The Colours of Things: Memory, Materiality and an Anthropology of the Senses in North Western South Australia

THE COLOURS OF THINGS. Memory, Materiality and an Anthropology of the Senses in North Western South Australia

Diana Jane Barbara Young University College London

Submitted in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2001

4.

Abstract The thesis aims to establish the importance of the colours of things, to material culture and social theory. This re-examination of colour in anthropology, is necessitated by recent developments in cognitive and material culture theory. Research on memory and on material culture has shown that things embody social processes. It is argued that colour must be considered in relation to other senses. Colour and the senses and their role in processes of remembering are reviewed in neurology, psychology, anthropology and art history, to provide a new framework to approach the ethnographic data. This research was undertaken through field work with Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara people (Aangu) in and around the Western Desert Aboriginal community of Ernabella. The thesis makes a major new contribution to the anthropology of landscape in Aboriginal Australia, arguing that colours manifest temporal concepts and link Dreaming species to such concepts through their colours. Links between colour and odour, tactility and emotion transmitting stable concepts about land, are particularly elucidated. Field data shows that people's colour cognition is not constrained by language, and that colour terms are used predominantly to articulate contrasts or difference between colours. In the third section it is established that colours are crucial in determining the efficacy of social action and in constituting identity. It is argued that colour is considered potent as surface on cars, clothes and other non-indigenous artefacts and hence as a mediator between people and between people and country. Lastly, this thesis establishes the importance of colour to the anthropology of art, through an analysis of the Ernabella Walka or design. This imagery is examined in terms of the possibilities created by the introduction of novel pigments. The Walka is established as an articulation of identity through synchronic religious concepts, transmitted through the dynamics of colours.

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Frontis: The road into Ernabella, the morning after rain, September 1997. 3

Every effort has been made to ensure that images in this thesis do not reveal secret information about Aboriginal cufture, or show people now dead. However, many of the illustrations have not been cleared for publication. Please respect the copyright of the authors and do not reproduce the images.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title



Abstract Frontis

I

Copyright

2 3

4

Table of contents



List of illustrations

5

Acknowledgements

9

13

SECTION 1

Section 1.1: Introduction

Colour and the Senses; a critical overview

14 14

The sensorium



16

Constraints on the senses Synaesthesia



Synaesthesia in cross cultural contexts Colour and emotion

17 21

Colour and cognition; language and perception Physiology of colour perception theories The interaction of colours Colour and the temporal Ethnographic research on colour The Rainbow Conclusion

Section 1.2:





24 27

A brief history of Emabella and the sources

29 36 37 38 38 41



48

51

of that history

Section 1.3:

The Pragmatics of Fieldwork

55

Methodology

58

Constraints

59

5

SECTION 2 Introduction

Country and Bodies; the Inseparability of Land and People



77

Belonging to country Time



79 86

Ancestral time and the everyday Daily time Seasonal time Time and events Land and place Tracks Living on the land Manta (Y) I Pana (P) / earth Fire Rocks Water The wanampi and mamu Sick bodies Death Skin Hair Bush foods Kuka /Animals Mai I vegetable foods Greenness, rain and olfaction Seeds Sweet bush foods Conclusion

SECTION 3 Introduction

Section 3.1







86 87 88 90 92 96 97 98 99 102 105 110 113 114 124 128 130 133 140 143 150 151 154

Cars, Clothes, Blankets and Other Things. 163

The Life and Death of Cars; colour, space



165

and motion Introduction

165 6

Acquiring cars



167

The History of 'that red car' Inside and Outside Cars Going Along Navigation Dead and Declining Cars Conclusion



172 172 177 182 184 189

List of Cars abandoned around Ernabella, 1997-98

Section 32 Introduction

'Hungry for Clothes'









211 217 218 219 220 222 223 224 225 229 233

Clothing and country Acquiring textiles



235 236

Losing Clothes and blankets



Clothing and inma and ilbinji / Love magic Conclusion

SECTION 4 Introduction Practice

209 209

The Naked and the Clothed; a short contextual history Clothing Styles Women's Clothing Men's clothing Colour series The Colours of Clothes Hats and socks Blankets and tarpaulins. Clothing and events Clothing and inma Football

192

241

242 243

Walka; The Tactility of Colour

The neglect of colour Tactility as contrast

262 265

Tactility as knowledge Walka in inma

266

268 269 271 7

Making the Ernabella Walka Spinning and the craftroom History of Walka Conclusion

SECTION 5

APPENDIX Glossary



Bibliography



Conclusion

273 280 283 285

292

298 300 306

8

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontis



The road into ErnabeHa, the morning after rain, September 1997.



2

Section 1 Fig. I



Diagram after Albers to show the interactive relationships of red, black and white.

Fig. 2

Patrick Heron 1964, 'Escaping Discs'.

Fig. 3

Map of Aangu Pitjantjatjara Lands showing language areas. Goddard 1976.



49

50

61

Section 2 : Country and Bodies; The Inseparability of Land and People

62

Fig. 4

Diggie and Nali Armunta with 'mingkulpa tjuku tjuku'/ a little bit of mingkulpa'.

Fig. 5

Children in a waterhole in Ernabella Creek 1960. ALa lrititja Archival Project. Photographer Bill Edwards.

Fig. 6

Head of the storm (1). February 1997, near Alice Springs, Northern Territory.

64

Fig. 7

Filled claypans at llparpa, January 1997, Alice Springs, Northern Territory.

65

Fig. 8

Warku; water lying on rock after rain.

66

Fig. 9

Homeland grave one year after burial.

67

Ernabella Mission 1953. Windlass and watertank and manse garden on the right; church, far left. David Trudinger /Ara lrititja Archival Project.

Fig. 10

"See that blue rock", Ayers Rock approached from the south through sandhills, September 1997.

Fig. 11

Fig. 12









Fig. 14

Wiltja of blue /green tarpaulins, women's camp, August 1998.

68

69

Ernabella camp, 1957, with (left to right) Manta's father, Charlie and Murika, Windlass's parents. Ara lrititja Archival Project, photographer Nancy Nicholson.

Fig. 13

63



Puli number 3 near Ernabella. Photograph taken after3pm

70



71

72 9

Fig. 15

Sunset, April 1997.

Fig. 16

Parkilpa /parakeelya in flower, Anilalya Homelands, August 1997.

Fig. 17

New green growth, two weeks after the start of rain, Alice Springs, January 1997.

Fig. 18

Yellow Country, September 1998.

Fig. 19

'Maw kutjara' /two black (women) picking up tjala. Photograph Dora Haggie.

119

Fig. 20

Collecting ii /figs, Nungalka and Mayningka, 1997.

120

Fig. 21

Nyiaka, shot by Dora Haggie, 1997.

121

Fig. 22

Bubblegum box

Fig. 23

The skins of two emu rolled ready for cooking, and stuffed with bloodwood leaves. Near Ernabella July 1998. Photographer Gertrude Stotz.

Fig. 24

Dora Haggie 1997; interior of piti, acrylic painted red river gum root.

73



74

75

76



297



122

123

Section 3.1 : The Life and Death of Cars Fig. 25

Interior of Toyota on trip to Mutijulu.

156

Fig. 26

Abandoned green car, Emabella 1997.

157

Fig. 27

Abandoned re-sprayed yellow Dodge, originally pale blue, missing bonnet, headlamps, wheels and engine 1998.

158

Fig. 28

Car bonnet reused as a sign.

159

Fig. 29

Ancient car with sign writing and bullet holes.

160

Fig. 30

Contrasting blue and white car, Ernabella 1999.

161

Fig. 31

Abandoned car near Emabella, repainted in household paints 1997.



162

Section 3.2: Hungry for Clothes Fig. 32 Fig. 33

Field sketches of hats. Wiltiwa, Tjimpuna, Muwitja, Tinkiri, Angkuna, Miritji, Angkaliya, Tjamiwa, Margaret. 1957 'new dresses ready for

196 197 10

Sunday morning church'. Bruce Edenborough/Aa lrititja Archival Project. Fig. 34





Fig. 35

Fig. 36

Fig. 37

Fig. 38

Fig. 39



Fig. 40

Fig. 41





Women and babies in Mission clothing (?). c. 1940. David Trud inger/Aa I rititja Archival Project.

198

Dora Haggie and her grandson, May 1998.

199

Margery Okai in Rasta T-shirt. Nura Rupert and Nungalka digging for tja!a behind. May 1997.

200

Diggie, surrounded by dried out mingkulpa, near Womijara, October 1997.

201

Children playing on the trampoline, Alice Springs swimming pool, January 2000. Photograph Chris Barry.

202

Waka Ispider mite bag, hanging from mulga tree.

203

Field sketches of women's clothing contrasts, skirts and tops (1).

204

Field sketches of women's clothing contrasts, skirts and tops (2).

205

Fig. 42

Wool and spindles, with two arms. From black and white film strip produced by the Australian Presbyterian Board of Missions, from photographs by Rev Hamilton Aitken. Aa lrititja Archival Project.

Fig. 43

Women spinning 1952. From black and white film strip produced by the Australian Presbyterian Board of Missions, from photographs by Rev Hamilton Aitken. Aa lrititja Archival Project.

247

Fig. 44

Boys in blankets or school uniform shorts, displaying drawings on the manse lawn 1961. Back row from left, unknown, Donald Ferguson, Kenneth Ken, David Curley, unknown, Charlie Antjipalya, llpilitja (Simon Fraser), Munti Smith, Kenda Peter. Shirley Gudgeon (Hill)! A(a lrititja Archival Project.

206

Fig. 45

Young women wearing jumpers they knitted themselves with Ernabella sheep's wool, 1951. Far left back, Diane lnkatji's mother, middle, back row, Muwitja, end back row, Watulya. Front row right, Katie's sister. Ron Trudinger /Aa lrititja Archival Project.

207

Fig. 46

Take-away food and shop at AP Sports, September 1999.

208

246

11

Section Four Djandinja boy aged c. 13. Pastel on paper, CR Mountford Coltection, State Library of South Australia.

Fig. 47



Nali, girl aged c.13, 1940. Pastel on paper, green wiggly lines 'snakes', pale blue 'sandhitl', blue /pink circles 'waterhole', brown/orange 'sandy ground'. C. P. Mountford Collection, State Library of South Australia.

248

Fig. 48

249



Child's drawing, 1940. Emu. C.P. Mountford Collection, State Library of South Australia.

250



Pastel drawing by Ernabella schoolchild, probably a boy's, early 1950's, ¼ Full size. Ara lrititja Archival Project.

251

Fig. 49

Fig. 50

Stanley, boy aged c. 14. Black and white photocopy of drawings in coloured pencil on the rear of a letter to Mary Baird, June 1951. Ara lrititja Archival Project. Full size.

Fig. 51

252

Fig. 52

Watulya (or her younger sister Nyukana) early 1960s (?), Ernabellaku Walka, gouache on card, 8 x 10 inches. Private collection.

Fig. 53

Patjiparan; Ernabellaku Walka, published in Hilliard 1968

Fig. 54

Edna Rupert, 1997. Ernabellaku Walka, acrylic paint on canvas, 14" x 14". Private collection.

Fig. 55

Lexie's Walka, 1997-8, gouache on card, real size.

256

Fig. 56

Nyuwara's (Kannitja's) Walka, 1997-8, gouache on card, real size.

257

Fig. 57

Artist unrecorded, 1940, finger painting, 'Kipara and fire stick'. C.P. Mountford Collection, State Library of South Australia.



254 255



258

259

Godanya Mukulya! / Love God!, car sticker, 1/4 real size.

Fig. 59

Fig. 61



Various artists 'ngurajara' / 'visions of home', red and yellow blended screen print on red cotton. Ernabella Arts Inc.

Fig. 58

Fig. 60

253



Rainwater tanks painted with Ernabellaku Walka, Ernabella School 1998. Commercial postcard of Ayer's Rock.



260 261

296

12

Acknowledgements

There are many people whom I would like to thank for their kindness and support during the course of this research.

In Ernabella, Teresa Butler Bowden, Will Powrie and his family in Adelaide. Marlene Hodder. Successive Art Co-ordinators at Emabella Arts, Jennifer Dudley, Louise Partos and Hilary Furlong. In Canberra, Claire Smith, Nic Peterson, Louise Hamby, Luke Taylor and Frances and Howard Morphy. In Alice Springs, Sarah Dunlop, Susanne Gibson, David and Deborah Kirkby, Robert Hoogenraad, Jenny Green, Paul Ekhert, Dick Kimber, Lizzie Ellis, Terry Marnhi. The team at AP Project. David Nash, Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, Piers Hammick, Su Dalgleish, Jacqui Dawborne. Fiona McLachlan and Sue Dugdale, Deb Fisher and Philby Bigg at Tangentyere Design

Elsewhere, Mary Bennett, Ron Trudinger, Winifred Hilliard, Lucienne Fontanez, Jenny Tonkin, Les Hiatt, Cliff Goddard, Paul Memmott and John Dalwitz and Ron Lister at Ara lrititja Archival Project in Adelaide.

Chris Barry, whose work as an artist has influenced me here.

The Page fami'y, Dora Haggie and Nungalka Kunmanara, their late husband and families. Minyma tjuta for teaching me.

Gertrude Stotz, without whom I could not have done this research, for all her generosity.

Edward Toovey and Dorothy who were there.

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Section One; Part One Colour and the Senses; a critical overview

Introduction Field notes November 29th 1996 Alice Springs Down at Honeymoon Gap it is silent and overcast, immense heat coming off the black tarmac, the birds - kites, the iridescent green Port Lincoln Parrots, are silent. Thunder comes from the distance then sheet lightning and a few drops of rain and that smell of wet land, but no real rain itself. An Aboriginal family come past twice in a beaten up beige car and the woman yells, each time, 'Look out' Rain's coming'. Then the storm passes and a rainbow appears; it gets wider and wider so that all the colours are separated out - it looks like puce, blue, green, yellow, orange. Then a second parallel rainbow with its colours inverted appears higher in the sky - a reflection of the first. When the rainbows fade and the sky brightens, the birds begin to make noises again.

This research was carried out by living and working with people in and around the Aboriginal community of Emabella, on the Aangu Pitjantjatjara Lands in north western South Australia.

The aim of the research was to examine what role colours play in the structuring of the interwoven areas of bodily, spatial and social experience, and hence to processes of remembering. The research therefore focuses on the role that the colours of things might play in a society whose members, within one generation, became familiar with novel pigments and artefacts in a whole range of colours. What impact did such expansion in the possibilities of hues, previously only known through the land and therefore manipulated in limited ways, have on multi-modal imagery and the material constructions of identity?

The three major considerations taken into the field were formal, ontological and political: Firstly, formal considerations: How do coloured artefacts, which in Aboriginal terms, includes the land, affect the acquisition, concretisation and transmission of spatial and temporal models, and how are these articulated in relation to religious beliefs and practices? Secondly, ontological considerations: in the external aspects of memory what is the relation between colour, and social remembering and forgetting? How are certain colour relationships created and how are they 14

efficacious in ritual and in everyday contexts? Is the amplification of a particular sense used in conjunction with colour? What bearing do these sensations have in the creation and remembering of spatial and temporal frameworks? Thirdly, political considerations: namely, what is the role of colour and the senses in establishing social identity? Is an economy of images controlled and manipulated for both political and religious ends? In place of symbolic communication, I place all the emphasis on agency, intention, causation, result and transformation. I view art as a system of action intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it' (Gell 1998;6). My intention is as Gell's. I shall stress colour as an agent of transformation also, potentially, certainly in Aangu cultural perception, the transformation itself. I also situate the perception of colours within a wider sensory connectivity, that is, within an anthropology of the senses. This is in contrast to most studies of colour in anthropology which have conceived colours only as symbolic and carrying a meaning which lies beyond their surface.

Colours offer the means to evoke space and, as diachronic series, to represent time. Colours not only evoke strong emotional resonances but have synaesthesic connections to emotion too. The synaesthesic connection of colour with sound is also established. The association with emotion, and the implications of the spontaneous internal coloured imagery triggered in synaesthesics, point to the fundamental role of colour in the physiological mechanisms of remembering and forgetting.

Colour is not a property of light itself, but is constructed by our own physiology, and in this aspect it has been the subject of a-cultural studies in psychology and neurology. For human beings colour is a quality that everything in the external world possesses. How we see colours is conditioned by our memories and desires. Since these are socially primed experiences, colour is not just personal perception as experimental psychology implies, but the way we notice and use it: it is a product of our social and cultural experience. The way we notice colours is influenced temporally, historically, through a 'period eye' as well as through a 'cultural eye'. (Baxandall 1981, Coote 1992). On the other hand such 15

experience must operate within the constraints offered by human physiology (Bayer 1993).

Colours, occurring as they do in the mundane realm as well as in ritual symbolism (areas which have been separated in anthropology), provide the capacity for analogy across otherwise disparate categories of objects. Anthropology has the means to unravel the complexity of the efficacy of colour usage in a society yet, as a discipline, it has failed to do so, and I will show below how this has come about.

I want here, then, to borrow knowledge about colour from other disciplines, art history and cognitive science, as well as from the anthropology of art and work on the anthropology of the senses, to build parameters within which to frame new questions about the role of colour in a society. Colour may be considered primarily visual in the west (except by some artists and psychologists like Faber Birren, who have made it their business to know colour) but ethnographic data, and that on 'clinical' synaesthesia, poit)t to colour perception as having other sensory attributes. As I wish to highlight the relation of the senses, it is here that I begin.

The sensonum Ong's assertion that a whole culture can be defined through knowledge of its exploitation of the sensorium has, during the 1990s, become the starting point for others. The organisation of the senses in a society is highly influential in shaping modes of cultural expression. David Howes takes issue with the western notion of 'objective common sense' in which the senses are 'receptive, not constitutive . . . (and) pick-up data but do not process it', the processing being done by the 'mind' (Howes 1992;18). Whereas perception (like remembering, an aspect of it) is an active embodied process, not a passive one, not 'camera like'. In many cultures the senses are thought to alter the world in the process of perceiving it, rather than simply registering it (Howes ibid, 25, 49, Barnes 1977). Indeed, recent findings by neurologists are showing us that 'perception is projecting brain hypotheses outwards into the physical world - endowing the world with colour and sound and meaning...' (Gregory 1998;1693). 16

Howes points to the 'objectivists' assumption that sense data is 'mindless', that the senses are transparent receivers of information. For example, colour is produced as a sensation of consciousness or qualia, by a chain of eye and brain reactions to the external world. Qualia may somehow flag the present (Gregory 1998). The three types of receptors in the retina of the eye communicate with areas of the brain recently identified in the visual cortex as 'VI', which deals with wavelength, and 'V4', which knows or codes colours. This information is sent on to multiple higher systems in the brain (Sacks 1995;26). Just why a particular sensation is perceived as red, though, is stilt unknown.

The 'higher' systems referred to in psychology are considered as rational ones, whilst the 'lower' systems are often considered as emotional, or spontaneous, or purely sensation. Colour has often been classed in the latter manner across a variety of disciplines, including art and anthropology, and also as too dangerous and too sensual (Cf Batchelor 2000). The same ranking of high and low (and therefore suspect, too involved with gross sensuality and emotion) has been applied to the senses themselves in western culture. Colour does not seem to be independent of the object world supporting it in many cultures, and for P/V people this, I propose, is true. When I showed crayoned swatches of colour sets, blue and black and red, yellow, green, for example, to women at the end of fieldwork they met with blank stares. Those same colour sets as a quality of things, however, are constantly noticed by the same people. In another way though colour emanates from the things it is a part of, in after images, coloured shadows and in the spatial properties of hues (Goethe 1970).

Constraints on the senses Anthropology began with an interest in the sensorium of non-western cultures. The Cambridge expedition of 1898 set out to document the sensorium of the Torres Strait Islanders (Howes 1992). The data collected, with its emphasis on the physiology of the islanders, was overtaken in anthropology by a shift of focus towards notions of culture and society. Some of this data though - on coloured clothing for example, (see Section Three) - has resonance with Western Desert culture 100 years later.

17

Human physiology is constructed to be selective about what is perceived, for example in terms of selective wavelengths of light and sound. The way a person can perceive the world is not through the same sensonum as a bird or an insect. The western sensorium of the five senses inherited from Aristotle, privileging sight and hearing, then smell, over the base taste and touch, is also a cultural construct. Here it is psychology which has found that there are many more senses than five, the tactile field being much larger in the range of 'kinaesthesia', the 'feeling of motion' (Howes 1992;25). Telaesthesia, where a disturbance in the body is interpreted as a premonition of forthcoming events, is common in Aboriginal cultures, but like Evans and Wilkins, I have little data on it (Evans and Wilkins 1998;1 I).

Howes summarises the work of phenomenologists and that of Walter Ong, on categorising the (five) senses as corporeal or incorporeal. Taste, touch and smell involve greater propinquity of the sense organ to the stimulus than sight and hearing. All the non-visual senses are time-bound and processual whereas sight, reportedly, is effortless, an array of objects yielding themselves up to be seen. Instead of this western biased approach, Howes proposes the following; 1) The relationship between the sense impression and the idea, as interactive and mutually constitutive, rather than u ni-directional. 2)

Focusing on the relationship between the senses constructed in a culture, rather than defining a culture by one dominant sense.

3)

Attending to the use of the senses in symbolic terms.

4)

Not to limit analysis to the way the senses are used in a culture's language, as this precludes embodied practices, and limits the analysis to one of discourse only (Howes I 990;40).

Colour has often been described as a language' but colour, like the other senses cannot be reduced to meanings which are describable using words (cf Wittgenstein 1978). This thesis is an attempt to move from a language based symbolic analysis and idealist theory, towards considering the importance of colours as non-propositional images (Sheifflen 1985; Saunders 2000). Much of the limited material on the senses, and on colour, in Australian contexts has been language based (e.g. Jones and Meehan 1978). The supremacy of verbal narrative and song has been an assumption in these ethnographic contexts, in 18

both popular and scholarly work perhaps because outside the realm of Aboriginal art, there has been little research on material culture in Aboriginal societies (Chatwin;1987, Strehlow;1971, Ellis et al; 1978).

Linguists Evans and Williams have recently argued that certain universal constraints in the lexicalisation of perception verbs, as proposed by Viberg, also apply to Australian indigenous societies (Viberg ;1984 quoted in Evans and Wilkins 1998;12). Using a survey of perception verbs classed as 'controlled' or 'non—controlled', seeing as non-controlled and looking as controlled, hearing as non-controlled and listening as controlled, for example, Evans and Wilkins map verbs of perception onto verbs of cognition 1 . They argue that the evidence shows that all Aboriginal languages in Australia map verbs of hearing onto understanding and that therefore hearing, not sight, informs cognition. Verbs of perception, they argue, follow a uni-directional pattern which is divided by the 'higher' and 'lower' senses (following, it seems, the old Aristotelian hierarchy) and they assert: 'there are no examples of verbs of cognition arising from taste or touch' (Evans and Wilkins I 998;27).2

Sight>> hearing >> touch >> smell and taste. They point out that generally there is a lack of distinction between activity and experience verbs of perception in Australian languages; contextual clues though provide the meaning (1998; 13). 'Kulini', a Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara verb provides a good example of this. Kulini is listed as having nine meanings; 1. listen to, heed, 2. hear, 3. think about, 4. decide, 5. know about, 6. understand, 7. remember, 8. feel (bodily sensation) 9. have a premonition from a sensation in the body (Goddard 1996). Certainly remembering, as Evans and Wilkins admit, does include visual imagery for Aangu. People tap their forehead, a place which is conceived as the mind's eye, where visual imagery 1

Evans and Wilkins use their own field notes and published dictionaries as their sources. By no means all Aboriginal languages have been written down in this way. P/V has though been the study of Cliff Goddard whose dictionary I used in the field. It is also his orthography that I use throughout this thesis. 2 Evans and Wilkins seem to be attempting to demonstrate something akin to Berlin and Kay's Basic Colour Terms: that is, they propose that the way of classifying the senses varies, but not without constraint. See also Myers 1996 :108 on the neighbouring Pintupi, classed by linguists as a part of the same group of languages. 19

such as dreams are also manifested. The linguistic evidence regarding verbs of understanding in Pitjantjatjara /Yankunytjatjara does seem to be supported by the meanings of Kulini, and by sign language, and in phrases such as 'pina pati,' meaning someone, literally with closed ears, that is, with no understanding.

