I have been talking about a work of art by Emily Kam Kngwarreye and I'm going to turn my

attention now to a collaborative work painted in 2009 by twelve women of three different
generations who were painting at, Punmu in the East Pilbara of Western Australia. They had only
begun to paint three years earlier when the Martumili Artists Cooperative was formed.
One thing I want you to think about with this work is something that the Martu artists themselves
have said. The painting is the country.
The country is the song.
The song is the dance.
It is all connected. And just remember that the artists are also the land they paint. So all of these
things, country, painting, song, dance, and the artists themselves are intimately connected. This
particular work, Ngayarta Kujarra,
represents the artist's cultural memories of growing up and living in a place where
every day they were astonished by the gigantic salt lake, Lake Dora, with its crystalline surface, that
was too harsh and sharp too walk upon.
Around its surface, in wet seasons, rock holes spilled with water. These were places of living
water, believed to have ancestral associations that were known and named in sacred songs of the
womens' ceremonies.
One of the things about this work is it is holistic, it is seamless. The artists come together over nine
days and painted three by five metre canvas the largest one that they ever worked on in forty six
degree heat.
The thing is they layed in first the whiteness of this salt lake, and then around the edges, they
painted and sung the names of the rock holes where different sorts of plants and bush fruits
would spring to life in the wet seasons.
The amazing thing about this work is that
it looks like it's almost like Google earth.
I have flown over this site and seen this amazing salt lake, and it encapsulates the visceral nature of
this shimmering expanse of whiteness.
There are large bands of salt lakes in this area of the Pilbara. Some of them are inhabited by
dangerous cannibal spirits.
They are a manifestation of ancestral activities in the tjukurpa, the dreaming.
And what was amazing as well was that when the artist was speaking about this
at a seminar at the Adelaide Festival, one of the people in the audience asked why it was so white.
And the artists were mystified, flabbergasted, because as they said at the time, it is white, because
that is what it looks like. They have created a platonic form of a place of sanctity that their spirits
are immersed in. It is an amazing, holistic masterpiece that actually transports the viewer to this
sacred place and also expresses the artists sense of oneness with it. Indigenous people often
worked together collaboratively in a ceremonial context or in making paintings for the market.
In this case, what happened is that the Martu people had moved back to Punmu after a long period
of exile. During the mid-20th century, Martu people moved away from country in response to the
intrusion of Europeans in their land. That is, the development of the pastoral and mining industries
throughout the Pilbara. And most of them moved into mission stations or
onto pastoral stations, where they worked for European overlords, as is the case with Emily Kam
Kngwarray. In the early 2000s, the Martu gained title to their ancestral lands and moved back to
homeland centres or out stations near where they had grown up. And there was such excitement that
occurred when they moved back to Punmu that they had the idea that it would be wonderful to
come together and create a work that expressed exactly what moving back to this country meant to
all of them.
In such a collaborate work, it is customary for senior women to take a leading hand, and in this
case, Rosie Williams and Yikartu Bumba, who had earlier created
a smaller scale representation of a giant salt lake in memory of Rosie Williams' sister who had
passed away at Punmu and was the initiator of the idea of painting a salt lake as a huge expanse of
white pigment on canvas. They decided that together they would create the celebration of their
newfound return to country. And also, it will be an act of homage to Rosie Williams' sister, who had
recently passed away. She was the heart and soul of the art centre.
So Rosie Williams made the first mark on the canvas, and that was a dot.
And then the other women, the grandmothers, daughters and grandchildren of the senior women
came together
with their right through kinship associations to also paint this particular place, and were led by the
more senior members of their community.
The wonderful thing, however, is that in painting
the nature, the crystalline structure of the lake, different layerings of white came to the
fore. Apparently, large numbers of children watched, and dogs walked all over the canvas they were
painting on the ground in extreme heat.
When it came to painting the outer edges, the hand of Yucarta Bomba and her characteristic palette
is much to the fore, but the artists still were led by those two senior women. When it was all
finished, they had a look and discovered that the white had become sullied by dogs and people
sitting all over the canvas and children running all over it. And so it was taken to a place to the art
centre inside and another artist, actually painted over the white to bring it back to the glistening
whiteness, the blinding whiteness of the salt lake.
Afterwards, they rolled up the canvas, got into a troupie and laid it out on the surface of Lake Dora
and walked on it, on the lake.
And it was just as if the surf, the painting was part of the lake and continued beyond the frame.
The other thing that happened was that as they had been painting the rock holes, the places of living
water around the edge of the canvas, on the stretching edge, the artist wrote, or called out the
name of the particular water hole and it was written on the stretching edge. So this is a matte in
planar perspective
of the lake and the surrounding rock holes.
But as with Emily Kam Kngwarray, it is as if the artists are inside the landscape that they are
painting. They have walked upon it, felt it's contours through their feet. They know it intimately, it
is if they are painting themselves, their own bodies. They are embodied in this place.
The emergence of women's art practice in indigenous Australia
is the greatest single change in the past two or
three decades of Australian art. Indigenous women are audacious, fearless in their attack on the
canvas,
their juxtapositions of colours,
the intuitive and organic freedom with which they work.
Their responses to the landscape,
to each other, their shared memories of songs, dances, and foot walking through country from
which they were severed for many decades through incursions of Europeans into their landscape,
fIll us all with profound awe. The work that they are making stands comparison with any work that
is being made by contemporary artists in the world today. It stands up strong and is not
overpowered.