlands, through secluded valleys flanked by majestic sand ridges so high, they blocked out large portions of the endless sky. They read the landscape like a great tome, a mapped environment that also held their spiritual life. For them the two were inseparable. At certain times, they would gather in large ceremonial groups at sacred locations for powerful religious purposes and to engage in social connection. These People lived and moved in an arid but beautiful land, unchallenged and unchanged for eons, unaware that a new and dangerous world had begun encroaching on the far boundaries of their very existence, but the Spinifex People’ would soon find themselves impacted by this world.

Fred Grant talks of the truck and trailer that came to his naked family, near the site of Pirilyi when he was a boy. ‘No clothes’ he says, and he laughs while describing trying to put on trousers for the first time. All his family were removed from the land they knew, that which held their means for survival and the moral compass needed for a spiritual life. The truck and trailer were part of the major sweeps of ‘any natives’ who may be in the area, even though the country had so readily been termed uninhabited by the new and dangerous world. He and others were taken some 1OOOkm south to Cundeelee Mission – An American Evangelical Christian Mission – that was within two hours of the debilitating vices that would ravage, incarcerate, and decimate the population for years to come. And from those early years of separation from country, the Spinifex People planned and plotted a thread on which to follow, back to the land that had held them from birth. The Spinifex People were determined to return home.

That their spiritual lands were deemed to belong to others did not deter them. That their places of worship had been desecrated and poisoned, kept them wanting a return, to allay their fears of an uninhabited terrain and a landscape full of meaning without the people who knew it. And as they watched the new world take the path of destruction on their kin, they made the long journey northward to their traditional lands with overwhelming emotion.

Those men and women who were removed as young adults returned to a place they never forgot and began the arduous task to enshrine, what was always theirs, into the new world law. It is here they decided to tangibly portray their country in a painted composition, using intricate depiction of the birthright and authority, of a landscape brimming with meaning. Two collaborative paintings, a ‘Men’s Combined’ and a ‘Women’s Combined’ would be presented as evidence, in the court of Native Title. Visually documenting this knowledge of country delivered the correlation between artistic collaboration and recognition of cultural ownership within a legal framework. Notwithstanding, forty years after atomic bombs were exploded on a lived landscape by new world ignorance, the Spinifex People finally had ownership, of a land they never relinquished and of the home they always grieved for.

Today those same artists still tell all that is relevant within sites of importance and sing in harmony of a cultural landscape that lives and breathes for and of its people.

BRIAN HALLETT