From my research though, it was clear that Apangu created revelation in ritual by using sound (song, 'bull roarer' etc), but also by looking, summed up in the word 'uti', which may mean becoming audible or visible. In many ritual contexts those not dancing are told 'don't look' /nyakunyja(wiya) until a given point when people are told that they will see and then understand. 4 Looking is powerful, not only in everyday social contexts when indirect or broadcast speech is used without eye contact, but also in country. Looking or not looking at a men's sacred site is, for everyone who is not an initiated man, a taboo act (although women often do so, saying simultaneously, 'Don't look!'), as is making photographs of these sites (cf Micheals 1994).

Colours together, brightness, shininess and sparkle are all considered manifestations of Ancestral power. Wilkins and Evans argument resembles the projection by McLuhan (and Ong) that all non-literate societies are oral (and aural) cultures first. Howes refutes this using ethnographic evidence, showing that for the Kwoma, although they seem an aural society, ritual power is visual (1990;12). I argue the same for Anangu; language may indicate that hearing is considered the way of becoming knowledgeable, but what people do, the way in which they habitually learn, not through verbal exegesis, but by copying others, points at least, to the importance of tactility and sight. A song is said to have a taste or a smell (mayu) (Ellis et al 1978)

Evidence suggests that it is likely that the senses are constrained. But by applying Howe's stricture number (4) above I show, in Section Four, that touch is very much construed as linked to cognition, although according to Evan's and Wilkin's discourse, this is not (linguistically) salient. 5 Their model, like Viberg's ' 1 describe some of these in Section Three I desist from confusing cognition with language, especially since the problem with regard to colour has been one so foregrounded in previous literature. There are though some interesting connections in the multiple meanings of some P/Y verbs. Rungkai is one such, relevant to all 20

model of transferences between the designated five senses, is uni-directional. This is contra-indicated in my research. It is the relationship between the senses, not privileging one, that is my concern here 6. I want now to consider available data on synaesthesia and the constraints on the connection of colour to other senses.

HEARING

SMELL

- contact

TA TE

+contact

SIGHT< ! TOUCH

Diagram 1: Viberg's refinement of the modality hierarchy for polysemy in perception verbs.

Synaesthesia Synaesthesia, the spontaneous triggering of imagery in another sense from that of the original stimulus, offers other ways of understanding the way memory works, even the nature of consciousness itself, and perhaps also constraints on linkages between the senses.

There are presently two broad areas of research on synaesthesia, which do not meet. One is psychological and neurological research, concerned with individual case studies, and attempting to explaining how synaesthesia works. These studies concern British or North American individual synaesthetes, and are intended as inductive. The other, in the 'anthropology of the senses', concerns culturally embedded linkages between the senses, such as the synaesthesic metaphors which are used extensively, for example, in Japanese haiku poetry (Odin 1982). Actual synaesthesic internal imagery is induced by

later sections of this thesis. Rungkani; 1) hit with a hurled stick; 2) grind, as in grinding seeds 3) knead as in making damper;4) use spear thrower as a fire saw; 5) spin; 6) strike out hit by lightning;7) slang, to shoot off put on sudden turn of speed (on a horse, in a car). Goddard 1996;155. 6 I have in fact little data on sound as song, since I am not a musicologist and the fieldwork area has already been the subject of distinguished study by musicologists such as Ellis et al. 21

narcotics in certain Amazonian groups (cf. Classen 1990). I am aware of no culturally comparative research concerning synaesthesia at a neurological level.

Sound evoking coloured imagery is the commonest from of synaesthesia, documented in the psychological literature. This has been called colour/word or, more culturally loaded, colour/lexical, synaesthesia (Baron-Cohen et al 1997). 'S.', the mnemonist of Luria's famous study, experienced coloured imagery in response to all sound, whether meaningful or not, and this imagery often also had taste and texture. 'S.' describes a voice as being crumbly and yellow (Luria 1968). There do seem to be constraints as to the pairing and direction of synaesthesic imagery. The least common, or almost never occurring, form of synaesthesia is touch triggering hearing (Harrison and Baron-Cohen 1997;3). It is apparently rare for smell and taste to be either the trigger or the synaesthesic response. Cytowic cites one case where sight evokes odour, one where smell and taste evoke tactile shapes, and another unusual case where taste evokes colour (Cytowic 1993).

Aiming to overcome the unreliability of self-reported synaesthesia, prevalent in turn of the century studies, Baron-Cohen et al (1987) showed the genuineness of colour/word synaesthesia using a 'memory' test. A synaesthete experiences imagery in response to a particular stimulus, which seems to be consistent over a lifetime, with regard to that stimulus. A synaesthete may therefore fail to remember a name, say, but know that the name associated with the person is green7. 'S.', the synaesthete of Luria's case, was so bombarded with his own synaesthesic mental imagery that he often confused memory with the present (Luria 1968).

Colours and imagery vary with each individual. The search for universal correspondences between colour and sound has occupied Newton, Goethe, the Symbolistes, including Kandinsky and Baudelaire, to name a few. Following Fodors model of the modularity of the sensory information, and Maurer's Baron Cohen et al(1996) now estimate the prevalance of synaesthesia as I in 2000 (1 in 10,000 in earlier study) ratio of 6:1 female to male. Currently genetic studies aim to trace the inherited prevalence of synaesthesia. This research presumably r&ates to the UK population. (Cytowic is down to I in 25,000 of the US population and a ratio of 2.5:1 female to male (1 997;33) 22

research with neonates suggesting all babies are synaesthesic, Baron-Cohen has suggested synaesthesia as a 'break down of modularity' and an undeveloped state (Baron-Cohen et al 1993).

Cytowic, less positivist in outlook, is critical of this computational model and the absence of any theory of perception in most experimental psychology concerned with synaesthesia. He suggests that everyone is synaesthesic; 'synaesthesia is the conscious awareness of a normally holistic process of perception that is prematurely displayed' (1997;38 and 1993). Synaesthesia can be induced in non synaesthetes and manipulated in synaesthesics by drugs.8 Migraine and temporal lobe epilepsy can also induce synaesthesia in 'normals', as Baron-Cohen dubs the non-synaesthesic population. Cytowic also suggests that synaesthesia is taking place in the emotional centres of the brain, and that like emotions synaesthesic responses are partially submerged in the subconscious (Cytowic 1993).

Recent Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanning of the brains of colour word stimulated synaesthetes showed activity, not in the 'classical visual areas' as expected, but in the PIT (posterior inferior temporal) lobe. This area is activated in colour Ispace perception in humans and visual associations of words . In short it is an area seemingly able to integrate colour, shape and language (Frith and Paulescu 1997;136-7). Similarly another recent study (Martin et al 1995 quoted in Frith and Paulescu) found a similar area of the brain activated to visualise the colours of objects represented in black and white drawings - banana imagined as yellow, for example. I suggest that this 'colour /word' form of synaesthesia may eventually contribute to an understanding of the complex relationship of colour perception and lexicon, so feverishly pursued in the cognitive sciences and outlined below. How, though, might this be both constrained and mutually constituted by culture?

This is one of the as yet unanswered questions about 'clinical' synaesthesia which a collaboration between anthropology and psychology could begin to answer. Other questions might be: B

Notably LSD and Mescaline 23

. Is there a relationship between colour word synaesthesia and literacy? • Do predominantly non-literate societies (or perhaps, bearing in mind Howe's criticism of McLuhan's generalisations of all non-literate cultures as aural/oral, the question should be, 'societies with different sensoriums from Britain and North America'), such as Australian Aboriginal communities, possess the same incidence of colour / word synaesthesia? If so, how does it manifest itself? • Scanning of synaesthetes by Grey (et al) shows increased activity in the visual cortex, but is this only for colour/word synaesthetes?

Synaesthesia in cross cultural contexts Red seems particularly linked with other senses. In south India colours and foods are attributed cooling or heating properties. Changes in colour are accompanied by changes in temperature and changes from raw to cooked food. These qualities are harnessed to control the state of heat or coolness within the body during ritual. White is auspicious for stability, whilst red supercedes the ordinary and is desirable for innovation. Its instability makes a further change to white desirable for well being. The person being purified is thus fed balls of coloured rice; the first is white, the second red, achieved by adding lime or tumeric, and the third white (Beck 1969).

Amongst the Abelam, paint itself is a magical substance; it is by the process of anointing yams and boys with colours that both grow (Forge 1962). Paint is a bodily sensation and a catalyst for growth. The Abelam describe the paint as 'hot', the most powerful being red paint9.

The use of narcotics in South American ritual points to cross-sensory association in the structure and recall of ritual. The Desana produce tunes on a flute said to be male in odour, red in colour and hot in temperature and are used by boys to carry an erotic message to a particular girl. People living in the Anthony Forges early work with the Abelam of Papua New Guinea, on their magical paints offered colour as effective in ritual through its perceived sensual properties. Alas Forge then literally 'took leave of his senses' and attempted to quantify graphic symbols instead (Howes 1992; Kom 1978). However Forge's elucidation of a non verbal communication system and 'communicating only to those socialised to receive it', is central to an anthropology of art. 24

Chilean Andes use the term 'kisa', which means the concentrated sweetness of dried fruit, pleasant speech and a soft tactile effect which refers to a rainbow effect in weaving. The rainbow is such a powerful image that it stimulates all the senses (Classen 1990).

I propose that there are constraints on hues in their suitability as metaphor or symbol. Thus our universal physiological experience of redness, presumably constrained by wavelength, constrains its use in culture, although we still do not really know just what that experience of redness is 10 . Saturated reds appear to be forward of their surrounding and expansive; red is thus literally attractive.

As discussed above, anthropology has often relied on language as evidence to reinforce the cultural relativity (though constrained by human potentiality) of the senses, as Levi Strauss does, searching for sensory clues in myths, in Symboliste mode (Levi Strauss 1962).

The neglect of tactility as a way of knowing about the world in western cultures is perhaps responsible for the dismissal of surface. Western culture, after Aristotle, has degraded touch and taste as too base, too animal (Synott 1991). The privileging of sight (perspectival) and sound (language, music) has been at the expense of olfaction too (Howes 1991). Certainly, for Aflangu tactility is not just a 'distraction' in the flux of daily preoccupations, but a major way of understanding things and images and is certainly linked by them to colour and shininess (Taussig 1992).

Specific culturally recognised odours, strongly associated with greenness, are connected with transformations of both country and bodies mostly, but not always, attached to religious ritual, for the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (see Section Two). The link of greenness and particular odours is cultural synaesthesia; it is possible that the ingested green mingkulpa promotes this. The greenness is also ingested. American experiments suggest that the colour

10

In the arena of so called alternative medicine, there are many colour healing devices. There are colour light healing rooms in some NHS hospitals but is in the U.S.A. that research with molecular vibration is using colour. 25

of food or drink strongly influences the perceived odour intensity of the comestibles (Zeilner and Kautz 1990)11.

I have found little recorded information on odour in Australian societies. Warner recorded of the Murngin that the bones of the dead are dried in the sun, so that they will not smell. When the bones arrive in camp for their final rites, they have been rubbed with red ochre, and have acquired its odour as well as colour (Warner 1937;438). W.H. Rivers, in his sensory research, did test Torres Strait Islanders on odour associations (Rivers 1901). Odour connected to rain and its agents (e.g.; Mountford 1976; Buchler 1978), to the decayed corpse (e.g.; Mountford nd; Berndt and Harvey Johnston 1942), and to sweat and other body substances, all have in common odour as a mode of recognition, or rejection, by Ancestors. The importance of all present smelling the same is similar for Aangu12 in ritual contexts. 'Number One bush medicine', irmangka-irmangka, is used by women in sacred ritual contexts but never for Christian ceremonies (see Section Two).

In comparison with colours, Sperber noted that lexicons of odiferous terms are impoverished or do not exist. So it is among Pitjantjatjara /Yankunytjatjara speakers where smells are 'wiru' /lovely, or 'kura' Thad, or 'pulka' /strong or powerful, or are named for their resemblance (Sperber 1975). Aangu admire odours as 'panti wiru' in the same non-lexicalised way that they admire colours, 'kala wiru'. Odours that are spoken of as admirable are those perceived as connected with green-ness and the smell of rain, and also the smell of sweet tasting foods. Arguably, like touch, smell is used in cognition by Aangu, who sniff at strange foods, and are constantly checking their own body odour. In the past, when a Pitjantjatjara /Yankunytjatjara person pointed at themselves, saying 'ngayulu' I'l', it was their nose to which they pointed. Very old people have pierced nasal septums. A body is said to smell of what it eats, and odour in hunting, is of paramount importance. Generally odour is, I think, much more culturally important to Aangu than my limited data might indicate. Changes in The researchers Zellner and Kautz 1990, conclude either that colour induces a weak odour percept, or, like Baron-Cohen above, that the link is due to conditioning or residual intersensory neural connections left over from infancy. 12 Howesl99l:134 notes Mckenzie 1923 on the synchronisation of odours, quoting Havelock Ellis in Christian ritual. See also p145. 26

the conception of odours have undoubtedly occurred since the mission. Petrol sniffing, which is regarded as a continuing problem in Ernabella, has not been analysed by outsiders in terms of negating bodily odour. Sniffing induces complex waking mental imagery in users.13

Contrary to Sperber's assertion, there is documentation of extensive smell lexicons in Africa, for example, among the Li-Wanzi (Gabon) who have eleven terms for odour (Dubois 1997 quoting Hombert et al 1994). This points again to the 'out there' nature of sensation, whether as odour or colour, not just to the internal 'perception' as the standard psychological approach (Dubois 1997).

Howes points to neurological research showing that odour activates the limbic brain, and therefore the potential for evoking emotional intensity (Howes 1991:132). Like Howes, I would not wish to separate emotion from cognition. He also endorses odours as culturally coded; that is, there seem to be no universals of odours used, say, for initiation, as Turner has controversially asserted for colours. Dubois suggests a universal separation between 'natural' odours and perfume as cultural artefacts. For Ajjangu the smell of the land is also a cultural artefact.

Colour and emotion

'We must stop... wondering how and why red signifies effort or violence, green, restfulness and peace; we must rediscover how to live these colours as our body does, that is as peace or violence in its concrete form.. .a sensation of redness and its motor reactions (are not two distinct facts)... we must be understood as meaning that red, by its texture as followed and adhered to by our gaze, is already the amplification of our being.' (Merleau-Ponty 1962;21 1) Merleau-Ponty may be justified in pleading for consideration of the embodied, rather than merely visual, perception of colour, but do the constraints on human physiology mean that there is cross cultural correspondence between hues and emotion? As Howes, above, invokes a comparison between the senses as salient in the construction of a culture's sensorium, I argue that the same goes for colours. It is the differences between colours adjacent to one another in a context, on an object, that is important for Aangu. 13

See Maggie Brady 1992;86-89.

27

Psychological research has shown how motor reactions differ with different colours. Jackson has elucidated the power of metaphors of the body in bringing the world inside and the body to the outside (Jackson 1987). Synaesthesic links between emotion and colours do seem to be universally applicable connections. It is not just a figure of speech to say 'I saw red' meaning very angry (or hot with anger) or 'I feel blue' meaning sad (and cold) and others less explainable in words, 'in the pink', 'green with envy'. I know of no such comparable linguistic similes used by Anangu; instead people use colour directly on their bodies. Coloured clothing is used to articulate an individual's emotional intentions with reference to the current social milieu. Through coloured things, people become one such thing, through clothing and body paint, a dynamic 'flow of relation' between subject and object is constructed.14

The recent work of anthropological commentators such as Lutz, Abu-Loghud and Rosaldo has discussed the cultural construction of emotions (Lutz, and Abu-Loghud 1990). In particular these writers have pointed to the difference between the character of emotions in western societies and many non-western cultures. In the former, emotions are constructed as individual and private and feelings, and are indexical of the truth of social realities. In many non-western cultures, emotions are conceived as socially generated and directed towards the enactment of events. This latter generation of feelings towards events seems to be the way that Ajjangu construct emotion. Goddard has been stimulated by this work on the anthropology of the emotions to write about terms for anger in Pitjantjatjara Ivankunytjatjara (Goddard 1991) and Myers has written about the meaning of anger for the Pintupi (Myers 1988).

Events which recapitulate and reconstruct national or local identity are universally deliberately coloured. Flags, almost always made from two or more colours, are a clear example. Events of great spiritual celebration involve the application of light and colour. Joyful or 'fun' events, street carnivals, circuses fun fairs are all intrinsically 'colourful'. Colour can have profound effects on our emotional state. Asked to identify fifty colour samples on a semantic scale, subjects identified red with warmth, white with intensity, and happiness with 14

am using Munn's phrase concerning Waripiri yilbinji designs, although she is not referring to colour (Munn 1973;56). As I discuss in section four, Munn neglects colour in her analysis. 28

high brightness and saturation, not with hue at all (Wright and Rainwater quoted in Marks 1978). D'Angrade and Egan used Munsell cards and words referring to emotions in laboratory research with Tzetzal and English speakers. Both groups produced similar results for the following associations: 'happiness' elicited the most saturated colours, 'sadness' the most unsaturated, 'strong' the most saturated, 'weak' the most unsaturated and 'anger' and 'fear' produced the widest spread between the two groups.

Bartlett established emotion as one

of

the formative aspects influencing

remembering (Bartlett 1932). Recent studies have emphasised the dynamics of remembering and body consciousness (Rosenfield 1991). Halbwachs was concerned to stress membership

of

a social group as the overriding factor in

remembering. He also emphasised the materiality of space in remembering, That memories are site specific certainly seems to true for Aboriginal people.

Single colours, used in psychological experiments, do not seem to be memorable (except for synaesthetes, see above), but similitude, where subjects implicate a social context, 'that colour is like my mother's sweater' and linguistic clues seem to improve memorability. The representation of a similar hue does though seem to activate remembering (Lucy and Sweder 1988)

Colour and cognition; language and perception What is the relationship between colour perception and language? Is colour cognition independent of language? Is there a direct link at all between what we know, and what we can articulate about colour? (Maffi 1997; 355). These are the questions in this field, dominated by psychologists and linguists, which have occupied and eventually defeated researchers during the last 30 years.

In the 1880's Magnus noted that many primitive peoples have a well developed colour perception and a comparatively limited colour vocabulary. Van Wijk's (1959) hypothesis is that societies near the equator focus more on brightness in their lexicon, whilst those of higher latitudes are more interested in hue (Gardner 1987). This research suggests that Aangu are more concerned with the bodily praxis

of

colours than talking about or through them. 29

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 'a radical doctrine of linguistic relativity' assumed that colour perception is created by language (Kay and Willett 1984). In other words, that the way humans think affects or determines the form of the language used. Rosch's work with the Dani of Papua New Guinea (Heider Rosch 1972, Heider Rosch and Oliver 1972), showed that focal colours are recognised independently of lexicon. Lucy, an enduring critic of the universal colour theory, and Sweder, claimed their experiments reinstated the Whorfian basis of earlier studies (Lucy and Sweder 1979). Berlin and Kay, in their well known and much criticised Basic Color Terms (BCT), claimed that all languages followed a universal evolutionary pattern of color names, black and white followed by red mounting to eleven terms in lndoEuropean cultures (Berlin and Kay 1969)15. They took these eleven colour terms of the American English lexicon as an evolutionary standard, and it was against this standard that other lexicons were compared as performances of competence (Saunders and von Bracket 1997;168). This claim for linguistic universals was used in many disciplines, including anthropology, as evidence for a fixed number of colour terms. Just what the meaning of a BCT might be, has never been explained (ibid). The universal sequence proposed by Berlin and Kay seemed to concur with ethnographic research, where there is a well documented ritual triad of black, white and red (e.g. Turner 1968, Tambiah 1968). Berlin and Kay regarded BCTs as counter evidence to Whorf, that the way humans think affects or determines the form of the language used. Berlin and Kay16 also found, as Rosch in her Papuan research, that the basic terms were universally clustered around focal colours. That is, they claimed that all languages divide the colour spectrum up in similar (constrained) ways. Rosch's research began with the premise that 15

Research with people from ninety-eight languages or dialects, all living in the Los Angeles area, Berlin and Kay claimed a consistent pattern in colour lexicons. Where only two terms existed, they refered to light and dark (or white and black), where three, a term for red was next followed by yellow or green in either third of fourth place, blue or brown at sixth and seventh. The last four were purple, pink, orange and grey. Further participants from twenty genetically diverse languages selected the same group of hues as brightest, whatever their lexicon. 16

Kay has since been creating the World Colour Survey (1991) using data assembled from various sources. A fuller survey has yet to be published but some central Australian languages are included; Warlpiri, Marduwongka and Arrente. 30

focal colours were 'natural prototypes', perceptually more attention grabbing, and therefore more easily remembered. She concluded from her work with the Dani, that the ease with which colours were remembered, correlated with the BCT series. Her methods and results have also been challenged (e.g. see Saunders and von Brackel 1997).17

Recently an attempt to replicate Rosch's research with a neighbouring Papuan group claims 'a considerable degree of linguistic influence on colour categorisation and.. constraints on the type of neuron likely to underpin it' and that colours are here, not classified by focals but by difference at the edges of categories as Lucy had proposed (Davidoff, Davies and Roberson 1999). Lucy's later work claimed colour categories can be made around non-focals. Lucy has also spent many years cautioning against visual experience as residing in interior biology, rather than 'out there' in socially anchored linguistic systems (Lucy 1997).

Anangu, as they themselves have often said (e.g. Nungalka in Section four other people in many other published examples), learn by copying others, not from verbal explanation. Their delivery of language is contexturally rhythmic, repetitive, deliberately pitched. Batik artists on the Lands manipulate, with a consummate eye for juxtaposed colours, commercial dye stuffs, without necessarily knowing the names of those colours. People often do not name colours; just as in English one might say of someone else's clothing, 'that's a nice colour', Aflangu say, 'Kala wiru'. This term kala from the English' colour' is a recent linguistic acquisition. It is combinations of two or more colours that are thus admired: brown and yellow, for example, often draws comment from women; blue on its own, red, yellow and green together. I have also heard it used of body paintings and the shimmering effect achieved by this on women's breasts. 'Tjilpa' from 'silver' is a term Aangu use for coins, or change, but I think no other context. Frederick Rose mentions this term in use at Angus Downs in the early 1960s (Rose 1968).

17

Saunders and von Brackel, among others, challenge Rosch's notion of focal colours which she herself selected and seem to have some correlation with the most saturated colours. 31

Anangu use adjectives without the noun that they are describing, or in English with 'one' or 'that one' attached. Thus a thin person is 'that skinny one', or two skinny women' 'ngurka kutjara' (lit, skinny two). A short person is often nicknamed shorty / 'Tjunkunya' etc. So colour terms are used this way too. 18 A woman might typically yell out in Pitjantjatjara 'Go and get my handbag from the car - that blue one', blue one being in English. Or 'You know; she lives in that house on the East side - that white one'. People are always pointing out contrast: maru and piranpa are used like this often. There are three tjanki

(donkey) piranpa and one tjanki maru. The donkey described as 'maru' might be light grey but is dark in comparison with the others.

As I will show in the following chapters, Aangu are concerned with the difference between colours and most crucially with sets or series of colours where one colour becomes the next. Aangu are also concerned with certain individual hues - red and blue, for example, but the context of looking is always important to the efficacy ascribed to that colour. People are also interested in shine, fluorescence, sparkle and metallic qualities, as well as connections with sound, odour and tactility, which may overlap with the previously listed qualities. The idea that colours are 'totally described' by the Munsell 'internal colour space' of hue, brightness and saturation, is certainly untrue (Saunders and von Brackel 1997;175). Rather than concentrating most on individual hues as previous research has done and then trying to pin static meanings onto them, I have tried to follow the cognitive processes of Aangu.

The PitjantjatjaralYankunytjatjara term used to connote the greening of the country is 'ukiri', which refers only to the green growth of grass or other plants after rain, and especially to minkulpa Mild tobacco. Although the repetition of the term, i.e. ukiri ukiri means green or greenish (Goddard 1996), Aangu today almost always use the English term 'green', incorporated into their own language, when speaking to one another. This applies also to all other colour terms now except for black and white (or dark and pale), which are most used

18

The right wing Australian politician Pauline Hanson, who was on television much of the time during the period of field work, I heard referred to as 'that orange woman'; she has bright red (i.e. orange) hair and often wore orange. 32

still as P/V maru (black or darker in contrast to the comparison), and piranpa (white or lighter in contrast to the the comparison).

The first linguist in Ernabella recalls terms which he equates with blue, green, black, white, red and yellow when he first arrived there in 1940 (Trudinger pers comm).

Table of P/V colour 'terms':

Red



Tjitjintitinpa

Black / dark



White / pale

Maru

Piranpa

Yellow / yellowish Green I greenish Bluish



Untanu-untanu Ukir ukiri llkari-ilkari, tjunan-tjunanpa

Tjilpi, meaning old person, also specifically refers to grey hair / 'mangka tjilpi'; it is a state that one becomes, is transformed into.

