Outback Art Project

Date: Sunday 1st June 2008

I have just returned from an incredible trip to a remote aboriginal community. For two weeks, I worked as a volunteer on an art project in a township called Pipalyatjara, which lies on the border between South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. I was joined by three other white fellas: Jude Crabtree and Cheryl Brown from South Australia, and Sue Jenkins from Tasmania. We were profoundly inspired by the opportunity to be involved in this community art project, which we also helped to facilitate.

The project was to take 40 plywood panels measuring 1.8 X 1.2 metres each, paint them, and attach them as cladding around a number of new school buildings. School students and many other members of the community were involved. The adult artists were paid.

The artists and students embraced the project with gusto and enthusiasm. Undeterred by the size of the panels, they took in their dimensions, using their remarkable spatiality and visual skills and memory, before embarking on the task at hand, which was the documentation of their stories in art.

These artists are forever deeply connected to their Tjukurpa (meaning ‘creation stories’). They paint with a pure honesty and beauty that is unmatched and unfathomable. They have no guile, no arrogance. There is no ego involved. They demonstrate their belief in the pursuit of excellence with every brush stroke, every dot. A ten hour shift of intense concentration is not uncommon.

This was magical to watch, breathtakingly glorious, and life changing for us. It was an essential part of our education, one that we will be eternally grateful for, and which will inspire us to help educate the many, many Australians who really want to know more - those who wish to have a deeper understanding of the soul and essence of our country.

Contrasted against this are the third world conditions in which these people live. There are disastrous health problems, inadequate housing, poor diet, distressing mental states and the findings of the Mulligan Report.

But all of this was forgotten in the calm of the environment of the art shed. We experienced a sense of harmony which enveloped us like a protective shield. The artists were unstoppable. Even on Saturday we opened the shed at their request, and they would have been in on Sunday if, as mothers, we had not requested a Mother’s Day break to relax by some waterholes. So far we have recorded the artists’ input at approximately 220 hours. This does not include the time put in by the children who came into the shed after school each day to paint quietly and reverently beside their mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles and grandmothers.

Troppo Architects must be thanked for providing us with the opportunity to support this project. We are particularly appreciative of the school and the community for welcoming us. We were privileged to be given an extraordinary entrée into the intimate world of these Aboriginal artists. It was a small glimpse, a very personal close up view, of the visual intelligence and the well of knowledge possessed by these wonderfully gifted people. I was profoundly moved and honoured to be amongst such immense talent, ancient wisdom, and generosity of spirit.