|
The history of the Warburton
Arts Project
Yarnangu, the Aboriginal people who speak Ngaanyatjarra dialect
live on their traditional homelands in the central western
desert of Australia. Ngaanyatjarra believe that the earth
was created by mythical beings and that initially, it was
flat and featureless. Ancestral spirits arose from the flatness
and journeyed across the country bringing into existence all
the features of the landscape and all the animals living within
it.
These journeys and the rituals and ceremonies
that relate to them are all part of what Ngaanyatjarra people
call Tjukurrpa, and what non-Aboriginals often refer to as
'the dreaming'. Tjukurrpa holds all the principles of Ngaanyatjarra
life together and all things are created by it. Law, stories
and songs, the physical features of the landscape and the
first people were all made by the ancestral spirits of the
Tjukurrpa.
" All these Tjukurrpa stories,
we didn't make them up, they happened. White men when they
come to Australia, they thought we were nothing … or
just a spirit. But we was a human being. They brought everything,
everything we don't know. There was shooting, there was fighting
with the spears. They found the Aborigine people here with
lotta stories. They was looking for land. That means troubles,
troubles. They was putting handcuffs on the people and dragging
them out to jail, near that big bottle tree in Derby. They
shoot them too but people, we're still fighting. Now, today,
they're fighting with the talks, because of culture, culture."
- Tommy Simms.
Mitika rock art site |
The Aboriginal people
of the western desert were nomadic people, moving around in
search of food and water. This changed with the arrival of
missionaries and the beginning of 'settlement' at Warburton
in 1933.
...by the 1970s the last of the nomadic
people had come in from the bush.
Warburton settlement lies beside
the Great Central Road (Outback Highway) in the heart of the
Gibson Desert, 1050 kms South West of Alice Springs and 750kms
north east of Kalgoorlie. Before the missionaries arrived
the only Europeans who had passed through this region were
a few mining prospectors and doggers collecting dingo scalps.
By 1954, between 500
and 700 Aboriginal people were living at Warburton. Children
stayed in the children's home and were sent to school where
they were taught in English, a policy that contributed to
the breakdown of traditional culture. Women and girls were
trained in sewing, kitchen skills and cooking, and men made
money by collecting dingo scalps or working as shearers or
builders for the mission. A nearby copper mine drew even more
people to the settlement and by the 1970s the last of the
nomadic people had come in from the bush.
"Missionaries brought mum and dad
here. They said to us, 'You gotta stay here at the home until
you get big'. Mum and dad went back out bush and we stayed
here. Sometimes they were allowed to take us away for holidays
and we always dug for goanna or rabbits. Before that, our
grandmothers and grandfathers had their own beliefs …
but my father and mother, they been following God." -
Tjingapa Davies
|
Tjinuka Holland collecting
honey ants near Kalkakutjarra
|
The Ngaanyatjarra people
currently hold a 99-year lease over their traditional lands.
In 1973, the United Aborigines Mission handed control of the
Warburton settlement to the Aboriginal people, and responsibility
for economic development was undertaken by the Aboriginal
Affairs Planning Authority of the state government of Western
Australia. Since then, Warburton has worked under the umbrella
of the Ngaanyatjarra Council.
The Council has initiated many successful business
ventures including an airline, a building company, a road-making
service and a freight company which brings food and dry goods
to the communities. Their aim is to achieve economic self-sufficiency.
In 1990, the Ngaanyatjarra community formed
the Warburton Arts Project to help people find new ways of
expressing their culture and to assist them in maintaining
and nurturing existing traditions.
GO TO PART 2 »
|