Aangu talk about colours in terms of similes. The terms above for green and blue are similes. Ilkari is the sky and tjunanpa is smoke, whilst untanu is the term for yellow ochre. Often though there is no suitable P/V term to describe something verbally, so indicating something of the same colour suffices. This is dependent on a person's age; often grandchildren correct their grandparents on the use of English colour words. For example, Nungalka said of 'Cockies' (Major Mitchell Cockatoos) that they had 'red', under their white wings, whereas Inkajili aged about 8, corrected her, 'pink'.

Names for 'special Aboriginal paints' are different from the colour terms, except for yellow.

Purku: Kaltji:



black (charcoal) white stone (gypsum)

33

Tutu:

red ochre19

Untanu:

yellow ochre

The word for red ochre in particular is concealed from 'whitefellas'. These terms are seldom used except very carefully in a ritual context. I was also given a green stone when the 'special Aboriginal paints' were explained to me. Before contact green existed, other than in plant growth, in a stone named in English 'crysophrase' or 'Australian jade'. This is sometimes used as the stone in the end of spear throwers made for sale. Pale green associated with blindness, as puss in the eye, resulting from fly bites, seems common throughout central desert cultures.

A gap between language and cognition is shown in other places in this thesis (Section two). For example the Pitjantjatjara have no specific word for 'blonde', unlike the Warlpiri 20 , classing merely as 'light'! 'piranpa', yet they are renowned for producing blonde haired children.

The only other systematic documentation of colour naming in the social context of an Australian society, and documented by anthropologists is 'Anbarra Concepts of Colour, a short paper by Betty Meehan and Rhys Jones, and an unpublished thesis by John Rudder (Jones and Meehan 1978, Rudder 1983). Although the Anbarra live near what is now Maningrida in Arnhem Land, there are similarities with P/V culture. Jones' and Meehan's work is concerned mostly with linguistics; Like PlY, Gidjingali had two colour terms which seem to refer broadly to dark and light or, I interpolate, the contrast between them:

'Gungaltja; referring to light, brilliant white colours and also to highly saturated red. The true gungaltja colours require a touch of brilliance or animation as well as a high degree of brightness.' 'Gungundja; referring to all other colours, namely dark, dull and black colours'(ibid :27)

19

was, in fact, told 'karku' for red ochre by my first informant, but not by subsequent informants, all female. I never heard anyone else refer to red ochre as karku. Karrku is both the name of the red ochre mine and the Waripiri term for red ochre (cf Petersonj 1985, Dussart 1999). 20 Robert Hoogenraad pers. comm.

L*MpCk&

34

The sea in daylight is 'gungaltja' whereas at night it is 'gungundja'. As in P/V culture, many things are referred to by their prefix followed by the appropriate colour term without the noun. For example, the young sought-after Barramundi fish swarming in creeks during the wet season have a silver sheen to their scales and are described for brevity as 'an-gungaltja', 'an' being the male prefix (ibid ;28).

The four traditional mineral earth pigments are white pipe-clay, red ochre, yellow ochre and charcoal. The names of these pigments can also refer to the colours themselves. In everyday speech, report Jones and Meehan, these terms were used only to refer to painted surfaces, the pigments themselves and analogous European paints. These four earth pigments have moiety affiliations. Overall they concede that red 'excites most interest among the Anbarra' (ibid;31).

The same term is used for raw red ochre as for raw meat and unripe fruit (ibid;32). Red ochre is sometimes oxidised by 'cooking' in a fire, and some raw yellow ochres are transformed to red ochre in this way. Red as 'cooked' and yellow as 'half cooked' is documented widely in Arnhem Land ethnographies (e.g. Rudder 1983;97; Brandl (' Andre Grau pers. comm.) but these sorts of ochre seem to be uncommon in the Central Desert. Here, among Aangu, living things as well as green plants are classed as 'wanka', alive or raw. Bright green, as will become clear, is associated with wetness and renewal.

Rudder, in Elcho island, reports a woman discussing choosing dresses from the trade store in terms of 'minj'tja' and the colour in the printed pattern that stands out above the others, 'white-having' or 'yellow-having' dresses.

Attempting to initiate a discussion on focal colour groups, using a Munsell chart, the informant identifies the white spaces between the colour chips as 'Yirritja', i.e. white and therefore of the Yirritja moiety 'Colour terms are used to discriminate between natural species otherwise almost identical', yams, parrots, eucalypt trees (Rudder 1983;1O1).

35

Each pigment used by a group is from a specific site connected with the transformation of Ancestors and therefore possibly as coming from the Ancestor body. Rudder also notes that pigments have a secret name or set of names which are site specific (p102). Hence one yellow ochre may be called 'Green turtle fat' and another 'Dhondji-belonging -to-yellow' (Dhondi is the name of the site). Fat is often symbolised by yellow in Australian cultures, but symbolic meaning varies with context.

Physiology of colour perception theories The painter who, in Sack's account, after an accident was deprived of his ability to recognise colours, was plunged into a grey world. He also lost his colour /word synaesthesia and coloured dreams, and found the world shockingly meaningless. Apart from the terrible loss of pleasure in his surroundings, in his own paintings and in those of others, he realised how much one relies on colours on an everyday habitual basis to distinguish such things as food, clothes, traffic lights.

A simple, even basic, use of colour is as a means of distinguishing difference or sameness. Football teams dressed in the same colours, areas of a map coloured the same are examples.This colour as code is the way social scientists have most often theorised about colour. Using colour like this in painting is regarded in the west as 'naive'. The Impressionists sought to overturn the notion of colour constancy, the 'trick' that tells us a thing is one colour rather than many different ones, by painting their real perceptions of objects. Although opponency theory is still the subject of speculation, we do know that a saturated source produces after images of the opposite colour to the originaL(cf Harding and Maffi 1997, Saunders and von Brackel 1997) A red source, depending on its leaning to blue or yellow will produce a green or turquoise after image, a blue source produces an orange after image and so on (Goethe 1970). Colour, then, can be in two places at once, like odour, and is not always the prisoner of an enclosing form.

36

The interaction of colours Even in western art, colour has been the servant of form. That cotours may be manipulated by adjacency to other hues has, though, a long history. This key point has remained unremarked in the social sciences, where colours have been treated as isolated hues without social, or even aesthetic, connectivity. Yet, as I have stated before, everything has colour. In one of the few systematic attempts during the last century to document colour interaction, the artist and teacher Josef Albers wrote: 'Colours present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related to changing neighbours and changing conditions' (Albers 1971;5). The following passage illustrates the relational quality of colour with reference to time, the changing daylight and space, the changing of adjacent colour, and cultural meaning: 'Let us follow a cardinal dressed in red as he walks in the gardens. At every instant the colour seems different. . . whether we see him on the intense green of the sunny lawns, under the dark green of the cypress trees, on the silvery surface of a lake, or under the azure of the sky, he still changes. He changes always, becoming pale before a bank of geraniums and red before the marble of the statues. He gets darker in proportion as the daylight fades, until he becomes a dark purple and is dressed in black like a simple priest..' (Vibert 1902 quoted in Gage 1993;223) 'If all the colours became whitish', wrote Wittgenstein, 'the picture would .lose more and more of its depth' (Wittgenstein,1977;44). Cezanne attempted to convey, without perspective or tone, spatial experience on canvas laying strokes of colour next to one another. Using middle tones, he employed the spatial nature of adjacent colours, receding nature of 'cool' colours, relative to 'warmer' ones to create form. The later attempts during the last century to divorce colour from form, (and pattern), Rothko, for example, are less relevant here than a painter (now unfashionable) such as Patrick Heron. Heron spent a lifetime exploring form and colour and has said; 'all painting is about spatial colour' (J. Read 1986). He exploited the expansive, contractive, projecting and recessive nature of colour, allied with pattern (fig. 2). Adjacent colours may also evoke luminosity, without a light source being present.

37

Colour and the temporal 'Colours have a meaning according to their position in a complex, the order being as significant as the colour itself. The colours are few, the permutations many' (GA. Reichards on Navaho colours in ritual). The colours of transmutation conceived of as a dynamic sequence were central to aichemic concepts with the ultimate aim of transforming base metals into gold with the philosopher's stone (Gage1993;140). Metals were considered to be essentiatly the same, merely different in form, a concept that is similar to the way Aangu perceive their country, as I will discuss in Section Two. The idea of all colours being present in white (and black) is an ancient one 21 . Red, 'the crowning King red' identified with the philosopher's stone was also considered as present in white, and the aichemic progression from black to white passed through red. Thus in alchemic thought the common ritual trilogy of colours was understood not as unlike, fixed and separate, but as connected in a dynamic sequence. This also offers the possibility that colours have four dimensions, that is including at least temporality.

Ethnographic research on colour Colour has been neglected in anthropology and even the anthropology of art, where it has been treated as an adjunct of form or of 'graphics' (e.g. Munn;1973, Gell;1998). Social scientists have tended to consider colour as a surface, and therefore as a superficial perceptual quality, associated with the feminine. Colour is for them, linked to the transcendence of Kantian aesthetics. Hence colour, in the discipline of anthropology, has been seen merely as a sign system for a coded message, or as a specific kind of symbol due, not least, to the influence of structuralism. The emphasis on language in structuralism and post-structuralism has determined colour as meaning only, and has negated the complex power of colours in the inter-linked areas of evocations (emotional, spatial, temporal) and analogies (political, social, 'ritual', 'everyday') which they can communicate without words. These are why colour is so efficacious as symbols and able to carry meaning. This emphasis on the connection of colour

21

Gage attributes Newton's experience of alchemy as furnishing him with the idea that white light contains all colours. Gage 1993 38

with both vision and language is, as I have shown above, derived from culturally specific constructs about the senses.

Much of the ethnographic research that mentions colour, dating from a time when material culture was considered trivial, assumed that people think of coloured things as symbolic scaffolding for an abstracted social reality. Recent research on memory and on material culture has shown that things embody social processes (e.g. Kuechler;1988,1993, Hoskin;1998). Since all things have colour, this last body of research offers clues as to the role of colour in these processes.

In anthropology during the last half century, colour inquiry can be grouped into several broad areas. Firstly, the question of colour naming and its relation, or not, to perception as framed against Berlin and Kay's findings (cfJones and Meehan 1978, an Australian example, discussed above). Secondly, the search for universal symbolic meanings for individual hues, notably the ritually common triad of red, white and black (Turner 1967, Tambiah 1968; Barth 1975; Sahlins 1977).

Victor Turner's essay on the colour triad of red, white and black as 'epitomising universal human organic experience' has been highly influential (Turner 1967). Semen and milk symbolised by white, blood symbolised by red, faeces and dirt symbolised by black, all are invoked as not merely perceptual differences but 'condensations of whole realms of psycho-biological experience, involving reason, all the senses and concerned with primary group relationships.'

Turner has been criticised in many quarters for being totalising in his approach to symbolism in general (e.g. Sperber 1975) and colour symbolism in particular (Gell 1975, Tambiah 1968) but his bodily fluids theory has become embedded in anthropological discussion of colour, although the riders regarding the implication of all the senses, quoted above, has been ignored.

Barth's chapter on colour among the Baktamen of Papua New Guinea correlates with Turner in that the dominant ritual colours of red, white and black are ascribed basic referents from which fairly constant meaning is derived 39

(Barth 1975). The referents though, are different from Turner's, except for red/blood (ibid;177). The Baktamen initiations take place only every ten years and are accompanied by little verbal exegesis. The initiates are, though, subjected to multi-modal symbolism, including highly coloured imagery, and extremes of fear. This experience during initiation is consolidated on a daily basis in taro gardening, where the same sensory experiences of the initiation are also present, including colours.

Tambiah's exposition of Trobriand colour symbolism also revolves around the same colour triad, but with a differing set of referents. The extremes of contrast achieved by red, white and black together account, I suggest, for the frequency of the triad in ritual and also its memorability (fig. 1). Scoditti has shown multisensed links between the red, white and black painted carvings of Kitawan canoe prows which must be continually produced from memory. The initiation of the carver is structured around coloured substances, artefacts and magic words, but no accompanying explanation, and is intended to evoke clear mental images of the complex painted prow motifs (Scoditti 1990, Young nd).

The red, white and black painted motifs that compose mortuary Malangan sculptures in New Ireland, are also reproduced from mental imagery, rather than from the transient artefact itself (Kuechler 1988; 1993). On the other hand, red-ness is the materiality of memory, in the kula shells whose surface becomes reddened with handling and thus gains both age and fame (Campbell 1983; Rowlands 1993).

Colour, explicitly valued as surface, seems to be commonest though as body decorations, notably in Melanesia (Strathem and Strathem 1971, M Strathern 1979, '0' Hanlon 1989). In western culture colour is seen as surface, a mere superficial adjunct to the more substantial form or, in drawing and painting, line: 'designo et colore'. Paradigms of depth ontology, what is beneath the beguiling but unreliable surface, the mere appearance of things, pervade western traditions. (cf Wigley 1996). Strathern's paper on self-decoration shows that, for Hageners, the skin is where social relations are. The skin of the human body is decorated with paint, feathers, leaves. Social efficacy is, in contrast to western culture, on the surface. Strathern and Strathern, like 'O'Hanlon, finding little 40

constancy in colour symbolism, conclude that dullness and glossiness, or brightness, are of more import than that of individual hues. The interaction of the colours, aided by the oiled glossiness of the skin to increase reflectance, creates this brightness. Conklin's paper on Hanunoo colour categories formed the basis for Berlin and Kay's research. His evaluation of the Hanunoo four 'basic' categories contrasts lightness and darkness, and wetness / succulence in contrast to dryness (Conklin 1955;343). This last pair was grouped broadly around colours containing green and colours containing red.

Research with east African herder cultures, has shown that the only linguistic terms that implicate colour are cattle marking classes (eg,Evans-Pritchard 1940; Cootes 1993; Turton 1980). Cattle with contrasting coloured markings are venerated, red and white, or black and white in herds of predominantly grey animals. These terms are of course also about pattern and are used as metaphorical moral terms too. Morphy's influential paper concerns the 'putting on' of surface brilliance among the Yolgnu of Arnhem Land. He shows the connection of the impression of brilliance, created through coloured cross-hatching on paintings and bodies, to emotional euphoria in ritual (Morphy 1989). Here a shiny red ochre is the most sought after pigment and is widely traded. Morphy argues that all Yolgnu ritual and symbolism is concerned with the transformation from dull to brilliant: thunder and lightning, for example, are precursors to the arrival of Ancestors. Brilliance, he believes, is an effect that operates cross-culturally.

The Rainbow The rainbow has exerted a powerful influence in the thinking of many cultures including South American and European contexts (Levi Strauss 1964; Gage 1990). The number of colours in the rainbow, assigned as the propitious seven by Newton's assistant, is similarly culturally bound. As will become clear, for Aangu the rainbow is efficacious as three hues.

In Australian ethnography the beings known in English as Rainbow serpents have been widely documented, and I review the work concerning them below since they are also crucially important in the Central Desert. Among Aangu 41

such a being is known as 'wanampi', and may also be a water serpent that periodically 'stands up' in the sky as a rainbow. In this form it is not openly discussed by Aangu (see Section Two). It is here, as doubtless elsewhere on the continent, a part of secret and sacred religious knowledge.

I am interested in Rainbow serpents for the emotional and sensory information attached to them in Dreaming stories. They are ascribed, in their manifestation as a rainbow, potent transformative power by swallowing and regurgitating and are agents of water and wind, and therefore of fertility and healing. The rainbow, as a cultural artefact of luminous colour, is linked in Aboriginal thought with other shiny, bright or luminous things such as pearl shells and quartz. Rainbow serpents are also Ancestors who created features of the land, notably creeks, as well as being the 'spirit' of water sources such as springs, rock holes and wells.

Radcliffe-Brown thought the Rainbow serpent to be one of the most important Australian myths: 'The myth is the belief in a giant serpent which has its home in deep and permanent waterholes and represents the element of water which is of such vital importance to man in all parts of Australia' (Radcliffe-Brown I 930;342). The Rainbow serpents of Australian Aboriginal cultures seem to have much in common. There are many dimensions to their potency. In Australia it is often possible to see a rainbow reflected in the sky forming a double, its colours inverted. Thus Rainbow serpents also often come in pairs, male and female. In Arnhem Land, where the Rainbow serpent is the symbol of the North Arnhem Land Council, they are associated with the female ancestor creator of the cosmos and the male ancestral creation of specific sites (Hiatt 1971). Hiatt suggests that uterine /female Rainbow serpents connects to transformation through swallowing capacity and the male /phallic serpent transformation through regurgitation and the 'standing' rainbow. 22 Men's secret Kunapipi ritual, Swallowing and regurgitating metaphors occur in Arnhem Land initiatory rituals and swallowing is used to describe the act of transformation of ancestors into features of the land, (Hiatt 1971;1975).Hiatt has pointed to oversights in Levi-Strauss's analysis of the Murgin story of the (rainbow) serpent who swallows and regurgitates the two Wawilak sisters (Levi-Strauss 1961 ;91-6). Following Warner, Levi-Strauss interprets the myth as a symbolic statement about local climatic conditions. Hiatt argues that swallowing and regurgitating metaphors are apt to rites of passage because they suggest transformation of identity without obliteration (Hiatt 42

conceptualised by the serpent and the Wawilag, has become increasingly popular in central Arnhem Land (Berndt 1951). The vast energising power of the Rainbow serpent is channelled through ritual to ensure the controlled multiplication of species and also for healing in the Oenpelli region (Taylor 1990;333). Taylor's Kunwinjku informants told him: 'that the electrical storms at the end of the dry season 'burn up the fat' of many species and makes them skinny. . . by performing the Kunapipi and encouraging the rain, everything will get fat again' (Taylor 1996; 114, my emphasis). The serpent is also the subject of many contemporary paintings produced for the art market in the Maningrida region where its body is segmented as represented of other Ancestors whom it transforms, becomes, or are its progeny (ibid). Like the cross hatched 'brilliance' of the Yolgnu, In western Arnhem Land .cotour, especially rainbow colours, and visual activity in the painted surface are indicative of the life force that is regenerated through the agency of the Rainbow serpent. . ."; they are indicative of ancestral potency (Taylor I 996;92; Morphy 1989). As will become clear in Section Two, 'visual activity' as coloured surface on all sorts of things, crucially the surface of the land, is construed by Aangu as indicative of Ancestral power.

Rainbows appear at the start and finish of rain or the rainy season in the Tropical belt. The rainbow is said to swallow waters in the dry season and regurgitate them during the monsoon. The serpent sends the north-west Monsoon, thunder is his voice, lightning his forked tongue, rain his saliva and the rainbow a manifestation of his presence (Hiatt 1971;147). Among the Yarralin of the Victoria River in the Northern Territory, the rainbow is young at the start of the rainy season but old and tired by the end. The sun burns it and the wind breaks its back and it retreats to the rivers. Water, characterised most forcibly by the rainbow, is associated with all the manifestations of water and with all water sources. The rainbow serpent opens its mouth and shoots out saliva containing tadpoles and lightening. Tadpoles turn into frogs who call for more rain (Bird Rose 1992;98).

1975;155). See also Taylor 1996;217. 43

In the Central Desert, among the Warlpiri and the Pitjantjatjara, the Rainbow serpent is said to drink up all the water at the end of a storm 23. Mouniford also records the wind as the breath of the wanampi (1978). Inma of the wanampi were conducted by large numbers of men and women at Tjukula, over the western Australia border, in 1998. Ernabella people were among those who travelled there. I was told that these beings were a minyma I woman and a wati /man 'wanampi' from two waterholes, whose form seemed to relate to the gender of the snakes. The serpent lives in deep, cool and dark waters, but a wapampi may, though, disappear, causing the drying up of the water source. Mountford records the theft by medicine men from 'the southern Pijandjara tribe' of the wapampi from Atila (Mt Connor) spring, causing the spring to dry up, and placed the wanampi instead in their own country at Owellina, in order to have more water. The smell of white people may also cause the rainbow snake to disappear: "I was told a story about the disappearance of water from the soakage nearby. When the green water snake smelled the strangers (whites) it took the water away from the surface and carried it underground.' (Stotz n.d.)

The strong gusts of wind that are the prelude to rain in the Musgraves are, I learnt, generated by the wanampi. Approaching any rock hole that is home to a wanampi must be done carrying a fire stick or the interloper will be killed by the serpent (Mouniford 1978). The opposition of fire, which in three of the stories recorded by Mountford in my fieldwork area show the excess wetness or perspiration in someone who has experienced physical contact with a wanampi. The opposition in Anangu thought between this wetness, which is concomitant with greenness and therefore coolness (it is only in shady moist places that greenness thrives), and the heat and dryness of red, as fire and the red of the earth, is a central one.

Rain transforms the surface of the land from dull and dusty to green and bright and many coloured like a rainbow. An aspect of Diane Bell's ethnography, based on her fieldwork at Warrabri in the Northern Territory was one of the few clearly recorded aspects of colour transformation which I found before going to the field (Bell 1988;166). She describes love magic involving rainbows and transformation through colour in Yilpinji (ilbinji in P/Y) designs and rituals for the Gertrude Stotz pers comm.on the Waripin.

44

management of emotional states.

The Rainbow Men, two brothers, are the sons of Rain, 'brilliantly coloured and ever changing'. They beautify themselves with colours to win the love of a woman. The brothers also dull their colours with red anthill (i.e. brown) and dive into green waters in order to avoid frightening the girls they encounter with their brightness. This opposition of redness /rainbow with green is reversed in the Arnhem Land Wawilak story when the sisters and their sons, who have been swallowed by the reddish Rainbow serpent, are vomited onto a green ants nest, confirming Maddock's assertion of 'reversal' in myth which, I suggest, is also to be reversal through colour oppositions (Maddock 1972;153). In another story recorded by Bell two old women travel through country performing ritual. As they travel they rub themselves with fat; this turns their skins red and manifests their power. This ability of the rainbow men and the old women to change colour at will demonstrates their power and, says Bell, 'one of the stated reasons for the extreme power of yilpinji is this access to colour in the rainbow myth' and the ability of colour to attract (Bell 1988;164-169). This constant state of flux is transmitted by the dynamics of colours. The production of colour and colour changes is implicitly linked to notions of fertility and power in the agent of rain. Rain makes animals, and therefore indirectly, people, fatter, just as Taylor's informants say above. Here the colour transformations are not only metaphors for change but also are that change, and this becomes important in my own analysis.

The Rainbow is, elsewhere in the literature, discussed in terms of visual symbolism and transformation (cf Taylor 1990, 1996) and in terms of other senses (cf Butler 1978), but its colours, and the colours of the skin of the rainbow serpent, are mostly only mentioned in passing. These always include red, in its rainbow state, and often green in its under-water serpent guise.

'Rainbow only has a red skin and yellow up front...' ( Mawurndjul in Western Arnhem Land in Taylor 1996;74). Waripiri making a film of their return to their homeland of Kamira from Lajamanu in the Northern Territory mention the rainbow snake as having a yellow back and a red belly. It fell from the sky and made a creek (Ross Jangala 1986). The Rainbow Serpent is often hairy or 45

bearded. McConnel reported the North Queensland manifestation of the serpents as possessing red hair and a body striped with many colours and as curing the sick who swim in its waters (McConnel 1930). W.H. Rivers asked his Torres Strait Islander male informants about the colours of the rainbow through their drawings although his concern was to see if they got the colour order 'right'. But the correspondence between what is 'out there' in the rainbow and what people see is, as I have discussed above, not necessarily a transparent one; people do not see like a camera. Only older men knew about or were willing to discuss and draw rainbows. All but one man got red in the right place and all drew two rainbows, one big the other small 24. All drew rainbows as vertical stripes: black /white / red, indigo /yellow /red, and black /yellow /red are among the examples. One man has narrow purple and narrow orange bands, sandwiching a rainbow of yellow /indigo /red.

Mountford records the waflampi of Ayers Rock (see Section Two) as according to his informants, having 'an enormous head, projecting teeth and a beard, and a skin which has the same colour as the rainbow', or having colourful skins 'like carpet snakes' (Mountford 1978;41). Carpet snakes are often a euphemism for wanampi, or become wanampi later along the track in a tjukurpa. The colours that now represent the wanampi for Aangu are red / yellow / green usually, but not always in that order 25 Luminosity is certainly created by adding green, the 'new' pigment, previously only available as 'ukiri ,'green growth. At sometime since contact, this set of colours has been systematised and has perhaps taken the place of another three, that represented and was the waflampi. I continue to explore this throughout the thesis.

If Rainbow snakes are the agent for 'the fertilisation of the world', the odour that is associated with rain is associated with them too (Buchler 1978;188; see 24

'In no representation, however were the colours of the smaller bow given as rever 'sed' Rivers, W.H.1901 ;69) Of course during the Mission times and now in school, people are instructed as to the 'correct' that is western notion, of the order of the colours in a rainbow. I have seen acrylic paintings made to sell through the Arts Centre (in Emabella and also in Alice Springs) which depicted the makers grandfather's dreaming of the rainbow men. They were represented using a slightly' wrong' rainbow in these terms sequence of colours that incuded blue and violet as well as red yellow and green. See also Dussart 1999 where the photographs accompanying the text of the Waripiri karrku acrylic painting made at Yuendemu show the rainbow as green, red, yellow, orange, and Dolly Nampijinpa Granites Rain tjukurrpa, the rainbow is yellow, green and red but with white, black and brown(?) in between. 46

Section two). Snakes have a keener olfactory ability than any other sense; the serpent recognises through smell the pollution of its water hole by the younger Wawilak sister's menstrual blood in the Arnhem Land Dreaming. Before their circumcision as a part of the Djunggwan ceremony, young boys are told that the Father snake can smell their foreskins and is calling for them (Warner 1937;26). The final transformation of the human soul is into small rainbows, imagined as a kind of small fish which lives in waterholes before its new birth (Maddock 1982;l3in Taylor). This suggests the Rainbow serpent as eschatological, its formation not only of the seasons, but also of fife.

Radcliffe-Brown asserts a strong link between quartz crystals, pearl shells and therainbow serpent and medicine men (Radcliffe-Brown 1930;342). Quartz crystals are 'among the most important of magical substances used by medicine men', because they 'contain' the rainbow, which the medicine man can then himself contain by keeping the quartz within himself (ibid). Pearl shell '...was regarded as an emblem of life. . .,' (Ackerman and Stanton 1993). The Pitjantjatjara, and people at Ooldea, regarded pearl shell as the concentrated essence of water; at Ooldea the shells were called 'kapi', or ga:bi, that is 'water' and are used in rain-making rituals (ibid, Berndt and Berndt 1941). In the 'doctrine of similitude' that pervades Aboriginal thought (cf Kolig 1988 ) the pearl shell is iconic on many levels. Ackerman shows how pearl shells maybe engraved with geometric lines, representing lighting. Other shells are engraved with zigzag lines, which represent the Rainbow snake. Pearl shell is shiny like spring water and rain and flashes like lightening. Ackerman connects the shine of the pearl shell with shininess as a sign of health, well being and beauty among the Warlpiri (Dussart 1988;37; Bell 1988;153), as in Melanesian contexts (e.g. '0' Hanlon 1989). I suggest that pearl shell is also like the fat of certain animals, notably the glistening white fat in a kangaroo's tail. This cluster of similitude connects to the sequences of transformation that rain brings about, one of which is that everything will get fat again after rain. The association of shine, brilliance and luminosity with Ancestral power (Morphy 1989, Thompson 1975) connects fat, as a tactile substance, with colour, and this I explore especially in Section Four of this thesis. The flash of the suspended pearl shell and its similitude with lightning as a conduit of Ancestral power, activating power, attraction and desire produced by love magic/ilbinji. Ilbinji is now used to 47

ask for other things, money and cars, explaining the engraving of motor vehicles on pearl shells, as well as playing card (used for gambling) patterns (Ackerman and Stanton 1993; 40-6).

Conclusion I have argued in this introductory section that colour should be considered as a part of the anthropology of the senses, and not merely as a visual perception. I have also discussed current neurological theories about synaesthesia reinforce this argument and offer arresting possibilites as to the nature of consciousness. Colour perception really does alter the world in the process of sensing it. I have also suggested that there are constraints on the links between colour and other senses, and that there are constraints in the way colours are used symbolically.

I have argued that colours are so potent as symbols because of their many aspects, linked to emotion, space, sound, odour, tactility and embodied through taste and swallowing. I have argued that the it is in the interaction of colours that their salience as symbols also resides. This leads to categories of colour interaction, luminosity, spatial etc, that may embody social processes.

As to language, if colour cognition is independent of language what then are colour words doing?

48

Fig 1: Diagram after Albers to show the interactive relationships of red, black and white. 49

Fig 2: Patrick Heron 1964, 'Escaping discs'. 50

Section 1.2 A brief history of Ernabella and the sources of that history This thesis is situated in 1996-99, not the anthropological present. However the history of settlement on the Ernabella Mission, and elsewhere, is a useful background to what follows.

Ernabella is an Aboriginal community with a fluctuating population of around 450, often less, sometimes during ceremonies, funerals and football, many more. Ernabella is on the Aboriginal Freehold Aangu Pitjantjatjara Lands and a permit is required to enter the Lands. Freehold title was granted in 1981 in the Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act. Ernabella is situated in the north west of the state of South Australia near the border with the Northern Territory, in a range of hills named the Musgraves by the explorer Ernest Giles. But this country belonged to and was named by the Yankunytjatjara people. The area around the rockhole 'Anapala' at the place that later became Ernabella was a frequently visited camping ground. Today the majority of people in Ernabella claim to be Pitjantjatjara and no one visits that rockhole since someone drowned there.

The Pitjantjatjara are an Australian Aboriginal group named for their verb 'pitjanyi' /coming. The Warlpiri call them the 'Pitja pitja'. Yankunytjatjara, like Pitjantjatjara, is one of many Western Desert dialects, but in Yankunytjatjara there is no word for coming; 'yankunyi'/ going, moving along, is used with the prefix 'ngalya' /forehead. The two dialects have probably become more similar during the upheavals of the last one hundred years (Goddard 1996). Aangu, which once meant just 'people', has during the last twenty years become a proper noun and Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara use it to refer to themselves. It is in this sense that I use it.

The differences between the groups is not merely in their names or language, but also the country they occupied. The Pitjantjatjara, whose country was west of present day Ernabella and Amata, in the Tomkinson Ranges and what is now the Western Australia border and north into the Petermann ranges, moved east,

51

probably during the early years of this century26 . There seems to have been regular contact for ceremonial business and 'holidays' between Ernabella and Areyonga. The anthropologist Norman Tindale, visiting the Ernabella area for the first time in 1933, learned from old men that drought (which Tindale placed as that of 1914), had by 1916 forced the Pitjantjatjara to move east into Yankunytjatjara land, the latter moving out 140-160 miles into the area of another group (Tindale 1974;69). There seems to have been violent clashes between the groups. Basedow, passing through country north of the ranges in 1903, has an account of murders by westerners of easterners (Basedow 1904;13 quoted in Hamilton 1979;4).

The Yankunytjatjara seem to have drifted eastwards. I was told by Anangu that Dalhousie Springs, an important tjukurpa site on the edge of the Gibson Desert, was Yankunytjatjara, although this was really Arabana land (D. Kimber pers comm). The Yankunytjatjara also moved towards the railhead at Ooldea, where the Bemdts conducted fieldwork in the early 1940s, and to Oodnadatta.

Yalata is a community on the south coast of Australia on the Bight, composed mainly of the descendants of those northern people who made their way to the railhead at Ooldea from the 1920s onwards. Many Ernabella people have relatives in Yalata. Men's business was said to have travelled up from Yalata through the bush to the Lands during my stay there in 1997-8. The anthropologist Isabel White did fieldwork here.

Hamilton, collecting life histories from Yankunytjatjara people in Mimili (then Everard Park) in 1970-71, found that in their minds the clashes were as much about the appropriation of women as watering sites (Hamilton 1979;4). Tindale also relates that 'one old man informed me in 1933 that he and other old men had arranged stones near Emabella and had transferred place names and locations of some myths to the new area. . .This seemed to be a stage in the actual legitimation of their claim to that country.' This process of legitimising claims continues today.

26

Two of the people who were my teachers, had grown up in the Northern Pitjantjatjara settlement of Areyonga, where Nancy Munn conducted fieldwork in 1968. 52

Hamilton says 'people repeatedly referred to the Everards as 'Jangundjara'(sic) in everyday contexts, contrasting the area with Amata and Emabella which they said were "Bidjandjara"(sic)' ( 1982;97) and' Ngura ngaiyugu? Barari, welurara! Bidjiwanga tjuta!/ Country mine? Far west! Bidji speakers all!'(ibid) .Some of the women and men with whom I worked had Yankunytjatjara mothers and Pitjantjatjara fathers making them Yankunytjatjara since this is transmitted by the matriline. The Pitjantjatjara then, who have their name on the freehold title, the Aangu Pitjantjatjara Lands, are living in country whose waterholes they could not name in 1940, according to Hackett's journal of his contact with men then.

This central area of Australia was the last to be penetrated by colonists and today is still like another unvisited country to many Australians growing up in the urban centres of the south east coast. The Stuart Highway, that John McDougall Stuart managed to navigate for the overland telegraph route in 1862, stretches from south to north of the Australian continent. Although it does not exactly follow this route, it remains in the year 2000 the only north-south road across this huge continent, It was laid with bitumen in the early 1980s. Ernabella is today reached via 200km of dirt roads, from the Stuart Highway. Robert Layton, from his work with Anangu, has published an Aboriginal history of Uluru which traces the complexity of naming, the overlay of European and Aboriginal, in the area. Before Layton, in 1873 Gosse seems to have been the first European at Uluru which he named Ayers Rock.

All these early journeys by non-Aboriginals into Aboriginal land were limited by ignorance of water sources. Giles, in his explorative journeys of 1872 and 1874, like those who followed him, wanted to meet Aboriginal people solely so that they could show him where to find water (Hilliard 1968). From the start of contact between the two races then, water was implicated. The difficulties of finding water in this particularly arid area saved the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara from the displacement and violence inflicted by pastoralists on Aboriginal people further north, from the 1870s (see for example Bell 1988;6466), or from the fate of those such as the Pintupi, who found themselves living at Papunya. At the same time though, it seems likely that it was at least partly for water that the Pitjantjatjara started to move east. It is difficult to know what 53

the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara knew of the colonists in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Dick Kimber asserts that, judging from the mission record of names, Pitjantjatjara people, as well as Pintupi, were coming into Hermannsberg in the 1880's. This means that people well into the Petermann ranges to the east knew of the existence of the ration depots.

From 1937 Ernabella was a Presbyterian and then Uniting Church mission, and Christianity in an evangelising form remains a highly influential part of social and cultural life27. Although the Mission handed Ernabella back to Aboriginal people, many ex-Mission staff stayed on and retain strong links with individuals in Ernabella. Dr Charles Duguid, a medical doctor and Scottish Presbyterian was the driving force behind the setting up of a mission by the purchase of the area of the ErnabeHa pastoral lease. He surmised that the same fate of disease and extinction faced Aboriginal people, here as elsewhere in the continent. The Mission policy, in which Duguid was influential, was one of enlightened paternalism. This period, their childhood and for girlhood on the Mission, was the one talked about most by the older women with whom I spent my time. No one talked about the land rights struggle, which was much more recent. Recently, a project with the South Australia Museum, the Ara lrititja Archival project, has begun recording Anangu memories of Mission time and of 'first contact' with whites. The project goal is also to make available on CD Rom all the information regarding Pitjantjatjara songs, photographs and objects held in private and public collections in Australia. Aangu and ex-mission staff have worked together on this. The old film and photographic records of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people, are of course, seen through the lens of outsiders. PY Media, set up in the 1980s by Anangu, with the help of outsiders, aims to make videos by Aangu for Aangu.

27

In a recent article on syncretism at Yirrkala in Arnhem Land, Mcintosh (1997) points to the importance of Christianity in the construction of a common identity between Aboriginal cultural groups, and also to the antagonism towards anthropologists expressed by some Aboriginal Christian ministers. Yirrkala was also a Uniting Church mission though its pragmatics were rather different from that at Emabella. Certainly the influence of the mission is far the greatest in Emabella and this sets it apart from other, younger, neighbouring settlements such as Fregon, Amata and Mimili. It was my impression that those who did not like living under the mission regime, but went to school in Emabella, moved elsewhere, as soon as it was possible. 54

Other sources of textual information about Aangu include Deaconess Winifred Hilliard's well known 'The People In between. The Pitjantjatjara people of Ernabella'. Winifred Hilliard administered the Ernabella craft room from 1954 to 1986. Rev. Bill Edwards, Mission Superintendent from 1958, has also published widely. The anthropologist C.P. Mountford visited Emabella in 1940 and travelled with Aangu to Ayers Rock. He incurred their wrath, and a court case, by publishing secret information. Tindale returned to Ernabella in 1957. Yengoyan worked in Emabella in the 1960s on demographics. The Wallaces published books about their time in Ernabella. Ellis and Ellis were musicologists who worked with Pitjantjatjara and Antakerinja people. Helen Payne also worked with women in Emabella on inma, and Keiko Tamura wrote a masters dissertation on the Ernabella craftroom, as a result of her fieldwork there in the

I 980s. Ute Eikelcamp has recently published a book in collaboration with Ernabella artists on the story of the Ernabella craftroom. Aside from these, documentation of material culture was carried out by both Mountford and Tindale, and by Brokensha, recording tools, weapons and bowls made in the Mt Davies area, now Pipalyajara, in the 1970s. Work on plant use and huntergathering by Cleland in 1933, Goddard and Kalatos and health educator, Susie Bryce, were all useful to me in the field as references.

Section 1.3 The Pragmatics of Fieldwork Arriving in Alice Springs on August 31st 1996, we were caught in a torrential thunderstorm, the first rains, as it turned out, since January. It took six more months to get to Emabella, although living in Alice was, in a sense, the start of my fieldwork. The hot time, over Christmas and New Year, is also the time when much ceremonial business takes place in Central Desert Aboriginal societies, and that year the heavy rains brought all the creeks to life, making travel in and out of Alice impossible. I visited Ernabella for the first time just before the rains in January 1997, with the then art Co-ordinator Jenni Dudley, but most people were away from the community on business. After several one week visits to ask permission from the Emabella Council to conduct my research and negotiate a permit, we arrived there in March. I therefore 55

witnessed the transformation of the country from red and bone dry to green, and endeavoured to learn from Apangu about their attitude to this.

It had become clear that a car was essential to fieldwork. Apart from anything else it was something I could offer socially. Thanks partly to my funding body, the ESRC, who advanced my next year's fieldwork expenses, we acquired an old Toyota Personnel carrier with a long wheel base. As it transpired I was mostly socialised through the possession of that car. We also acquired a camp puppy to 'grow-up'.

In the preceding decade there had been little outside anthropological research on the AP Lands, but the AP anthropologist Dr Gertrude Stotz had recently helped to facilitate PhD research, and I followed Ute Eikelcamp, a German researcher, into Ernabella and whilst I was in the field there was another PhD researcher at Mimili.

Housing is a problem in remote communities, both for local Aboriginal people and for staff. Housing provision for the latter is mostly (though by no means uniformly) of a higher standard in order to attract and keep staff. Each different organisation, the school, the health service, the TAFE, has its own allocation of housing. Housing for Apangu, even new, is certainly of a different, and mostly lower, standard than housing meant for staff, who are generally nonAboriginals. Aboriginal housing does not, for example, have air conditioning, whereas all 'whitefella' houses do. There could be no question of our having any right to either type in Ernabella and importing a caravan was beyond our means.

We were very lucky therefore, to be offered the use of one of three abandoned tjilpi bId person's houses on a homeland 35km north of Ernabella, at Katjikatjijara. The homeland had been cleared for men's business to go through it over Christmas time. We were said, by Anangu, to be 'looking after' the homeland for a family on a nearby homeland who were in turn looking after it for a relation who was the nguraritja ITraditional Owner.

56

The hut, three metres square, had a stand pipe outside, around which a previous occupant had cut an old stainless steel sink and a plywood table. It also boasted a gas cooker, (gas being bought in large cylinders in Ernabella) with three working burners, although mice had eaten out the insulation of the oven, and a big fireplace. The three huts, of the 'transitional housing' type shared a shower and laundry block and, a hundred yards away, a pit toilet, a common layout on many homelands, dating I think from the late 1970s. Hot water for the shower and laundry sink is heated by a 'rocket', an external rocket shaped water tank with a tiny hearth at the base for fire wood. It takes an hour to heat the water in winter and no fire is needed in summer when the water is already hot from the sun, and cold water would be a luxury. My habit of showering was regarded with amusement.

Although many homelands are now connected to mains electricity generated in Ernabella, the homelands on the road north were not electrified in 1996-99. We were Ie nt one 12 volt solar panel, a large gel battery and one 12 volt light, and our Aangu neighbours at Youngs Wet! le 'nt us their generator for a while. If the generator failed, we had the 12 volt light to fall back on. It was through the kindness of our neighbours that we learnt how to live well on the homeland and adapt to the seasons.

During school holidays we 'house sat' a teacher's house in Ernabella or sometimes the art adviser's house. Aangu friends treated me differently when I was in these houses; visits seemed to fall into a set way of behaving inside a white person's house. On the homeland, Aboriginal people sometimes said we should get a 'proper' house, and we were pitied because we did not have a washing machine. We made a vegetable garden, in which we grew water melons, tomatoes, lettuce, silver beet, broccoli, courgettes and beans. This garden people were always interested in, always commenting on. Although many homelands did and do have gardens there are problems maintaining them; 'We' hunter-gathers' a man remarked to me. But neighbours watered the garden and helped themselves to its produce when we were away.

From April 1998 when my partner returned to the U.K. it was difficult for me to continue living at Katjikatjijara on my own. Apart from being unsafe, women told 57

me there were 'wati kura Thad men' about and it was sociaUy unacceptable to be alone, whether male or female. I stayed there when other families were present, but mostly I camped out in Ernabella with old women, and also in a women's bush camp during a long stretch of business. During these last months - April to September - I was also working for Ernabella Arts curating their 50th anniversary show.

Methodology In order to gain permission to do fieldwork in Ernabella I had talked to members of the council and women in the art centre about my research and about the way they thought about, and used colour. However as I then spoke little Pitjantjatjara it was difficult. I learned later that many people understand English very well, but chose not to speak it. The couple who had signed my entry permit to the Aangu Pitjantjatjara Lands both spoke English and took me under their wing by availing themselves of my car. In this way, by starting up a reciprocal exchange of favours with me and my partner, I became socialised; the term A.angu use for this taking turns is ngapartji ngapartji. At the start, saying I was interested in colour elicited people pointing at some brightly coloured thing, flowers or seed necklaces for example, and announcing the colour name in English in a charming and friendly way. So I quickly gave up mentioning 'colour /kala' much, and my methodology became participant observation; that is, I hung around.

In the first eight months I drove where ever anyone wanted me to take them, or they drove me in my car. I went out with women honey-anting, for witchetty grubs, for goanna, for mingkulpa /tobacco, for firewood, for puu. I went hunting with an extended family, I went to Christian inma and to sorry camps and Openings and to Alice Springs with them and with others. I did give my sponsors a list of things I wanted to learn about and generously they did their best to teach me. The list was:

Pupu (trees and plants); Bush medicine; Funerals; Inma (ceremony); Wiltja (bush shelters) 58

The categories of things which I write about in this thesis are the categories where colours were most obviously evident in a mundane context, cars and clothes for example, and in country, in gathering and hunting activities. There is other material which I have not used, belonging to the secret sacred realm, It gradually became obvious to me that there were certain correspondences in the way colours were employed, regardless of what the things actually were. Odours also were revealing of such correspondences, but these I was verbally taught.

I have not attempted to make transparent the symbolic meanings of colours in this thesis, as even if I knew them, which generally I do not, it would be a gross invasion of privacy in secret sacred rites to reveal them.

Later in the fieldwork period, I made some more structured interviews, mostly in connection with the production of items for the market and women's memories of the craft room. I was also able to use the A!a lrititja Archive, videos made by PY Media, and old cine film made by mission staff. I looked at collections of drawings made by Anangu in Ernabella since 1933, and visited collections of artifacts in the South Australia Museum, National Museum archives in Canberra and in the Museum of Victoria.

Constraints What one learns as a researcher is constrained not only by one's own personality and behaviour but also by things more or less outside one's control. The most important of these is gender. In societies, such as those of the Central Desert, where the genders spend most of their time apart from puberty onwards (though as old women said, this is apparently less strictly observed than in the past), the gender of the researcher will be a major determining factor in what is learnt. Although women anthropologists such as Munn were treated as honorary men, this would not happen now and certainly not among the Pitjantjatjara who are renowned among other desert peoples for their fierceness in protecting the Law. Thus I was perceived, like most white women, as a 'young girl' Ikungka (P) since I had no children. My hair, however, was going grey and I did have a man with me, so certain allowances were made and later I 59

was called 'minyma'. It is possible for childless women to become ritually powerful. A woman in her late thirties with no children is in the process of becoming 'boss' of an important women's site. I spent most of my time with older women and their young grandchildren, in fact many of the same individuals who had taught previous female researchers in Ernabella.

The power struggle for country between the Yankunytjatjara and the Pitjantjatjara underlies much contemporary politicking on the Lands today. The senior nguraritja /owner of the place where I lived was a Yankunytjatjara man, who died in 2000. My stay on the Lands was sponsored by another Yankunytjatjara man who died in 1998. The import of this Yankunytjatjara connection, both to how and what I learnt, and to the situation in Ernabella today, gradually became clear to me.

60

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Section Two Country and Bodies; the inseparability of land and people

Introduction The Western Desert is red but after heavy or prolonged rain, the ground begins to turn a brilliant green. As the first raindrops hit the ground a strong smell rises. The stronger the smell the longer the time that has passed since previous rain. Like all odour it is difficult to describe; eucalyptus oil with a top note of dust and excrement - dog, camel, human? Aangu link this particular version of the smell of eucalypt oil and odours they regard as similar, strongly with becoming green and well being of land and bodies. In the months after heavy rain sheets of flowers turn the land successive colours, and new green growth appears in land that has been burnt off. After a few months without rain, grasses and other plants become yellow and dry. The daily sunset, especially on cloudy, days turns the sky a succession of brilliant hues before dark. In this section I will explore how Aangu conceptualise the mutating colours of the land and sky, both of which are, for them, a cultural artefact.

Non-Aboriginal visitors, including ethnographers, to the great red expanses of the Western Desert have noted the startling colours of the land after rain, and the way country changes from moment to moment, the light on the ranges, the sunsets. Yet such descriptions figure only in introductions to ethnographies, or in personal journals, and are couched in terms of the author's own aesthetic appreciation, not those of the Aboriginal inhabitants and any notion that changing colours are connected to agency 1 or are in any way more than peripheral. I have explored the cultural mind set that might account for this neglect in Section One of this thesis. How then is colour used in the articulation, representation, structuring and remembering of fundamental Aboriginal concepts about the land, Ancestral bodies and human ones?

1

Mountford for example and his young assistant Laurie Sheard both wrote in their separate journals of the beauty of the changing colours of the Musgrave Ranges. Myers 1991;1 I describes the Pintupi country in his introduction. Bell (1988) discusses the effects of rain and colour at greater length. 77

For Anangu, the tjukurpa (P) /wapar (Y) 2 or, as has been glossed in English following Spencer and GiVen, Dreaming or Dreamtime, are embodied in the land (Spencer and Gillen 1899). The tjukurpa travelled through country touching, linking, creating and transforming specific features of the existing land as they went3. Trees, rocks, creeks, waterholes of various types, and sand hills

(it is usually an aspect of one of these), embody Ancestors or their bodily traces. Where they paused on their journeys - sitting or lying down, going into the ground or acting in some other way, the event remains as visible, audible or olfactory traces on the country. These events were often highly charged with emotion. Like humans, Ancestors felt anger and envy, were watjil(pa), sad and lonely for relations or country, mukaringanyl, wanting, loving someone or something or manyu, greedy, for example. Some Ancestors ended up in the sky, such as the seven sisters /Kungarungkara and their male pursuer, Nyiru. The Ancestor may have been an animal, plant or part of a plant such as the wintalyka /mulga seed, or element such as fire or moon. Often an Ancestor mutated into different forms during her or his journey. Liru /snakes became kuniya /python or waampi Iwater serpent for example. As Munn notes, an Ancestor may leave any number of such records of himself (sic) as he moved thmugh the country; he is not uniquely embodied by a single transformation (Munn 1979;143, my emphasis).

Many non-Aboriginal writers have noted of Australian Aboriginal peoples that people and land are conceptualised as almost inseparable (cf Myersl99l;25). Bell writes perceptively that country is both a basis of identity and analogous to emotional states (Bell;1983;163). Munn states that the land is the fundamental external object system where consciousness and identity are anchored (Munn 1971, on the Warlpiri and northern Pitjantjatjara). Morphy, writing of the Yolgnu of Arnhem Land, goes further; 'It is not simply that landscape is a sign system for mythological events.., rather the landscape is the referent for much of the symbolism. Too often the landscape has been seen as an intervening sign system that passes on information about the Ancestral past.' (Morphy 1995; 186). 2

In Ernabella tjukur(pa) is used so I use it here According to T.G.H.Strehlow (quoted in Mountford 1965;25) Central Australian Religion uthe Aranda believe natural features were created by the mythical people at the same time as they moved across the countryside. The Pitjantjatjara claim that there was no change in the topography until the close of the creation period'. 78

The referent is in many ways land as body. 'Nganampa manta nganana kurunpa kanyinma' /the land holds our kurun(pa)/ spirit, say Anarigu. Aangu continually search for resemblances, between features of the land and the topography of bodies, not only human bodies, but of Ancestors as animals (Kolig 1988). Anangu are not given to lengthy exegesis nor description, especially when away from a place. Features are recognised by their contrast to surroundings and colour, that is hue, is mostly the salient difference mentioned if it is mentioned al all. For example, 'nyaratja ukiri /over there, that green (one)' indicating a quondong tree with brighter glossier green leaves than its neighbours.

Colours cannot be reduced to meanings describable using words (Wittgensteinl978). It is however an essential pre-requisite of a doctoral thesis that I attempt to do so, if not in the elucidation of 'meaning,' but sense. No material thing is experienced in isolation - the colour of someone's car in relation to their personal, social and religious affiliations and to the landscape through which the car moves, for example - all are implicated in the connectivity of things through their colours. This first section is therefore necessarily fragmentary in format, providing information about colour and the senses in various arenas.

Before discussing the pivotal concepts of place and time I want to show whose country is the subject.

Belonging to country Both individuals and groups of present day humans, have unbreakable (or following A. Weiner's term, inalienable) ties to certain areas of country (cf Myers 1988). A person had a conception place, a birth place, tjukurpa sites inherited through parents and grandparents, and finally the country she /he lived and died in. Such attachment to sites may be restricted with settlement life, hospital birth and cemetery burial. The establishment of permanent communities at a site chosen, as Ernabella was, for a reliable potable water supply, have led to these locales becoming privileged, like the 'permanent' waters of old. This 79

permanency of water supply is conceived as critical and I will return to this below.

Kunmanara, in his late fifties, showed me part of his country, or rather his father's, mother's and grandfather's country, and listed the others parts for me. He was Yankunytjatjara and as he said 'born in the bush'. A woman who might now be in her mid-eighties, and one of the oldest in the community, told me of her daughter's birth as we passed the place; Field notes July 1998 L.; at a spot on the main KK to WW road just past the two knobbly red rocks she whispered to me 'ngayuku untalpa iii ngranrangu? (at this place) ngayulu tjititjara' /my daughter was born at this place, I was pregnant. (lit, having child) Now children are born in Alice in what is Arrente country. All births are scheduled by clinic staff to take place in Alice Springs hospital. If there are complications, Adelaide hospitals are the next stop. Whilst having many practical benefits, there are new problems created by this choice, in the baby's links to country. In the past a child born in the bush was linked forever with the relatives of his birthplace. In theory, the Pitjantjatjara who came into Ernabefla from the west achieved rights to sites in the country around Ernabella through being born into it. Contemporary communities are sited at reliable water sources and are therefore also likely to be Dreaming sites. This is the case in Ernabella, where from 1951, some women chose to give birth in the Emabella clinic4. Hamilton noted the prevalence of people in Everard Park (Mimili) with nyintaka tjurkurpa because the track crossed the area of the permanent camp (A. Hamilton 1980). Many younger people do not therefore have country to which they are linked by being born into it, because they are born in Alice Springs. Instead, where one lives is increasingly important and it is this which has brought community identity more to the fore. Some of the young women of whom I asked Where is your ngura?' said 'Just one' and named a community, Fregon or Mutijulu or Emabella, for example. Field notes Graffiti written in English on rocks and buildings in Emabella (Pukatja). 'Pukatja is a good place better than Fregon, Mimili, Indulkana' 'Emabella is a good place'

Nganyintja was the first woman to make this choice (Hilliard 1968:138).

80

'Girl's name from Emabella + boy's name from Finke, only 2 lovers so don't get jealous'. 'Girl's name and girl's name only 2 best friends from Emabella.' Girl's name, only I girl from Pukatja.' In these more sedentary times, knowledge of the sites around the settlement where one lives is increasingly privileged regardless of rights through parents and grandparents. Living somewhere also seems to accumulate rights to that site or one nearby. 'Inheriting' a Dreaming place through parents and grandparents is not always via the patriline (see below). Niether do women have to have children to become ritually powerful. Being boss of a site and its ceremonies gives a person social and political power5 A person may also inherit rights to other sites on the same track and in some cases become boss of whole stretches of it. Field notes April 1998; Visiting Indulkana. I went to find R. I was told she lived behind the gas bottles by the store. I go over with 2 kultuingka /cooldnnk, Pepsi and a lemon fizz. As I approach I call out that I am from Katjikatji and the woman outside yells to R inside the tent "kungka from Katjikatji ngananmpa ngura!' (A woman from our place Katjikatji) An old man got up; "you really live at Katjikatji?' he asks in Yankunytjatjara and smiles and leaves. Kulinma /listen! Then there were lots of Yankunytjatjara people in Emabella, she puts a series of strokes joined by a horizontal in the sand, (related people) and a big arrow, indicating the Pitjantjatjara coming in from the west. 'All Yankunytjatjara country' M. says I should speak Yankunytjatjara 'ngalya yanu' she says, since the place where I live is Yankunytjatjara. After a while it becomes clear without my giving any more information that they know exactly who I am. That is to say where I live and to whom I am related. I am your auntie says R., we are all your aurities. Armunta is their sister. Armuntaku mama ngura here /Armunta's father's place (drawing in the sand to show further west). Jenny, R.'s daughter who comes to join us dressed in black and white, is my sister and another younger woman she is my kami /granddaughter Jack Crombie, whom I met in Coober Pedy told me, " I am Pitjantjatjara through my father but all that country, Ernabella, Amata is really Yankunytjatjara country"

Field notes May 1998 F14;37 I ask N and E, is Kenmore Yankunytjatjara? Uwoe! Munu, Amata, munu Fregon, munu Indulkana, munu Mimili .-tjuta. Translation 'Yeees! And Amata, and Fregon, and Indulkana, and Mimili, all of them'. It is men who carry these into the wider arena of politicking with Australian state and federal governmental authorities and Land Councils. Women have had their power eroded as in so many other areas of contact with non-Aboriginal people (cf Stotz forthcoming 2001). 81

The Field notes above show that my position as a newcomer was influenced by two factors. Firstly, via those individuals with whom I had made a social bond, through various reciprocities, and secondly, through the homeland where I lived and which I was said to be 'looking after'. The boss of the place was still Yankunytjatjara, an old man /tjilpi who remained the 'the big stick,' as a younger Yankunytjatjara man told me, of Ernabella in ritual terms.

I was shown a place far out in the bush. It was a flat triangular area with the remains of many wiltja 6 frames shaped like ridge tents, between two domed rocks and a long spur. 'Ngura kutjupa,'/ 'another camp,' I was told, as no-one with us claimed to know the name, 'Pitjantjatjaraku ngura wiya, Yankunytjatjara ngura, tjana camped 'ere. 7 Take a photo.' I was with a Pitjantjatjara woman, who was married to a Yankunytjatjara man, their daughter, son-in-law, and his relations from Timber Creek, and a Yankunytjatjara woman.

A woman whose father had been a Pintupi, but who, she said had spoken Pitjantjatjara, had also spoken another way; Wirtjanytjatjara, where 'ngalya pitjanyi' becomes 'ngalya wirtjanyi'. 8 In research done with people in Ernabella prior to the freehold Anangu Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act of 1981, the Yankunytjatjara are hardly mentioned (cf Trudinger 1940, Yengoyan 1969, Wallace 1968, Hilliard 1968). Yet in more recent work (e.g. Goddard 1985, Layton 1989) with people at Mutijulu, Mimili and Ernabella, the Yankunytjatjara suddenly appear. Perhaps the events that I was told of are a revisionist history or perhaps the Land Rights act fuelled Yankunytjatjara discontent. 9 One is

6

Wiltja' - shade structure, humpy; see Section 3.1

T Translation; 'not a Pitjantjatjara place, a Yankunytjatjara place, they camped 'ere.' Tindale 1972; 228 mentions Wirtjapakandja as the southeastern group name of the Pitjantjatjara 'now living near Oparinna and Musgrave Park' ie Apara and Amata.'It was this portion of the tribe which commenced the movement into the eastern Musgraves after the 191415 drought, and usurped the country just to the west of them, extending south to kalaiapiti... The term Wirtjapakandja has a meaning akin to displaced persons'. Hamilton (1982; 96-98), who is much quoted on the subject of dialect and territory as a result of her research, discusses Tindale and R Bemdt. For Tindale, each dialect group is a tribe with a territorial association whereas Bemdt (1966:41) says dialect is a means of classifying people with no territorial association. Hamilton concludes they are both right, but that the association between dialect and territory is independent of any individual's or group's own territorial affiliations. Boundaries of places 'exist only by virtue of the linguistic behaviour of the people usually to be found there. This is why Ernabella is now considered a Bidjanjatjara place'. That is, there is a de facto relationship between a particular dialect and a particular territory. This 82

reckoned, unless mixed race, as Yankunytjatjara through one's mother. "We're all Yankunytjatjara.... never mind my father been Pitjantjatjara my mother was Yankuriytjatjara' says Pompy Waampi'°. Several women, themselves Pitjantjatjara, remarked of their Yankunytjatjara husbands, 'ngaltujara! But he learnt to speak Pitjantjatjara and his children are all Pitjantjatjara!' implying this was a better thing to be.11

As the title of Eikelcamp's book, 'Don't Ask for Stories', demonstrates, Aangu in Ernabella are not at all casual in talking about tjukurpa, especially their own.12 The Pitjantjatjara are renowned among other Central Australian groups, particularly the Warlpiri and Pintupi, for their fierceness about painting tjukurpa on canvas to sell and for upholding secrecy.' 3 Among anthropologists the Pitjantjatjara are also renowned for their indirect ways of communicating. What people told me about country as we drove through it on many bush trips was mostly about their own childhood activities in the places we passed, of the Mission picnics, (for example at Wamikata), of swimming in rockholes, of the places where boys spent their bush seclusion before initiation, in wiltja topped with spinifex grass. Older people in the late 1990's were the first generation of children to grow up with the structure of the Mission permeating their lives. It is as though their knowledge of this country only began with their own childhood, and was not passed to them by parents or grandparents.

Before a meeting I attended for a land claim in Coober Pedy, south of the AP Lands, a Yankunytjatjara woman told this story. Her son was working at Katjikatjijara years ago building the tjilpi houses and a snake came into the house where he was working. He shouted out 'wami, wami!' (snake snake!) but does not seem to be the case now. I think it unlikely that Hamilton was mistaken in her observations, so it would seem perhaps that the situation has changed. Hamilton points out that dialect used can make statements about social relations. She was asked to use Pitji when in Ernabella as it was courtesy to use the speech form of those as "most others in the place you happen to be'. This is still the case. For example I was corrected by a Pitjantjatjara woman when I spoke of a katji puu (spear bush) in Ernabella; 'Katji is a Yangkunytjatjara word ', she said, 'we say urtjanpa'. It is generally acknowledged among Anangu that place names indicate that the land is Yankunytjatjara or Pitjantjatjara. 1OIn Layton (1989;48); information gained on land claim work for Aangu belonging to Uluru and Katatjuta ' This means that the children of such a marriage inherit both V and P sites. 12 Eikelcamp 1999. Ute Elkelcamp preceded me into the field by 12 months and worked with many of the same women. 13 The implications of this in relation to art produced for the market are discussed more in Section 4 of this thesis. 83

none of his fellow workers came to help him. Remembering that his companions were Pitjantjatjara he yelled 'liru, liru!' and they all came running, and helped him kill the snake. This little tale was meant as an allegory, one no doubt with many levels that passed me by. However I understand 1) that snakes are considered very dangerous 2) that a difference in language is regarded as a difference in identity 3) that the names of estates adjacent to Katjikatjijara include Wamikata and Wamijara. That is to say they are therefore Yankunytjatjara country.

This emphasis on the language of naming as a marker of Yankunytjatjara or Pitjantjatjara land is now accepted as a mark of rights to country. 'Aparanya,'14 which Aangu say is the Yankunytjatjara name for the red river gum (apara + name ending /nya) is the name of a place north of present day Amata, and this is used as an indicator of what is 'really' Yankunytjatjara country. Pipalyatjara, in Pitjantjatjara country near the Western Australia border, refers to the same tree (this time 'having'! jara pipalya), but in Pitjantjatjara. Names of ngura thus seem the main marker of identity and embody a person's rights to country. Names around Ernabella are not given away, but guarded as inside knowledge about country and claims to belong in that country. The doubling up of place names, in Aboriginal language and English is also used as a screen. Ayers Rock, is named as such by most people around Ernabella, rather than 'Uluru', which is the sacred water hole from which the rock takes its name. Similarly the women's sacred site on Birthday Creek is referred to openly by this name, not its tjukurpa name.

Names are an aspect of tjukurpa and given by tjukurpa and are therefore iconic (Munn 1971;145, Berndt and Berndt 1941; 206)15. The possible links of the word as sound with other senses, is one I was unable to explore. The names of these ngura seem to be fixed and constant in contrast to the names of persons and knowledge of them particularised.(compare persons (Myers 1991 ;59 on the Pintupi). So concerned were my closer informants that I should understand

14

Layton (1986;122) traces the historical variations on this place name in European literature. 15 Tindale 1957, informant Tommy Dodd told him that the malu tjukurpa came to this country and gave people their tribal names. He asked them how they said different words and gave them names. 84

/kulini the ngura names that they, unusually, asked for pencil and paper and wrote them down for me. But the sound of the name is more important . As many other authors have noted what is told, to whom and where it is told and how, in what pitch of voice whilst exhaling or inhaling are all relational. Field notes 1997 The big hill/mountain red and with a striking pattern of vegetation giving it dark patches is IRANTJIRANTJI. The pattern of vegetation is hair on the tjurkurpa's body. It is watiku miilmiilpur but Wamijara is minymaku The well, just past the cattle pens, in use, is the one S made iriti when he worked driving cattle to Finke, ALANTJITJA.

To give voice to the songs, in whatever context, of a tjurkurpa and the ngura and track of the tjukurpa, is laying a claim to belong to that country. A tjurkurpa cannot exist without country but the inma /songs of that tjurkurpa do not have to be sung at the sites created by it.

The names then often are descriptive of sites which do not generally refer to their colour or other sensory properties, but to the events which took place there. These qualities are noticed by Aangu and are sometimes verbally articulated. The same seems to apply to inma; the song, dance, walka and odours used are complimentary facets of the whole. Names rather encode other social information, mnemonic clues as to who or what is there. Wamijara means 'having a snake'; Ma!upiti, 'kangaroo hole', Waranyapatjana, 'tall biting one' are some examples.

It is when travelling through country that Aangu may name sites as they come into view - utiringanyi. Uti can mean becoming visually or audibly apparent. 16 I was shown country as we travelled through it, on the way to bush food places, hunting, funerals, openings, inma; there was always an ulterior motive for a trip. Often small children in the car would be shown as well and I was their equal in terms of cultural knowledge, that is ngurpa, ignorant. Ngurpa is used to indicate something, a place, a thing that one has not experienced before. Once you have been shown a place and told its name (or a way to do something, or listened, to a novel inma for example) you are expected to be 'ninti' to

16

Other than walking for the sake of it, in the vicinity of the kajikatji apu/rock, a foible accepted with amusement, and which we were given permission to do by our neighbours, and driving in and out of Emabella, we generally only travelled with those who belonged in that country. 85

understand and remember /kulini. We were learning /nintiringanyi, becoming knowledgeable.

Time In accounts about Australian Aboriginal people's conceptions of time and place, it is the latter which is considered as having precedence over the former, time. I will discuss here three aspects of time; first Ancestral time and everyday time, secondly 'seasonal' time and thirdly time and events. I will argue here that Ancestral presence is manifested in the way the land changes colour after a specific event. These events are rains, fire, and in tjurkurpa times, swallowing or digesting. The other is a daily event, an event made by the suns regular movement across the sky and its setting /tjarpanyi (lit, entering).

Ancestral time and the everyday Aboriginal people's conception of time has been the subject of much debate over the years, particularly the apparent disjuncture between the time of the Ancestors, when the topography of the land was formed, and the present time. For example, both Morphy (on the Yolgnu) and Munn (of the Warlpiri and northern Pitjantjatjara) state that place is privileged over time. Distance is between place rather than the temporal distance between events (Morphyl995;188). The Ancestor became objectified in a permanent and atemporal transformation of his actions (cf Munn 1971 ). The time of the Ancestors and their actions are spoken of by Aangu in the past tense. Yet there exists an ambiguity between Ancestral time and everyday time. 17 It has been suggested that Ancestral time exists almost as another dimension or parallel time18 (Glowczewski 1988;1O, quoted in Rose, 1992;208, Morphy, 17

Rose quotes Stanner's term 'everywhen' as a felicitous one in this respect Living Anangu, like Aboriginal people elsewhere on the continent, only know three generations of their own family back in time (e.g. Bell 1988). It has been suggested that the difference between this shallow geneology and Ancestral time is necessary to draw meaningful social boundaries, to ?revent the whole structure becoming hopelessly over complex (Rose 1992) 8 On 'parallel' time; one night sitting around a camp fire I mentioned that my partner who, after 2 years had returned to the U.K., would be having breakfast and going off to work whilst we sat round the fire now' in the evening. The older women thought this very funny and must have told other people; ever since Aangu of all ages have asked me like a greeting, "what 's your miitalpartner doing now? Is he asleep, having his dinner?' and much laughter always follows my answer. 86

1996;314, Memmott 1980;483) rather than as an immutable distant past which rigidly structures the present as Levi Strauss proposed (Levi Strauss 1966). In his analysis of Aboriginal temporality, Levi-Strauss proposes that the 'time of models '(that of Ancestors) is timeless and therefore different from chronological or oelogical time. Ancestors are presenced by ritual (Gell 1992;28).

It does seem as though that for the duration of inma, through their singing and dancing together, their decorated skins and clothing, women create access to, and presence, Ancestral spiritual power. When the inma cycle, sometimes lasting all day and all night, is finished, often orchestrated as the moment the sun appears at the edge of the earth at dawn, they wail, sometimes weep, the same high pitched keening used at the death of a human, and say with sadness of the Ancestor, 'Paluru wiyaringanyu kuwari, ngaujara /she is finished now, the poor thing'. I do not think that this is literal, but meaning that the inma makers have together accessed spiritual power of the Ancestor, a power that they embody but that cannot be sustained long after the event of the inma. They themselves are only human beings. It does not mean that Ancestral time is dynamic or 'parallel'.

Daily time

Boyer has criticised anthropologists for concentrating on ritual without explaining how it is connected to, and remembered, in the midst of daily routine (Boyer 1993). For Apangu, colour and odour occur both in Ancestral time and also continually in the present. Although the topography may remain ideally unchanged, created as it was by the Ancestors in the tjukurpa, the surface of the land is mutable, as is the sky. The visible transformation or sequence of transformations of colour at sunset, for example, is a 'concrete' manifestation and communication of Ancestral power in the present which women note, though not necessarily verbally (cf Jones and Meehan 1978). For example: Field notes F14;6 5th March 1998. The clouds have set in thickly south of Emabella. When we stop at Turkey Bore store the temperature has plummeted and some rain is falling. The wind is coming directly from the south blowing flame shapes of white dust at the car. The second range back from the road is obscured in white cloud, the setting sun orange behind them How often it seems I am going to or from inma with Apangu 87

and the sky is spectacular. Ws brain damaged (from petrol sniffing) daughter sits in the front between me and W and talks in Pitji about the 'kala' /colour of the sky. Tjintju (Y) /day is also 'sun' and. the general time of day is reckoned by its place in the sky. Pira (Y) /kinara (P), moon, also means (loosely) month. The imposition of and adaptation to European time is observed daily for working hours and their relation to meal times - breakfast, dinner and tea - and weekly, with regard to 'holidays' Iweekends. Many Aangu remain vague about the order of European names for months of the year and days of the week confusing similar sounding months, September and December say. The length of time that makes a year is also little used either as a concept or for reckoning. 19 Dates and anniversaries are thus redundant concepts.

Seasonal time

There is no start or finish to the series of seasons, but they follow one another, nyiflnga, piriya, and kuli 20 or cold, wind name and hot. Nyinga lice, frost /coldtime, roughly May to September which may also be rainy, a time when waru /firewood, is always in short supply as everyone must have a fire near them when sitting down. I am not clear how much control Aangu conceive that they have in turning the seasons. Influence seems to be more at a local level. Certainly at the advent of heavy rains in central Australia one hears of some old man /tjilpi or a group of women who claim to have sung it up.

Piriya is the warm wind that blows from the north and west. It was during this season that our neighbours moved away from their outstation and camped nearer to Katjikatjijara where it is warmer (the rock on warmer days giving out considerable heat), 'more trees and no wind'. This time, especially August and September is one of growth Iinuntji when kangaroo are plentiful and dingo pups Linguistically, Anangu have few terms for time; kuwan is now', the present, but that might not be' right this minute'. Kuwaripa is 'not yet but soon', this maybe the next hour or the next day, even week depending on the event being forecast Kuwaripa can make life for non Aborignals in an Aboriginal community. Told of some event for example, I would ask 'when?' and be told 'kuwanpa'. Mungatu is 'yesterday' or a few weeks or months ago, glossed recently'. Intl is years ago, a long time back, the time of childhood, if an adult is speaking or of one's parents or grandparents. The time when Aangu were naked and lived in the bush, though within living memory, is now 'iriti'. 20 Tindale (1972) using his 1933 Field notes, has the season after kuli when big rains have often fallen, as 'putu kalitja/green time claypans have water'.This is perhaps puti /bush i.e. country ('putu' means forget or not having), kalitja from English is glass! mirror (Goddard 1994), literally then 'bush mirror'. This is exactly what happens, the earth becomes a mirror when the claypans are full, but it is not a phrase I heard anyone use. 88

are born. People comment often on the Piriya, translating it as 'spring'. It is remembered by older people as the time when the doggers went out for scalps and received payment of flour, tobacco, and clothes, from the European arrivals in their country. It is a time when the potential of any earlier heavy rains is fulfilled and when the land is at its most fertile, although the hot time which will burn everything up is already being blown in.

Kuli is the hot time when, during December, January and February temperatures can reach mid forties in degrees centigrade. People remarked that the heat in the Northern Territory and Top End was 'kuli pulka' and unbearable whereas on the Lands, kuli tjuku tjuku /little heat. During kuli, in the past a time of refuge at permanent waters, 21 all growth stagnates. However it is during this time in some years that substantial falls of rain fill the creekbeds with water, and the country with energy. When I arrived in Ernabella, just after the huge downpour of January and February women began teaching me language via phrases that reflected their pride in the state of the country ;'wiru pull' beautiful hills, 'ukiri puflu' /green bushes, 'wintjiri ukiri' /green country. Everything that was dry will all become green and new, you'll see and after lots of flowers, ('piritipalawa tjua') they said. Field notesJune 30th 1997 To Kalka for the Opening of an old man with his 'neice' and 'younger sister' The ground all around Kalka is covered in yellow daisies on the green grass. The flowers have shiny petals and the yellow shimmers. The sisters tell me that 'Kalka yellow number 1' (thumbs up) In deed although Pipalyatjara is a short way away only there are far fewer flowers. At dinner time Alison tells me in English; 'We waited until the flowers came out then we knew it was the right time' (for the opening). Whenever we pass the yellow they exclaim. They ask Dora what Ernabella is like and she says green and they say to one another (all in Pit) Anapala ukin kuwan /Emabella is green now. On the way home she says 'only purple here,' (east of Amata /Ernabella where that purple pea flower covers the ground). From June to October, after heavy rains in December to January, the cold time, the ground will be covered in sheets of flowers (figs 16, 17, 18). These seem often to be of a single species in one place. Thus in August of this year, other

21

Tindale says of the past and the return to permanent waters during the dry time' the Pitjanjatjara turn to deep sand soaks and rock sheltered pools in the Mann and Peterman Ranges; the Yankunytjatjara always returned towards the Everard range waters (prior to the 1914 drought and the onset of pastoral settlement in 1919' (Tindale 1974 ; 65). My informants would include the Musgraves in the latter's country and waters. 89

women told me that Wingellina was blue, Kalka was violet, Pipalytjara was yellow and lndulkana yellow. Amata was now 'red' and Mimili 'blue'. Around Amata is a particularly vigourous covering of an imported New Zealand plant, with scarlet young leaves and red dock-like flowers. The blue around Mimili is sheets of blue-flowered storksbill. These colours are obviously transient, like those of the sunset, succeeding one another. The surface bloom mats are also considered to be indexical of Ancestral agency. This condition of brightly coloured flowers is replicated in mortuary ritual as I will discuss below (fig 9).

Time and events It is events and what happens after as a result, that are the focus of remembering and of structuring time. Periods of waiting are a usual and acceptable part of living. There seem, for example, to be innumerable delays, prevarication and pauses before a ceremony actually takes place. An inma must go as it should do so that the right results flow from it and its 'sequential and causal relation to other events' (Memmott 1979;482). Waiting for others is also a part of daily life. Human social events and land 'events', rain, fire, highly coloured sunsets, are associated and not separate. 'Events happen but to understand fully one must wait and see what flows from it' (Rose 1992; 226). Aangu are using 'B series' time, time structured by ' before 'and 'after' (an event) contrary to Bordieu's assertion that A series dominates in pre-modem and B series in modern societies (of Gell 1996; 292). This is important because colours are used in sets which are 'series' (colour A will become B), and these relate to events and what follows from them, especially with regard to the colour flux of the land and people's emotional attachment to it. Myers writes of the Pintupi; 'Niether 'camp' not 'country' exist apart from the significance created by action or event, but country retains an identity enduring through time as something beyond human choice' (1991;55). Again, I would argue that the surface of country changes (although it is beyond human choice), whilst, in other aspects it does retain an enduring identity. Yet that identity's very endurance is effective for Aangu, in its surface flux of colour. 90

As to the sets of colours which are used as part of ritual knowledge to denote a particular Dreaming site on a track (see Section 4), and refer to the transformations that took place there; it is not clear to me whether these are 'series A' or 'series B.' That is, are these colours, which are symbolic representations of what took place, simultaneously present, because they are all in the time of the Dreamings, as in Gell's example of the spuriousness of series A time, 'A cup of tea is not simultaneously hot warm and cold', or are they in fact a sequence, A becomes B? (Gell 1996;157). From Gell 1996;157: A

B

Time = future, present, past Basic ideas, passage becoming Time is dynamic Truth time dependent

Time = before vs after Being four dimensional space time Time is not dynamic Truth not time dependant

B Pastness, presentness and futureness are not real characteristics of events but arise from out relation to them as conscious subjects A There are basic (ontological) differences between past present and future transformation is the same one (Morphy 1995;314). The continuous changes in the flux of colours of land and sky, mean that transformations to the permanently fixed Ancestral topography are always occurring over time. These transformations can only be predicted in general terms, following an event, rain for example. Sunsets, although predictable as a daily event, may not necessarily create a coloured sky; cloudy weather (allied to rain) is more likely to do this.

An ability to change colour is indexical of Ancestral power, and the way the land surface changes in terms of everyday lived experience is a concrete demonstration of the agency of Ancestors in the present. Aboriginal Christianity has also become implicated in this system of colour communication (see below). Ancestors are then, like God, present in everyday time not in 'parallel' time. What these colours, that is individual hues, the relation of hues and the succession of them, mean I do not know, although red is considered the strongest. There is, though, a message in the colours about the Law. This is an aspect of Ancestral power that belongs to the secret and sacred and is 91

therefore not publicly talked about. Are we to conclude then that the land/body remains the same but the skin /surface changes?

Land and place 'To live is to leave traces' wrote Wafter Benjamin about the interior of buildings (quoted in Colimina 1991;74). For nomadic Aboriginal hunter-gathers those traces of living are left directly on the land surface and the notion of 'inside' and 'outside' also exist, but as concepts directly about the topography. Transformation and motility are central motifs in Aangu conceptions about the world. The motif of transformation as traces of a stoppage in the motility of an Ancestor, a site of accumulated actions, is central to the notion of ngura, although there is an exception in the Ancestor called the waflampi, Rainbow or water serpent, where the whole track may have created creek bed. The whole earth though, not just tjukurpa sites, is imbued with the power of the Dreamings, as they went into the ground for good. Munn writes; 'The Aborigines relate the ancestor to his transformations, either by reference to the process of transformations itself (e.g. A becomes B), or to the state of identification which results (A and B are 'the same thing') (1971 ;143). These 'rules' about the order of things are applied to other coloured artefacts in the context of daily routine.

Ngura has many scales of meaning in relation to sites, but means a place where one belongs (Myers 1991;55, Hamilton 1980;15)). A ngura can be other kinds of location than a Dreaming site, one made by the living, animal or human, a camp, the place where a malu scuffs the earth when it sits in the lee of a bush, maluku ngura or tjulpuku ngura, a bird's nest.

It refers to what Stanner glossed as an 'estate' (cf Stanner 1965;2) and a person who has rights to that place is nguraritja, in Australian law, now legally enshrined as Traditional Owner. 22 A ngura as country, has as its hypothetical

In the past Aarigu did not move at random across the country; their travels were governed by belonging to the group from that ngura. The group hold that ngura and are linked together by common descent, not always patrilinealy (Layton 1989;39). This kind of information is now only talked of in the context of land claims and I did not amass information regarding it. 92

centre, from which the whole area takes its name, a dreaming site. Part of this feature, or near it, is a reliable water source; 'Ancestral tracks mostly but not invariably following the known permanent and impermanent waterhole routes' (Berndt, R. 1959;97).

In the literature, it is frequently said that it is the Dreaming ngura that structure the whole landscape (Cf Casey I 996).23 These centres are concentrated areas of Ancestral power which radiate their influence outwards, have no linear boundaries between them but are situated, cognitively, as relational to adjacent sites. A location is spoken of as 'outside'! urila or 'inside'! uungu (uungu also means 'underneath') the main ngura. Munn states that concurrently (with Ancestral mark making on the land) 'the landscape is created with an interior ('inside/underneath') dimension as ancestors go 'inside' where they remain hidden yet available to externalisation in contemporary ritual performance' (1992;1 13) . 24 25

Aangu distinguish the topographical features; puti /bushland, tali26 /sandhills, apu (Y) /pu!i (P) mountains, hills and outcrops, karu /watercourses. These are used as navigational aids and as boundaries, 'puli munkara'! meaning the other side of the hill, for example. There are many general linguistic similes about land and bodies, ranges of hills, as backbone, sand MIs as bald heads !kata tali, and plant growth as body hair for example. Not all features of country are classed as 'tjukurpa' or Dreaming places. There are also features made by humans and these too are shown.

Those who did the showing were my adopted kin or malpa /friend and the country that they 'showed' was theirs. Showing country like this means pointing out and naming turkurpa features as well as places, cattle wells, fences, honey In his only criticism of Myers, Casey following Aristotle argues, that place must precede space. Places are not carved out blank 'space' as Myers suggests of the Pintupi (Casey 1996) but says Casey precede it. 24 Memmott (1979;482) also records these inside! outside classifications for the lardil of Queensland where terretonal notions pertain to them 25 Munn is here implying that the Ancestors are in a parallel time. Sandhill country is west beyond Amata, and to the south, and along the northern approach to Ayers Rock. Many of the Pitjantjatjara who settled in Ernabella came from this country to the west, with its miles of parallel sandhills , so that many Emabella Aangu hold ngura in that direction. (An acrylic painting by Nyukana Baker of Malila and her travels through the sandhills shows them as many discrete coloured, dotted areas). 93

ant pits that they themselves created with their own labour. I want to avoid the term inscription here with its connotations of writing on the land (Connerton 1989). The cattle fences that many Aangu laboured to build, either as employees of the Ernabella mission or adjacent private cattle stations, Mulga Park and Kenmore are also noted as mark making on the land (Young 1998). The straightness of a fence line is admired particularly, by its creators.

Tjukurpa sites are distinctive, different in some way, in contrast to surrounding country. A rock may be of a different colour or texture or shape from those around, liable to catch the sun in a certain way at a sunset, sunrise, or some point during the day, or become transformed after rain and by fresh plant growth. It is a coherent figure against the scribble of the bush. Ayers Rock is famous for this mutability among the many tourists who come to watch it 'perform', but this aspect is equally important to Aangu, though because of the manifestation of Ancestral agency, not aesthetics (fig.61 ). Aangu also admire the different coloured low sand-hills that cover the southerly approach to the rock and form a contrast to it in shape and colour. Payne working with Ernabella women from the 1970's on, found that the tjukurpa sites viewed on a satellite map were the most colourful, that is, fertile in their region and that, 'the Dreaming path followed the only major line of fertility in an otherwise arid environment'. Payne means colourful in the sense of many different features represented by colour codes, but this is pertinent to my argument in that fertility and fecundity are marked by their colourfulness (Payne 1989;45-6). Dreaming sites then are colourful in terms of their fertility, often because they are a water source, and colourful in terms of the way light strikes them, that is in a temporal sense. A site may also contain colourfully iconic substances. Field notes May 1998 On the way home Z. asks 'nyuntu nyaakunjakitja?' do you want to see? Directing me off the road towards one of a pair of itara /bloodwood trees, 'Minymaku Law', (women's) she takes my hand and walks me anti clockwise round the tree. It has a big trunk which comes almost horizontal out of the ground then splits into twothe thighs /tjunta of a woman who is buried head down /kata tjaru (in the ground). She tells me to walk further round the tree to see and indeed the V of the two trunks looks like the genitals of a woman. 'Karkar' says J laughing. The tree is an unusual shape for a bloodwood and is laden with green gum nuts and all 5 of us set too harvesting them.27 27 The gum nuts, like quondong seeds are used by women to make painted necklaces for the market. It is not possible to include analysis of these in this thesis. 94

Muur-muurpa (Y) /itara (P) Ibloodwood trees exude red sap when cut, thus confirming their similarity with, or identity as, bodies. There seem to be many female Ancestors who became bloodwood. A tjukurpa site may be tiny or huge, from pebbles to rocks not much larger than an adult person, to mountains. There may be patterns and contrasting marks that are the transformed possessions (i.e. gendered tools of), or body part of, the tjurkurpa; a vüiof white quartz in a darker rock a woman's digging stick on her body, for example. Such marks may be visible from a distance, or be small enough to need intimate scrutiny. Two women lying down back to back, their tjiwa and tjungari, (grindstone and base) in front of each became a mountain. Many tjukurpa sites are a part of the Ancestors body, a synecdote but also a topology of the body. For example where an Ancestral woman sat down her vulva is a rock hole. A thigh or hand or head or a tail might also be the part that was transformed before the Ancestor moved on. Fluids ejected from inside the Ancestor's body may also have become the site, vomit or blood for example. It is often these which form the deposits of ochres used to make body paints; red and yellow ochre and white pipe clay. The surface qualities of the land feature are important, grass or other plant growth may be the hair, beard and eyebrows of the Ancestor. A site that was pointed out to me by several different women as the 'crack' between nose and mouth which resembled that on the face of the man whose dreaming it is. Aangu conceive bodies from above. Strehlow (1964) in (quoted in Brody 1984) understood that the Aranda (sic) had, as a result of looking down to track, developed the habit of looking down upon a landscape and not from the side as we do. When I gave disposable cameras, which people like to use, the resulting snaps people took of one another were a dynamic inter-twining of family bodies with no thought of the western convention for framing, no concession to verticals and horizontals 28 This is important in understanding figures and images and the facility with which Anangu read maps and aerial photographs.

28

Some of the photographs Anangu took with my camera shown in this thesis also exhibit this sort of dynamic. 95

Tracks The track of an Ancestor, made as she moved through country, link the sites as a sequential string of places. To imagine Ikulini a place is to recall it in relation to its connectivity to others and to those adjacent along its track. The track an Ancestor made between places is 29 not necessarily a straight line although in certain contexts they may be represented like this. Often the tracks were wandering ones, the Ancestor doubling back on herself and meeting others at various points, which were transformed into sites. Children especially played games with string figures looped across the hands but, unlike Milpatjunanyi, the 'putting down the stick' game (see Section 4), the making of these complicated spatial figures now seems uncommon 30. The tracks made by cars are a concrete marker of the linkage between places that the driver has made. Their linearity, the 'stringyness' of their continuous tyre marks, is thus an important form of mark making on the land and one that is noted with interest (see Section 3). String and hair, like tracks, are considered to bind people materially together, manifesting and mediating their relatedness to one another and to the land. In certain dangerous places or sacred situations, following in the track of others may be socially safer. These situations today are most prominent in rituals surrounding a person's death.

The tracks of airplanes across the sky are pointed out, like those of cars on the earth. Lightning and rainbows are sky tracks of colour and brightness and are especially potent manifestations of Ancestral power connecting the sky and the earth (cf Rose 199 94-96). Both are sacred. String as an artefact thus has many meanings adhering to it, both motion and attachment, rapidity and binding.

Living on the land Field notes April 1998 Camping in Emabella Back at camp in Emabella as soon as we light the fire people drift over. Mayningka's 2 part-time petrol sniffing sons, N's niece (untalpa/daughter), Renita, Straight lines are used notably in the representation of the Tingari Dreaming of the Pintupi (cf Myers 1999) and men's secret sacred boards (see Spencer and GiUen 1899 for example) but also in boards made by both men and women during the I 960s for sale through the Emabella craft room although women said that theirs were not 'anything'. 3° I saw a boy who lives in the far west of the lands making these on one occasion, but that was all. Both Mountford and later the Wallaces have photographs of Aangu making these. Photographs in the State Library of South Australia and mentioned in 'Children of the DeserV P & N Wallace 1968, Thomas Nelson Australia. 96

Margery Quentin and ijamiwa. Julie eats most of Mayningka's tjala, 'Julienya tjalaku manyu' (she is greedy for honey ants) says small M. Renita eats Nuna's(her mother). Tjaa wiru kala wiru (lovely honey ants, lovely colour) she says .We have returned early because of the evening church inma. We all crowd round one fire covered over with a large piece of bent reinforcing wire whilst kuka (chops from the store) is cooked on it and 3 billies boiled for tea. The usual cry goes up tea leaf yaaltji? I supply some. Nuna gives me tea in a large very dirty pannikin. Later she opens her white sliced store loaf and hands out 2 slices to all the children. Mayningka is wrapped in a blanket one arm free like the picture of the woman in a possum fur cloak in Victoria in the I 890s. As a whitefella, it is easy always to be caught out with this rapid eating routine. No washing up - bits of cardboard box that brought things from the store utilised if a plate is needed. The camp dogs, constantly shouted at "paipai/ paiiii!" still sit around the fire looking expectant. After eating at one fire, Nuna takes a fire stick and starts another fire some way off for her immediate family camp which includes me The night was very cold. N and I sleep on the ground at right angles to one another round the fire, in our swags. Nuna is sharing her single mattress with her 3 grandchildren, I girl, 2 boys. Throughout the night there are protests from her' tili wiya ' no flames the fire's gone out, Quentin don't kick me, Tjamiwa has taken all the blankets etc etc. We wake up frozen, ninnga /frost on the swags, the dogs trying to sleep on top of us. Nuna has a new blanket from Victory Downs store, 'kala wiru' /lovely colour, Its that fake fur pile, in peach colour with large print of some wild cat, vaguely leopardy, in black. A dog knocks over some bujng charcoal and Nuna's swag momentarily catches alight holing the blanket. Mayningka's is the first fire going in the morning and Nura and Inkajili sent by Nuna, are all cadging lights from it using bits of cardboard box. From Nuna's box of store food, safe in my car since yesterday, lnkajili opens a can of spaghetti hoops and a can of rice cream using my knife plus a tin of spam. All are put in the fire to warm, the spaghetti hoops and meat put into Nuna's metal bowl, which yesterday held tjala, now cleaned out with sand and rinsed. M's naked grandson keeps coming over to show me his toy petrol tanker, red cab, white body with 'ampol' on the side just like the real thing. Freshly cooked damper appears from Mayningka's camp. The dogs salivate. Inkajili tears hers into little pieces and floats them in her tea, Quentin and Tjamiwa take mounds of sweet biscuits from the packet in Nuna's box. Margery says that dog has a face like a monkey, lnkajili says wiya purunpa mingkiri —like a mouse.

Manta (Y) IPana (P) /earth People continue to 'live on the ground' sitting, lying, and in the cooler months, sleeping on it, as well as urinating close to camps, in the bush or on homelands (Munn 1973). Except in extreme weather, people prefer to have their skin in contact with the earth and keep their feet bare and this is most important for dancing. Many people choose to have furniture inside their houses, but prefer to sit on the earth when outside. The exception here seems to be Church inma and other public meetings where white plastic chairs are sometimes used in the centre of the community. 97

The red-orange earth, 'manta', whose colour Aangu rarely comment on verbally, registers all movement across its surface. The contact made with the ground as people, Ancestors or living animals and birds travel across it, is of primary practical and spiritual importance (Munn 1973). The traces made by human feet, animal tracks and car tyres are all tjina (lit. 'feet') /tracks. Just as Aangu can recognise whose bare feet have made contact with the ground, the patterns on an individual's shoe soles are also recognised as similarly the pattern on a particular car's tyres. Whilst sitting chatting, women often draw or beat time on the earth with a curved twig or piece of fence wire, milpa. Watson has recently emphasised the tactility in the registration of mark making, on the earth, on rocks, on human skin and on canvas and the association of touch with vibration and sound (Watson 1999). Types of earth are classified by their tactile qualities. Directly after light rain, sandy ground takes very clear prints of who or whatever has passed across it and is known as 'manta palya' /good ground because of the ease of tracking animals. The hard, bare ground of collapsed termite nests 'putu' is used for threshing. Tjilka /prickly burrs are another common hazard in sand and in an area of these, Anangu try to camp in where the sand is fine and clean, manta wiru (lovely sand). A substantial fall of rain will erase tracks together. As it may not rain like this for months, or even years, at a time, tracks can remain visible for that period but rains wipe the ground clear for fresh narratives to become imprinted into it. Strong winds causing dust storms are also said to 'clean' the land in this way too. The earth, imbued as it is with Ancestral power seems thought of as always forgiving, cleansing 31 . Scouring pans and metal containers, mugs, biflycans etc, cleaning a babies bottom and in the past absorbing menstrual blood, are all uses to which sand is put.

'Cleaning' the ground means ridding it of all plant growth, rubbish and tracks and the fenced paddock enclosing homelands houses, may be cleaned using a tractor and attachment which rakes the first foot of sand, returning it to a pristine surface. This is to make walking barefoot easier but also a protection against much feared snakes. The sons-in-law of our neighbours were deputed by their parents-in-law to clear the build up of litter on the ground of their 98

homeland - mostly packaging from western goods - in a way that in the past would have been done by rain or wind. This was done when the homeland was empty after something had happened elsewhere, a death, treatment at the clinic, to make everyone move temporarily into town. Their renewed occupation of the place begins without previous traces of their life on the ground, as happens after rain and dust storms. The residence of a deceased person is especially thoroughly cleaned (see below).

Fire Almost whenever Aangu sit down, nyinanyi /nyinakatinyi, is accompanied by making a fire, indeed making a fire means making a 'ngura', however temporary. The ashes of an old fire are another form of mark making on the land that people point out. A fire not only provides heat and light, and cooking fuel but animates a place and is used as a centre, around which people cluster.32

Anangu, even on a 'dinner' (midday) or tea time camp on an afternoon bush trip in the hot time, light small fires to sit around. The black charcoal and white ash remains of old camp fires survive long after the campers have left, maybe for years. Branding wood carvings - puu - making tea, cooking all require a fire and small fires are often lit in the yards of houses. At night and on cooler days any prolonged sitting, at inma, church or traditional, eating or gossiping necessitate a fire. Sometimes, as in a crowd, many tiny fires are lit among groups of people so that one's back and front are both warmed. Sleeping between two fires, or one in front is still common and a reason for people preferring to sleep outside even in cold weather 33. Although people have no longer any reason to carry fire sticks around with them, one fire is used to light

31

despite campaigns by health educators, to, for example, 'use the toilet, help fight disease' making a model of an old style wiltja for me, to show how they lived in the past, women animated the tiny model with a fire. The new standard model of house supplied by the Aboriginal Housing Unit (SA) have enclosed wood burning stoves but many older houses have no provision for real fires inside. Rubbish is burnt up outside in 44 gallon drums The SA government introduced plastic wheelie bins to the Lands in 1998, thereby necessitating much leafleting by the various AP admin. Bodies, prevailing on the people not to bum things in them, let children swim in them etc. 32

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others in the vicinity, as in the account above, either using hot coats taken on a shovel, or a piece of waru or cardboard as a light.

Fire making is a cultural practice which a person cannot survive without knowing and it was the first skill women taught me. Tiny twigs and dry grass are used as kindling, scraped into a shallow depression in the earth, and overlaid with specially chosen firewood. Wau' means fire and also firewood. Fallen timber from mulga trees /wanari or kurku is the main preferred source, the wood being dry but not termite holed and crumbly; this is 'waru wiya' /not wau. Often old fallen mulga wau is coated in hard red dust deposited there, I was told, by white ants. Other timbers such as ironwood /utjanypa, can also be used. This is often employed during ceremony for creating very bright burning bonfires full of spark showers.

The constant cry, especially of the old, and those without cars, during the winter, is waru wiya! No firewood! The size and type of waru is carefully chosen to suit the desired result. At night, in cold weather, whole tree trunks are burnt, the log moved into the fire during the night by someone in the camp who wakes with the cold. At night fires provide light as well as heat; dark moonless nights are feared as a time when mamu are about.

Matches and cigarette lighters are now habitually used to start fires and if I did not carry these, no fire could be made by women35. Much mention had been made of traditional practices of firing the land to regenerate plant growth and thus bring game into the area or firing an area to flush out game living there (e.g. Latz 1995, Layton 1986, Gould 1971). This is part of a body of practices embraced by AP Land Management and stated as an ideal, by women. I asked a man who was a bush ranger about it. Field notes ' At the annual Emabella sports day, one of the side shows' is a man, demonstrating firemaking using dried rabbit dung and a piece of split dry wood. I have never managed to see this. triti, along way back, before rabbits, fire was made with dry kangaroo dung and a spear thrower (Gould 1971;16). Aangu assume that a car will have a cigarette lighter as part of the ignition kit on the dashboard. This association of car engine with fire is mentioned further in Section 3.1 on cars. I saw women fire the ground only whilst out honey anting, to kill kajjuka, a large orange and black ant with a painful bite, and their nests. 100

Asked about fire management Nyaa? tjanpi? What? Yes, burning off the spinifex. You do it in winter, not now, too hot and the wind might blow, but in winter you get up early and get a matchi and it goes really quickly, finished by dinner time munu ukiri wiru, munu ma!u tjuta purkulpa /lovely green (growth) and all the malu are happy. The blackening of the land is followed by bright green growth; for a while both colours are present. The colour series black /green /orange, which perhaps alludes to fired land, is common in hats (see Section 3.2).

Some women living in the south of the Lands, who consider themselves 'spinifex people' claim they never burnt off country (Stotz 1997). Stotz concludes that burning off may be a practice imported with the newcomers from the west. Burning a sacred site is considered a very serious assault on a place, as is burning a person's clothing (see Section 3.2).

'The point is that the act of burning over this sacred site, whether intentional or not, was regarded as an affront to the totemic spirits which reside in that place.'(Gould 1971). On the occasion that I saw this done, the police from Maria Bore were called in by the woman who was custodian of the site. 'Bush fires' are also started by lightning (see below): Field notes Fire May 1997. Photographs Had one film developed, showed the photographs to I. There were the abandoned vehicle collection, sunsets and KK environs shots. I. took the sunset ones and N said 'bushfire!' I've never seen a bush fire I told her, its a sunset. Was indeed a flame shaped cloud, illuminated in yellow and scarlet. 'Really white here' she said marvelling, pointing to a bit in the centre of the light show (fig.15). Smoke is used to 'set' the 'new' skin of initiated boys and of new born babies and of sick people. Field notes; Initiation camp, October 1997; We demolish four punti shrubs about 4 feet high, hacking off the branches 3 feet or so long. Piled in the back of the car with me they do have a slightly acrid smell en masse. Back at the inma ground these are laid at the ends of the log 'tables' in a series across in front of the women's camps. They are lit and produce an acrid thick smoke, which billows towards the place where the boys are. The 'new men' (see Section 3.2), run towards these fires at the very end of their initiation ceremony complex. Women with flu' lay by smoking fires all day.

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Dussart, working with Waripiri women in Yuendemu, was told that the four colours, red, yellow black and white, come from fire (Dussart and Anderson 1988). This is certainly so —red and yellow are its flame - and black and white its products. However this exclusive suggestion is perhaps made in a place where the relevant Dreaming is more important.

Rocks The identity of Ernabella as a place is tightly bound up with its 'pull wiru', its lovely hills, as are Amata and Mimili with their hills. Although the ranges and rocks appear red close too, they are considered to be 'blue' in the distance (fig 11). Field notes 1997 When the hills near Amata come into view D tells me Amata pu are blue. On the way back she says now she has seen them she is happy, 'they are always blue 'purunpa ilkan' /like the sky', she says. Field notes date I 997Amata to Mutijulu N. wanted photos of 'those really blue flowers' and we came on a patch of them near Ayers Rock. She knew where they were growing. 'Short cut road, not Curtain Springs way' (the tourist route). 2 roads, one windy through the Amata homelands, the other direct. 'See that blue rock' (in the distance) says S., 'Ayers Rock'. Puli (P) or apu (Y) applies to anything from a piece of grit to a mountain. Tjiwa and tjungara, the grinding stone and base used until whiteman's flour made it redundant, was used by women to process seeds. Walu /smooth rock patches occur, often near rockholes, where grinding has taken place over many hundreds of years. Transforming their scale, grinding stones often turn into cave shelters in stories.

The rock where we lived is known affectionately as 'little Ayers Rock'. Like Ayers Rock it turns dark in heavy rain, purplish brown and then blackish. If the sun comes out after rain, the rock quickly transforms back to a pinkish orange but the many streams of run-off appear black. Harney records the black stains There are many children's and adult's too drawings of the elevational type (akin to Namatjira) from the I 960s onwards showing the hills a round Emabella as each a different colour or as blue and purple in the distance and red in the foreground. I am unable to reproduce these drawings here for copyright reasons. They are in collections of the National Museum in

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on Ayers Rock as mnemonic for a 'chant' (Harney 1969). Kapi wala (literally 'fast') is spring water, or run-off. The glitter of the ranges after rain followed by a sunny day is made by kapi wala escaping from hollows and crevices, which Aangu point out.

As well as concealing water holes, springs and caves /kulpi, rocks endow the ground around with their run-off. The run-off area around rocks is greener for longer and more fertile than surrounding plains. The wide green line around the base of Ayers Rock, for example, is known as an area of abundant growth and therefore good food. The perimeter of a rocky outcrop remains as a thin green line of grasses long after rains and is the first to brighten at the slightest new fall of water. Plants like the resurrection fern, which appears dead and brown, suddenly unfurl lush fronds and seeds germinate. This coloured outline is represented in the first children's drawings done at Ernabella school (Section 4). Jenni Dudley, a former Ernabella Arts co-ordinator, suggests rocks as resistance, likening them to the wax resist of batik produced by women (Dudley 1997). Country around rocks is thus at certain times after rains red (rock, hills) yellow (the dried grassland furthest from the rock) and green (the run-off area). Kanti /white quartzite was shaped and used for cutting and as a multipurpose tool embedded with resin into the end of a man's spearthrower. Quartz adze are still found lying about; Field notes Fl I ;28 8th Nov 1997 Suddenly something white. S tells me the name of this rock. A clump of white quartz kanti, about 10 foot long, a collection of boulders protruding from the earth. I ask what it is. S sends D round and points out 'knife' among the chippings, a parallelogram of translucent white with 2 sharp edges at right angles to one another but in different planes. Nuna holds it and makes the downwards motion "atula atula!* iriti wira, piti, miru all made with this. 'Who, Aangu Pitjantjatjara7 'Uwa Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara Antankarinja, everyone' says

S. And at the end of the mini (spear thrower) too. *Atuni means to chop or make a wooden implement but also to hail, pelt down (Goddard 1996). The white crystalline kanti is considered analogous to hail. Rocks of all sizes are common tjukurpa sites. I want to discuss a 'new' Dreaming site. The idea that specific tjukurpa features of the land are timeless and unchanging in shape, has been shown to also accommodate historical

Canberra, and the State Library thesis.

of

South Australia and are not otherwise mentioned in this 103

change. Both Myers (1991 ;53) and Rose (1992;207) for example (cf ,Rose and Swain 1988 ) suggest that change can be accommodated so long as they are assimilated to pre-existing forms. Dreaming Number '3' is an 'open' example of 'new' tjukurpa, similar to that described by Myers, except that this one is a Christian dreaming site. This pu!i /rock was shown to me at the start of my fieldwork, by Aangu who claimed it as their puli and was shown to me again, by the same people, on many subsequent occasions. Even if no one else mentioned it, they always looked across at it as we drove past and the car track, as often in 'open' sites, goes right up to it (fig.14). Field notes The rock is a split open boulder, grey (granite?) about 3 metres across with mica chips in it, where all the others boulders around are red. On the rock are faded figures. K remains in the car whilst F and daughter no 3 show me 'number 26, a cross, number 3, puu' tracing the figures with their hands. The puu is a faded blue area on the right. K's grandson, who is tall, living in Adelaide and going to become a minister and is coming to Ernabella tomorrow, had a dream. In the dream this big pui had rolled slowly down from the hill at whose base it now sits. There is another one like this near Amata. The dream is because Aangu are doing the wrong things, taking 'the wrong road". F & K have an exchange as to when he dreamt this. F says 1993 or 94, K says 96. F turns to me and says '96, 97". On another drive-past I learnt that the figure '3' becomes 'uti 3'o'clock'. Before 3pm the figures are hard to see, but after three o'clock in the afternoon, they become clear38. I was invited to take photographs by the relatives of the dreamer. I do not understand the riddle of the numbers and if I asked I was teased. I was told in 1997 that the world might end in 3 years time in 2000. Whatever the message presumably it is understood by those encultured to know it, and shows the contemporary linkage of morality, Christianity and country via a local site habitually passed and therefore acting as a constant reminder. That is, Christianity and tjukurpa Anangu often say are 'same thing' so the former must also be located in country. The rock is not 'on a track' in the sense of a Dreaming track, but literally beside the road, a connection between the two things, a road and a tjukurpa track, that I think Anangu make39.

Numbers (acquired Arabic ones) are used frequently, especially counting on's children, or different types of things, such as Kangaroo. This seems to be an additional way of remembering things, allied to digits of the hand. 104

Water In observer's records, the area named by whites as the Peterman and Mann Ranges, is described as harsh and suffering badly in drought years.(cf Duguid 1972 quoted in Layton 1989). It does seem that the Musgraves provide a better watered environment than the country to the west (Cf Tindale 1972, Hamilton 1980). It is probable that Aboriginal people did die in numbers during prolonged drought. Access to a reliable potable water supply is the single most important criteria enabling permanent communities to exist now in the Western Desert. The provision of water is sometimes given precedent by Ajangu, over the preservation of sacred sites. Before settlement, the nomads' knowledge of water, especially dependable water holes, was paramount for survival. The distance people were able to cover was directly proportional to the frequency of water sources available. There are though, many more facets to water sources and rain than this functional analysis would imply. With the advent of heavy rain, that within half an hour turns dirt roads to mud and leaves big pools on the surface of the earth, the land is saturated with colour as well as water. Not only is the earth cleaned of all tracks and traces, but the water standing on the ground, once the sand is saturated, gives eyes or mirrors to the land, opening another dimension (fig 7). The smell of gum oils that have accumulated during the dry period, rise into the air. All these are the instant results of rain but there are also various assumptions that Aangu make about how things will evolve after the event of rain. Firstly how the country will become green 'ukiri wiru'. Thus bright greens are synonymous with water and times of plenty for Aangu and the anticipation of the bush foods that they will eat, all beginning a cycle of growth after rains.

The bright green of new plant growth is thus an association with new things, and also an association with young things in Anangu's conception. 'lnuntji' is a term that covers new growth, and blossom is included in this. Such new growth occurs only where there is moisture, either in the shade, or because of water, either as rain or present under the surface of the earth. Bright green is thus not only symbolic of wetness and growth but also is indexical of both of these. That is, bright green in any context, is synonymous with plant growth and moisture and therefore fertility, and all that this implies, for Aangu. The linkage of the See Section 3.1.

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odiferous vapourised Eucalypt oils with the smell of land as the rain falls, is thus a highly auspicious one. The mimesis of this green smell of the land is in the application of 'bush medicine', ('irmangka —irmangka') fragrant fat, rubbed into skin. The internal consumption of odiferous greenness is via chewing of mingkulpa /wild tobacco. I return to these below. 'Ukiri wiru' or in English 'really green' is a phrase people often use about country, or plants. Field notes Fl 5;23 August 1998 Play waterholes. Whilst I was unloading, Pauline's grandson and grand daughter were busy. They and another little girl, all about 6 or 7years old dug some small holes and started to uproot the very green parkilpa plants and place them around the edges. The boy dug up a small plant of pink flowering everlasting daisies and replanted it near the hole. Look he said to me in Pitji and pointed out a blue flowered plant he was about to add to the collection, 'Ukin wiru* I made some apparently inappropriate comment and he laughed and said; 'Nyuntu rama rama /you're mad!' Later, I realised that they were making a pretend water hole. They had carefully put bits of bark across the top of the hole as should be done with logs to protect the water source from pollution by animals. They had made it green and floriferous. *literally green lovely Tjukula /rockholes and are often sacred sites. These can range from tiny scoops a few feet across to pools large enough for many children to swim in. Kapi wipu is a rockhole shaped like a tail (e.g. of kangaroo, perentie lizard). Warku is the water that collects in shallow puddles on rock surfaces during rain, remaining for a short time only (fig 8). Field notes taught me the names of lots of rocks that we passed. After rain, water lying on the rock is called warku. ' Ngawa tjukulu apungka ! (Look at that water hole on the rock), Look its really blue' It's a slot, a long pointed shape- kapi wipu ,Iit. water tail- in a fold of the rock only a foot across maybe 10 foot long. Land management have cleaned it. Its sides and along the top are white with nyu-nyu /zebra Finch guano. Often the water in a rockhole is blackish but it is idealised as 'blue' and as reflecting the blue sky above. People pointed out rockholes, as they do above, 'Can you see, really blue?'

After prolonged or sudden heavy rains, creeks flow and vast volumes of water flow through them. This initial flow of rivers, filled with sand from the red land, is a deep brownish red. Creekbeds dry out quickly but water remains in and is replenished in rockholes and soakages, but also in clay pans. Pans, which seem to be often or always on Dreaming tracks, are circular depressions of clay 106

that hold shallow water for many months after rain. They are points of fertility, attracting much wildlife, kangaroos and budgerigars, and supporting their own e.g. the tiny pink shrimps whose eggs lie dormant under the sand between rains. On still evenings claypans work like a convex mirror, only opportunity of seeing oneself, in the past, providing a double, like a person's shadow. To drink from a water source on the ground or from a mimpu/bowl one lies down to drink, a double coming up to meet you.

Karu /river is the largest but for most of the time creekbeds are dry. However for some months after good rains digging down in the creek bed will yield water. Tadpoles and frogs are regarded as harbingers of water. Field notes 3l Jan 1998 Out for Punu Palpable heat; walls of it. We go to find the uu pulka, big water hole in the creek The 2 children dig the creek sand and about one foot down the small circular hole —uru - fills with sandy brown water. One of the children mimes lying down to drink from it for me, the tourist. A tin bowl is produced and water from the uru passed round - kapi wiru. N starts on an inti monologue we were never sick malu ngalkupai (always eating kangaroo). At the bottom of the water holes are scores of black tadpoles. M. draws them in the sand, though she scribbles inside the outline to indicate blackness 'upupilypa' pronounced upupiinpa or kurtjikurtji. Later the kids come running very excited they have found 'uu pulka mulapa' /a really big waterhole. In the middle of the creek where 2 puflu trenches have been dug is a big pond of brown water bifurcated by the white tree trunk of the gum. One side they point out is wari (cold) and the other utjunpa (warm) There are masses of tadpoles here and frogs (nannggi) and froglets and Anrupa's son digs them out then bops them on the head with a gum leaf edge so that they dig themselves in backwards and disappear again. M goes off further down the creek towards the water hole and digs out a pile of small diameter roots, the ones that still have dusky pink bark. She wants to show me the clear water running out of them. Sara picks one up (they're about a metre long) and holds the end above her mouth and lets the drops fall in, then Anrupa's son. This water is so clear and cool. We leave just before dusk, a hawk is screeching and there are bird tracks all around the water holes. The roots of the red river gum, whose procurement was the purpose of the trip above, are used for carving puu. The roots chosen are those with moist and red centres, as opposed to dried out roots with brownish centres. Like the red tracks of honey ants (see below), this is redness as moisture.

Anangu are quick to distinguish kapi /mina (P) wiru, good water from kapi kura

t° bad water for drinking and will drive several kilometres off an intended route ° .'kapi kura' is also used to refer to alcohol. 107

to procure kapi or mina wiru. The homeland where I lived was reputed to have poor water although it had passed the various statutory tests for quality. This water is from a large aquifer and tastes very mineral, 'make your guts ache' we were told and it did. If I wanted to keep the stored water intact from the constant claims of those with me the car, I had only to say (I was advised by Aangu on this strategy) that it was from that homeland and it would not be drunk. The criteria for bad water then is that it makes your guts ache /tjuni pika at best, and at worst gives you diarrhea. Some community chauvinism operates here, so that Emabellaku kapi /water from Emabella taps is regarded as fine. However Fregon is reputed by those from Ernabella to have kapi kura as well as being 'lanma', a horrible place where everyone is always fighting. Mina wiru is most often 'not bore water' from springs or fresh rain water, and tanks are used to collect it.

People who remember growing up on the Mission, talk of the 'swimming pools', the big rock holes in the ranges where they used to swim as children (fig. 5). Many of these rock holes are now too small for such pursuits. The children washed everyday before school in cold water from a hose, before taking their place in school without clothing (see Section 3.2). The contact with water is also connected to baptism into the Christian church. People often asked us 'were you baptised?' Today, children have inflatable, often blue and white, paddling pools bought from stores in Alice or Adelaide. Or they swim in water tanks during hot weather, or 44 gallon drums. Stand taps are often just left running by Anangu. Toddlers frolic in the resulting 'uru', big sandy puddles for hours on end. When the creeks flow, and at the sea side, 'uru pulka', women lie down in the water fully clothed. In Section 3.2 I will show how wearing blue clothes seems to be a symbolic resurfacing of the body evoking that of immersion in water.

Donkeys and horses gravitate to settlements and their water tanks during the hot dry times of year and are nois y at night and destructive41 . However I was

41

One of the reasons for fencing off homeland compounds is to keep wild donkeys and horses out. As well as noisily seeking water during the dry season, donkeys munch their way through homeland gardens with great rapidity, so these too are fenced. There are few wild camels in this part of the Lands. 108

told similar stories to that b\ow' many times. This linkage of the Christian God with water and the greenness of the land is very important and one I will return to. Field notes November 1997 Donkeys. You must not shoot them because they have the mark of Jesus on their backs. Have I seen that one with the black cross on his back and that poor lame one is that one that died at K.K. ? You should put a trough of water out for them. If you kill tjanki then God punishes you, the land becomes dry (piltiringanyi); if you keep them then the land will always be ukin /green. When I lived with my first husband at Henbury there was a man there (Richard??) station owner and he killed a donkey and he got sick and in 3 days he was dead, ngaujara and the land went all dry. Meanwhile someone with hooves has kicked holes in the base of the old tank up on the rock and there is only a foot of water 1ef142

The wanampi and mamu Ghosts and other odd or unpleasant tricky beings are mamu. Mamu are an aspect of the spirit of dead people, but any creature that is out of place might be a mamu. Birds talking like humans or humans imitating bird are mamu. Generally darkness hold mamu. But an eagle feasting on dead kangaroo in the road in daylight might also be 'mamu'43. Mamu I met Frank at the garage and he said they were frightened sleeping in the karu at ( Homeland ) where it is cooler because of the ghosts. 0 said she had dreamed a terrible dream and had pungu (hit) the mamuShe described how Julie and Eddie and Linda and Frank were all sleeping in a row in the creek bed and they had seen (or dreamed) this mamu wati wara tall wati, wati kuraja, bad wati and Julie was crying - she imitates J curled up and with her hands over her ears - and Linda was crying and she and S. had come and they had prayed really hard and maybe it was a demon. As Morphy says, living people encounter ghosts but rarely Ancestors (Morphy 1996;314).There is though an exception to this; the being or beings Aangu call waampi. Waampi was, I was told, responsible for what occurred in the storm described in the passage below. It is powerful because of complete transformation of the land that it achieved in a very short time. Nov 1997 Field notes. Out looking for puu in creek bed. Drive back and forth across the creek a bit looking for suitable trees to rob then cross bush again towards another bit of same karu. All this time the clouds are 42

Dead donkeys are often set alight with petrol (( Stotz pers comm). Eagles are watiku/ belonging to mens' tjukurpa. Women regard them as inauspicious. 109

building up and thunder in the distance. Then a downpour of rain and beyond the range, a low isosceles hill D. points out smoke, 'bushfire' i.e. one made by lightning. For a few seconds I cannot see what she is on about, then she stops the car and switches off the engine. A big grey cloud is moving slowly across the mountain over a bright white patch of sky towards the increasing brown ('light brown' says D. ) smoke. Gradually the smoke is extinguished by the rain. I ask if I can take a photo and someone says wiya. No. Almost at once there is a banging noise on the car roof and big 3 x 2 cm lumps of ice are falling on us. D drives very fast down the track towards a tree to shelter and no one says anything. As I am on the passenger side, away from the wind now, I open my widow to see the 45 degree hail, a white torrent and pick up camera 'Kuwaripa' they say 'not yet'. When the intensity of the storm dies away D says 'take a photograph now,' and leans back in her seat so I am invited to take it past her on the wind bearing side. Panjiti tells D to get out and pick up some lumps of ice 'pulka' (big) she says, and D hands them through the window to me and Panjiti says, 'mi kunata' and adds in Pit that they kill you if they strike you on the head. Ai says D' right over (her home) - wet blankets'. The ground is now a mirror where lakes of the sky and trees appear before we break it up with our motion No one mentions this mirror. Just as we have settled down by a likely tree, rain begins again and all get up and make for the car, shut all the doors;'coming back' says D in English. She gets in the back with the other 3 and produces strawberry 'Superchoos' pink gum in strawberry pink wrapper with blue stripes, and hands them round. This time it was little hail stones 'liru katitiku' -snakes teeth. I smile at the simile and she starts to laugh 'liru katitiku' which rhymes (although possessive belongs to teeth not snake?). The Wanampi are referred to as water snakes who are alive and visible now, but also might be rainbow serpents. I was not permitted to take a photograph of the Waampi's activities - such prohibition of photography is rarely expressed. Reliable water sources, usually springs Iwa!a, are waampijara Ihaving wanampi, and waampi carry water from one available source underground to another (Layton 1989;25). They are beings to whom much respect must be shown. I was told that if we went to the water hole on top of Ayers Rock, Uluru, with my classificatory 'father' who was nguraritja of this country, he would shout out to the serpent first before approaching. His wife expressed her terror at having to go there because of the waampi. Waampi though were also active in tjukurpa creating creeks by their passage (Layton ibid, Stotz pers comm). As elsewhere on the continent, rainbow snakes often feature on the track of other Ancestors whom they swallow and often regurgitate. Field notes date 1997 Showing country near Ayers Rock Maybe 15km on down a windy track then up hill where a track 'roundabout' says S, goes in a loop, a high rock with a big patch of green III Ifig trees half way up a steep side. 'That green patch' says S 'spring - I'm going to have a look'. This he does, remarkably because usually he never gets out. He puffs up the steep slope - though the track goes as near as practically possible to the spot - and sits. 110

There are 3 small pools of water, swallow tail butterflies drinking, nyu nyu guano everywhere and the green shade of the figs above. It is a wonderful place. But no sooner have we sat down than S is off. We go. 'shut the (car) door', says D; 'wind, the waampi is coming'. This place is an open place but the other side of the rock 'partu' miilmiilpa says S. NGURA lNl WALANYA he writes in my notebook; i.e. the place is named wala = spring, nya name ending. The wanampi in its rainbow state, is also revered; people notice the rainbow and say nothing. My glee at the sight of a rainbow was totally inappropriate. Field notes, Amata inma August 1997 On Saturday afternoon the ranges became obscured in grey cloud, and lightning could be seen in the north. The old women pointed at the clouds over the ranges and motioned them away, towards the north, 'Big rain coming', cries of 'wala wala' (hurry), to the dancers as they made their way forward. When the rain did come, someone decided that I should drive them to katjikuta 'to get water'. M, N.'s daughter who wanted to have a shower and wash her clothes, N. and 2 women who seemed to live there and Nura. She and N. shared the front seat. The rain stopped, in those moments of suspension before the storm proper and the sky navy/grey, a huge rainbow appears, we could see the full arc and seemed to be driving directly towards the base of it. A faint double rainbow, the yellow daisies covering the ground all luminous. No one remarked on the rainbow so I did; 'tjutirangu' and then everyone did and the two old women said it was their Dreaming. Snake, liru, kuniya and waampi are special as Ancestors, not only because they are active in the present, but because for each, its track is also its body, the meander of a creek being the best example (cf Munn 1971;127, Rose 1996;206). The spiral, which may represent a coiled snake is watiku /men's and women rarely use it in any kind of mark making, on the earth, bodies, or in artificial media (Cf Munn ibid). They do however use meanders in all of these (see Section 4).

Anangu are obsessive about the danger from snakes and kill any they come across whether baby snakes, a few inches long, sometimes called kuyi /worm, or adults. Children often have toy rubber snakes and are very excited by fake snake tracks. At a sorry camp I caused pandemonium by dropping into conversation the fact that I had just seen a snake cross the path in front of me. Although the snake had taken no notice of me, I was questioned for sometime about its colour and demeanor and told 'run away next time!'

This place name is recorded by Layton (1989) as Wala Walpa' Walpa is wind. 111

During the hot time Anangu abandon their sleeping position on the ground between fires in favour of bedsteads with tall legs. On homelands there are lines of the family's beds outside the house, with impossibly high bedsteads so that any snake sleeping beneath will be seen.45 Field notes 1997 There is no furniture at all inside the house, shade cloth in one room irrigation hose in another. M. shuts 2 doors. The beds are all in a row outside with boxes and breeze blocks under the legs to make them even higher off the ground almost waist height because of snakes. Snakes are considered a manifestation of the devil, an unsurprising connection of dangerous snakes with those of the Christian bible. The waflampi though, is associated with or is considered the 'same as' God. Both give life and sustain it, by creating water. One can do without power in the desert, and firewood can always be brought in with a car, but water is essential. During 1997-8 there was a large modern image behind the altar of the Ernabella church, devoid of any humans beings. The crucifix was depicted with a large stream of water running from its base and luxuriant green growth.

Sick bodies There is no mind body split. A person does not own their body in language as in English but is it; Aangu say 'ngayulu muti' /'l knee' not 'my knee' for example. Emotions are located in areas of the body, anger in the throat /liri, fear or sadness in the stomach /tjuni, for example. Physical sickness results if someone robs another of their kurunpa /spirit. All living things possess kurun or kuuti; without it they are dead.

There is no concept akin to the western 'health', one is just 'palya' bk, or maybe tjuku tjuku palya /a little bit Ok. Sickness is 'pikatjara', having sickness. (HALT 1993). Generally, Aangu go to the community clinic frequently and rely on western medication for diseases induced by contact with non-Aboriginal people and their food stuffs: diabetes, tuberculosis, asthma, and for reproductive health. 'Having the needle', that is, having an injection, is regarded as

' Homeland houses, which are often used only sporadically, attract mice which in turn attracts snakes who eat them. We trapped up to 10 mice a night after being away from our hut but our neighbours were reluctant to do this. Maddock 1978; 102 also relates the Rainbow serpent to 'devil devil' in Arnhem Land. 112

unfortunate (a cause for mirth) but efficacious (see Tonkinson 1974). Often in tandem, patients seek out traditional healers /ngangkari or other kinds of healing from a group47. Emotional problems are treated in these ways. Women use their own healing rituals to revive a person's kurunpa, involving singing over the patient as she is massaged. These are secret rites for serious ailments, but among themselves, women often massage one another, preferably with fat or oil, but without it too. Field notes May 1997 Alice Springs. D. wanted to rub my ailing tummy. A statuesque woman with N.'s departing party at Women's Council had given her a film canister of 'bush butter.' No one refers to it as 'irrnangka-irmangka' She rubs my tummy and says she went to L, who has a sick knee, and rubbed her knee downwards towards the foot 'like a witch doctor' and 10, N's knee is better, she can walk now. Later she rubs my back and neck, either side of my spine, under my clothes with a sort of rolling /slapping motion, v nice. 'I do this for (her husband); its called kuuntananyi'. Nyitini I am told is 'rubbing/massage'. Nyiti is lizard fat. She shakes her hand to get rid of something, blows on her fingers, then rubs again. Maybe something gets blocked, she says, indicating my elbow joint and tells me a story about a wati in Emabella who could not use his forearm but then she rubbed it, towards the hand and unblocked the flow (of blood). The treatment that Ngankais seem to carry out most, is the removal of punu from the patient's body. Field notes 1St September 1997 Kumanara was happy because the witch doctor (sic) had got a puu from his head last night. Only a few days ago it was the same story regarding his stomach. Whether actual or metaphorical pieces of wood, puflu are I think thought of as blockages of the flow of blood round the body, and removing them, by massage for example, enables the blood to flow properly. As Hamilton notes, there is too a strong element of outside intervention in the presence of puflu in a person's body, and their own relation to social circumstances48. Field notes Sept 1999 At the football. Maria comes and sits with me. She has had two needles today for her liii pika /sore throat, palya now. Y says of Panjiti —she and Y went to Alice Springs hospital - Panjiti milkali piltiringanyu ka medicine pulka paluru ngalkuru, kuka wiru etc, munu milkali palyaringanyi. Her blood became dry but she had (ate) strong medicine in Alice, ate good food, lots of meat, and her blood has become alnght. 47 Aangu themselves gloss 'Ngangkai' as 'witch doctor'. Hamliton 1980;99. Unlike Hamilton's findings, it was clear that men, as well as women, used Ngankari frequently. 113

Diabetes is described by women, as 'milkali kura' Thad blood. Rare is the woman, young or old, whom I met who did not have diabetes. The ideal of bodies is that they be fat or 'not skinny' /'ngurka wiya', and not dried out, moist. The consumption of certain bush foods, fatty meat, and green mingkulpa for example, helps to ensure these ideals.

Death How does a deceased person now become part of country in death? Bemdt asserts that in the Desert, the transition rites of death and mortuary processes are not a prerequisite to immortality; the spirit of the dead person returns to the site where its tjuringa /sacred board rests. In Arnhem Land the spirit only achieves immortality by orchestrated social effort for it on the part of the living (R.M.Berndt 1974). Since the start of the Mission settlement at Ernabella, mortuary practices have changed markedly. They seem similar all over the area of what is now the AP Lands. 49 The dead are now memorialised in decorated, fenced graves whereas in the past graves were not marked, although their position was known. In these present practices, colours are of paramount importance in determining the efficacy of the religious rites and the care for the deceased person's spirit. The colours of the mourners' clothes and cars and the decorations of the grave are all agents in emotive expression, both towards the living and the dead. This in turn is linked to the state of the contextual country at the time. Since the whole process of death and mourning is so sensitive and hedged about with taboos and silences there has been little work by researchers on mortuary practices and I do not pretend fully to understand the whole complex.

Death is a frequent occurrence in central Australian Aboriginal communities. The effects of poor diet and diabetes, drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco, are killing many people in late middle age. Most of the women in their late-,

They do appear different from contemporary mortuary practices in other Western Desert cultures, e.g. the Pintupi, cf Myers 1991,133, Su Daigleish on the Utopia area, pers comm; in that Christianity is more important Perhaps because of the taboos surrounding death in these cultures, there is little published work devoted to mortuary practices although many passing references in early ethnographic accounts, in contrast to Arnhem Land literature. 114

middle-, or old age, with whom I worked, have lost at least one adult child through petrol sniffing, car crashes or drink.

As soon as a death is announced the deceased person's name is absolutely taboo to say and for the time being to write also. The corpse /mi[i (lit. 'skin') is referred to by its relationship to the living, a husband, sister etc. Anyone with the same name changes it to another. Images of the deceased enter a liminal stage from which they may never depart. This seems to depend on the beliefs of the relatives, avowedly Christian or not, and the extent of their loss; a well respected person who dies unexpectedly young may never have their photograph shown in public again. It is the sisters of a deceased woman who ultimately control this access to her image50, not her children. The whole complex of mourning and mortuary rites, is known as 'sorry business' and the near relatives immediately abandon their house for a sorry camp. There are areas of land around a community used for this. I do not know how they are chosen. Mouniford's account from 194051 of a burial and a later ceremony is as follows. The body of the deceased was bound with string and buried in the 'L' cavity of a hole . The body was laid onto a bed of warmed leaves, and the grave was packed with leaves and grasses 'to keep him warm' (R. M. Berndt and Harvey Johnston 1942). It was filled until level with the surface of the ground and large logs were put over the top. The logs were to prevent ingress by animals, a practice similar to the way water holes were protected for the same reasons. The ground around was then swept clean for some distance so that the man's kurunpa /spirit could come out and walk around. 'The natives affirm that it makes the track of a small mouse'. The accounts vary as to how many different spirits an individual has. This does not seem to be an issue now; I only heard of a person having kurunpa, although a harmful spirit, mamu, may be that of a dead person.

5°

And also to the images she creates as an artist as has happened with one of the important artists of Emabella. SI Mountford's unpublished journal, Elkin 1937 and R Bemdt and T Harvey Johnston on Ooldea,1942 all offer accounts of burial rites in South Australia within a decade of one another. Mountfords account is the only one made in the Musgrave and Mann ranges. 115

In the second ceremony, 'after three months people come with bunches of leaves in their hands and approach the grave quietly. When they are some distance away they call the dead man's kurunba (sic), who hearing his friends, leaves the grave and goes to meet them. Two blackfellow doctors', then leave the main group and each walk in a wide circle around the grave, one in each direction, clockwise and anti-clockwise. They wait near the grave for the kurunpa to return to the grave, It can only do this by the track on which the body was carried. Thus the medicine men are able to catch the kurunpa in their cupped hands, as it returns, and give it to some other person by pressing cupped hands containing the spirit against the abdomen where it enters via the navel opening (Mountford 1940; 89-92). At the second ceremony, the decomposed body does not seem to have been disinterred as it was among groups further south, when the earth containing the odour of the body was rubbed by the mourners on their legs (ibid). Instead, earth from on top of the grave was sniffed and rubbed into the mourner's legs, whilst the remains of the corpse were left (Sheard 1964;76).

In about 1974 burial practices apparently changed suddenly and radically in Ernabella. When Apinya or Eric, one of the first Aboriginal Christian ministers in Emabella, died suddenly and young, his spirit was missing from the grave when the ngangkari went to fetch it. It had, people realised, gone up to heaven and burial practices should be changed accordingly. The next death in the community was therefore treated differently. A cemetery area was consecrated to the west of Ernabella, at the base of the ranges, where one unmarked grave already existed, and western burial practices adopted. Crosses and sometimes grave stones marked the head of the white painted concrete grave slab. Two local men, visiting Aurukun in Queensland, saw plastic flowers on graves there, and brought the idea back to Ernabella with them.52

At the ceremony held sometime after the burial, called alami /opening, mourners heap the grave with plastic flowers of all colours, but blue are idealised as most desirable and appropriate. Fresh flowers can also be used, but artificial ones predominate. Field notes June 1997 Kalka opening The service lasts about an hour, then 5 minutes of socialising and all the cars set off in a line towards the cemetery. People are now holding a red plastic rose each. The ground all around is covered in yellow daises on the green grass. The flowers have shiny petals and the yellow shimmers. The land around the graveyard as far as you can see is like this. We all park about 25 yards from the 52 Winifred Hilliard pers comm 1997. 116

graves and now people are holding bunches of artificial flowers, white, pink, red, a few yellow a few purple, some made up wreaths with ribbons. There are about 10 graves; flat concrete slabs on the ground painted white a body length and 3 or 4 ft wide. All are already edged with flowers stuck in the ground as at (homeland). The crowd of which I am a part assembles at a distance. The minute we arrive the sister in law in my car starts a high wail and a few others in the crowd start wailing too and crying. A line of men stands at a grave. Suddenly the crowd all move forward. Those without flowers are taking them from relatives so everyone except me has some. A line of people envelopes the grave moving anti-clockwise around it; 1 can't see the grave. The new grave of the dead man now has its perimeter lined with flowers - all colours. The crowd comes back to the cars and its all over -about 10 minutes the whole thing. Even in the car - we are the last to leave - everyone is suddenly cheerful again and we go back to the sorry camp for dinner. The events in this account are typical of other openings I subsequently attended. The chief mourners, who are the in-laws of the deceased, stand at the open grave, and shake hands with all the other mourners who pass, usually in an anti-clockwise direction, around the grave, and lay their flowers. The flowers evoke the time of fecundity and fertility after the rains when the ground is covered in colour.

The grave of a newly dead man's son seems to be redecorated with new flowers, at the father's death (fig.9). The fencing-off of graves also seems to be important. This too is often decorated with flowers. Green plastic coated fencing, with an archway to the grave, was also used in Ernabella in 1999. At Kanpi, west of Ernabella, the wire mesh fence around the grave of a young woman, was painted with a mix of blue and white paint, which in the midday sun made it almost fluorescent.53 During openings, and funerals too, women pull the neck of their dresses up over their noses, checking on the smell of their own bodies. Women also do this when telling another of the death of someone dear to them. The odour of the mourners' bodies is now deliberately modified by showering before a funeral or the subsequent rite, an opening. Aftercare, during 1997, the red packaged 'Brut' is used by men at church inma. Again, this association between water and the rituals of Christianity, is reinforced at these occasions. There is, I suggest, a connection in people's minds between the land after rain, and its obliteration of old histories, with showering their own bodies. At openings brightly coloured clothes are worn. Often, bright blue dresses and br head bands are often 117

favoured by women and blue shirts by men at openings in Ernabella. Heaven, llkaritja as the missionaries called it from ilkara /sky, up in the sky, the clear blue sky, is where the Christian spirits of the dead are said by Aangu to go. What then of the land? Is it now devoid of the spirits of ancestors? Is blue the vehicle for forgetting them? 'At death and the subsequent removal of all hair from the corpse, part of the deceased's spirit enters the 'njun fun' ba', which eventually finds its way to a totemic site, usually a pool, where Wonambi swallow it' (Bemdt, R. and Harvey Johnston I 942;207 on Ooldea). It seems likely that the 'blue' of distant hills and their rockholes, also idealised as 'blue', are reflecting the blue of heaven. Heaven, as the mural in the church at Ernabella depicted, is a place where there is always plentiful water.

Piers Hammick, AP Anthropology, per comm 1997. 118

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Fig 23: The skins of two emu rolled ready for cooking. 122

Fig 24: Dora Haggie 1997; interior of piti, acrylic painted red river gum root. 123

Skin As I have explored in Section One, colour is a surface quality, and in western contexts is often dismissed because of this. In many non-western contexts it is precisely this quality of being superficial that makes colour so important. Surface, and surface as colour, is an attribute of everything, and connects things, animals and people. This has been done extensively with Melanesian (e.g. 'O'Hanlon 1989, Kuechler 1988) and Polynesian (Gell 1993) material, but rarely with regard to Australasian contexts. Strathern has argued that for Papuan Hageners the skin is where social relations are; it is the point of contact between the person and the world. The outer self is decorated with the intrinsic attributes of the inner self, using objects from the outside world, leaves, feathers, shells and pigments (Strathern 1979).

Unlike the Balgo area, where the land is explicitly stated as having a skin, I have not heard this concept directly expressed by Aangu (Watson 1999). I have discussed the surface of country above. I want now to examine what is on the skin of things; first the skin of people and then that of bush foods, which also have a social identity through tjukurpa. The surface of the land is transformed by various agents, as is the surface of the human body, and that of animals. As I have shown bodies and country are analogous, their surfaces too. These transformations occurred both in tjukurpa times, acquiring the markings they have today, but also presently as animals grow-up and when they are caught and cooked. Bush mai, vegetable foods, change the color of their skins as they grow and ripen indicating when they should be picked. This knowledge is transmitted in ritual and in tjukurpa and learnt during bush trips. As in Melanesian cultures, dry skin and imperfections from spots to boils are 'pika' Isick. The common condition of diabetes means that boils are prevalent, as is scabies, which can form contagious weeping scabs. A person suffering from boils shows others 'ngaltujara', they are someone deserving of sympathy and compassion from others. Women oil their skin with buta, a store bought, commercially produced, white fat that is used to make scented bush buta /irmangka-irmangka examined in more detail below. Any sort of oil, cooking oil, margarine is also used to grease the skin. 'The Aborigines take great pleasure in greasing their skins. Every fragment of fatty tissue is rubbed in the body' (Mountford 1940; 231). Before inma is produced everyone's exposed skin is oiled up. Fat is the carrier of red or yellow ochres and white ash, all used to resurface the skin, but on its own also deepens skin colour and makes it shine (cf O'Hanlon 1989). This is 124

made explicit by Anangu, when finished carvings from the red river gum roots are oiled to enrich the especially chosen colour of the wood. The kuturu Ifighting stick, used for women's ritual, is also greased in the same way to stop it becoming 'pilti' /dry arid enrich its colour.

Sitting in camp, often inma camp, with women, everyone's bodies are overlapping and touching one another's. In such company women like to get out of the clothes on the top half of their bodies and feel the wind and the sun on their skin. Women pick at the bumps on a companion's back, smoothing out irregularities with their nails. This tactile contact transfers the immanent Ancestral power generated by inma but in mundane situations women are used to close bodily contact with others.

Not long after the start of fieldwork I was puzzled to have Ajjangu explain to me, 'Nungalka African name' or 'we all African people' until I reahsed that they meant 'maw', that is like African people. Macu is 'dark' as piranpa is light1M, and these are used as relative or relational categories, referring to contrast, and to the classes, black and white. Thus the phrase 'maru tjuta' is often used, meaning lots of black (people), and 'piranpa tjuta', lots of white people. Whitefellas Iwalypala is a racial classification, an index of otherness but also of course because the skins of whitefellas are pale. Thus an olive skinned man from a Mediterranean country was classed as 'kutjupa' /another. For sometime Anangu referred to me in my hearing as 'walypala', since I had no perceived allegiance to country or kin. At a Law meeting of 40-50 women where I was the only non-Aboriginal present, women who did not know me addressed me 'Al Piranpa! /Hey Whitey' or 'Kungka piranpa /white girl', in the way that others are 'shorty', say, since this was the most obvious quality I possessed. When large areas of my skin were exposed, women with whom I had a relationship, remarked on how pale I was compared to them. Field notes F 11 ;23rd November 1997; Skin Inkajili (aged about 9) came and climbed on the running board and peered in at me as she often does and then asks 'yaaaltjikutu ananyi?' /where you going? Today she clutched at my bare arm and stroked my skin,'piranpa', then put her arm by mine 'Maw. Maw, piranpa'. Later with D.; when I had been digging with my hands, she looked fondly at them 'Pira' as a noun means moon. 125

caked in red-brown earth and said, 'brown wiru'. Inkajili's comments is like the chanting of colour 'sets' or series, which I explore further below. Black and white is one such set. Dora was continuing the process of making me more like her, as she also 'resurfaced me' with clothes (see Section Three). Later in my fieldwork women said approvingly that I was 'maru', that is, I was ninti Iknowing and could behave like and do things as though I were, a black woman, making camp, lighting fires. It was an acknowledgement of my trying hard to learn about their lives, even if I knew little. The photograph that Dora took, saying 'Maru kutjara', shows the contrast of Nungalka's black arm against my very white one (fig.19).

People of Aboriginal and another racial descent, European, Afghan, Chinese are called apakatja /half-cast by Aangu. Several people dismissed a whole side of their families as 'apakatja' and were reluctant to draw this part of the 'family tree'. It is one of the first, if not the first thing that people who are not mixed race tell you about those who are. Field notes I tell G about our visit from ( ), and at first he can't place him, then, 'Ai apakatja he's Indian. He doesn't know anything' When I say that U. is coming to live at (homeland), F. says savagely 'they can get lost we don't want half caste people there' Derogatory remarks are made out of earshot of mixed race people, for example that they do not belong or have any rights to land. This is complicated by the fact that many mixed race people are Yankunytjatjara, their fathers or grandfathers Afghan or Indian cameliers, or white men.

There are no section systems in use around Ernabella today, but the moities, nganana tarka /our bone, and tjanampa miltja /their flesh. Ego is always nganana tarka and is the same moitey as her grandparents' generation, her children and parents in the alternate. 55 Opposite moitey groups are said to have a different (another) skin, 'miri kutjupa'.

White, who worked in the predominantly Pitjantjatjara community of Yalata, states that there is an additional distinction between generational moities which gives them the status of social categories (White 1981). One moiety is called pianpa, the other maw. An informant told her that this pertained to the difference in liver colours of the generation moities. As she also notes, Tindale (1972:256) and Gould, record Ngadadjara divisions as tjindulakalnguru /those who sit in the sun and /those who sit in the shade. This is pertinent in view of clothing worn at the death 126

That the skin is 'where social relations are' is clear from the red ochred skin of the Kadaiche. This resurfacing, is a stripping of the social skin. The kadaiche, known also in anthropological literature as Red Ochre Men, are a squad of roaming males who seek out and murder those who transgress Aboriginal Law. The fear that they engender is huge. They are associated particularly with the Pitjantjatjara although how historically deep this is debatable. In October 1997 the homelands to the north of Emabella were cleared to make way for the men's business, including red ochre business, that was said to be coming through. Field notes F11;3 Oct 14th 1997 (our neighbours drive in to tell us) . . . .the Business is coming to Ernabella now, this afternoon, tonight. Have we seen anything? What is it we would see? Red ochre business; kadaiche - they come in trucks like his, 200 to 300 wati and they will shoot people who cross their path. They would drag him, F., from his car and kill him if he met them. "Danger". They were coming to take wati who had been bad to old people and everything would close down in town when they came. I mention my sighting in Ernabella this afternoon. Two young men just hanging around, stripped to the waist, one wearing a red headband, the other one a reddish head covering. Their torsos had that strange glow that dark skin has when rubbed with red ochre. On their bottom halves, very dirty trousers, i.e. clothes that have become stained with the red dirt. That red ochred and fatted skin looks as though it has been burnt, sinister and compelling in the daylight. In such a small scale society, even if geographically diffuse, the identity of a kadaiche man is known, his name, where he comes from, to whom he is related. I was told about the appearance and the name of the tjilpi in charge, boss to the young fit 'bouncers', whom I had seen in Ernabella.

Red, as a colour worn on the body, is considered 'danger'(ous) - the English word is spoken amongst Pitjantjatjara ones. Red clothes, red 'hairstring' /wool, red headbands are all considered dangerous , more or less, varying with the context, but red ochre directly on the skin is more so. This is an indication of being without skin, outside normal social relationships, and, in the case of the kadaiche, free to punish even kin, or at least refrain from usual social conventions.

of a relative in Ernabella today, black and white, described in Section Three. Dick Kimber pers. comm. 127

A part of the wau /fire tjukurpa that rose in the south of the Lands at Wataru, and travelled north to an area near what is now Papunya in the Northern Territory, illustrates the burnt appearance of red ochred skin. A old woman, who had access to the waru tjukurpa through her late husband and her daughter, told me how the two sons of the wa!u tjukurpa sat down to cook and eat a kangaroo they had caught. They touched the greenish mash of undigested herbage in the kangaroo's stomach, pilki, which they had been forbidden to do, and their skins were burnt off, 'miri wiya', another example of the opposition of green and red in tjukurpa (cf Maddock 1972). Unusually though, here it is the green that creates the red, rather than removing it, possibly because the brothers were disobeying the Law. There are other examples in tjukurpa, of Ancestors who transgressed Aboriginal Law being skinned.

At the announcement of a person's death kin use yellow ochre to resurface their bodies, as is documented widely for other Aboriginal groups. This seemed only to be in the context of women's inma. On another such occasion, an old woman covered herself in fat and white ash, remembering and mourning her dead daughter. 'Traditional' inma seems to provide a safe structure in which to mourn personal loss.

Hair If skin is the boundary of the body, hair is more ambiguous It is detachable (MacRae 1979).

Pitjantjatjara are famous for the white-blonde hair of children and young people. 57 Unlike the Waripiri there is no separate term for blonde hair, piranpa is used. June 1998 in camp in Emabella. At Nura's, Gillian and Gillian's malanpa /younger 'sister' from Mt Leibig(a community in the Northern territory) whom she said had Dora's yuunpa /face all got out of a Toyota after dark. The Mt Leibig malanpa, fathers side, has very blonde hair and G counts out all the people in that family who have mankga piranpa /light hair including herself as a younger woman. Nineteen apparently, whereas only 5 have mangka maw (dark hair. E.g. see photograph - of Nungalka Stanley - facing p97 Duguid 1963, captioned 'The golden hair of the Pitjantjatjara full bloods'. 128

Commercial hair colourants are a common gift from family visiting from Alice Springs, either bleach for lighter hair or reddish tints. The packaging, adorned with smiling white women's faces, is immediately discarded along with the instructions. It is usually women and children of both sexes who use these products, but I saw that one middle aged man, who dyed his hair black from greying at a time when he was said to have 'another woman'. 'Omo' washing powder, employed in quantities for removing wax from batik, is sometimes also used as hair bleach. This access to commercial hair colourants means that younger people change their hair colour frequently. During certain ceremonies when women red ochre their skin, they include their hair. Despite the rigour with which the mission inculcated children with daily hosing down of body and hair and combing the latter, these practices are again, as in pre-Mission times, inessential to everyday life. However red ochre from ceremonial undertakings is always washed out of a woman's hair before she returns to a community, and her male kin.

Warinkura, (Thysanotus exiliflorus Ifringe lily) is described as 'Number one'. It has long stringy leaves that change from white near the roots, through orange and pink to green. The roots are used as a hair tonic. They are moisture filled, swollen and translucent and are broken up and squeezed on the scalp. This is also said to cool the head in hot weather (Latz 1996;286, Goddard 1994;224). Field notes F9;7 4th August 1997 The children have Wannkura, which they call 'watinkura' (a pun) and S and N correct them. They drape the stringy hair-like leaves over their heads. Margery and Inkajili asked me for the Warinkura, roots they had left in the car, squashed in the bottom of a plastic bottle. The iconic resemblance of the multi-coloured, hair-like leaves of Warinkura, produced from (the efficacious) roots in the earth, to the ideal of plentiful mutable hair seems apparent from the gestures of the children draping the leaves constantly over their hair.

Jenny Dudley pers. comm. 129

Bush foods Field notes at women's inma camp We wait at the (name) camp for 2 and a half hours, eating the wipu I bought, the biscuits, the Weetbix. Dora was eating non-stop from Emabelta, oranges she took from L's house, the thigh of a roo S. shot last night, then sucking the fat from inside the cleaned white bone. Mayningka makes damper but it's kura Thad, because its self-raising flour. Aangu make a distinction between 'whitefella' food or 'Australian food' and Aboriginal food. For example, a woman told me that her mother died when she was a little girl and she grew up on white men's food. Aangu may, if necessary, now live by only eating food bought from stores, the community store and for commercial station stores - Mulga Park, Balfour Well and Victory Downs Station during 1997-98. All food is constantly employed as a mediator in social relationships. Yet people also hide food and say of themselves and others that they are 'manyu' /greedy. Food from the bush, though, is a more potent mediator, especially good kuka /meat or mingkulpa. Field notes 1997 L. has bought a new black bin bag half full of mingkulpa, tied with red ribbon to send to her grand daughter 'my sister's granddaughter in Hermannsberg Arrente - I'm sending it because she's my relative'. Acquiring food from the bush is still considered fundamental to personal wellbeing. Aangu may receive bush food from kin, but actually being in the bush, as women often told me, and one another, makes you feel better. Many Aangu hold the view that in the past - 'iriti' - before white people came with flour tea and sugar, they were free from disease.

59 60

Procuring bush food, kuka /meat or mai /grains, fruit and vegetables, honey ants /tjala or witchetty grubs /maku, is perceived as food for free when there is no money available to buy it from the store. Consumption of food from the land is not simply an economic necessity, though, but also a spiritual and emotional See Ajjangu Way,1991, a response to the Healthy Aboriginal Life Project which has many examples of culturally set monologues about the idyllic 'iriti' when Ajjangu lived off the land and did not get sick and were all happy. 60 I have gone into some detail here as despite several published sources and videos including those made by PY Media sources on bush food in the area (cf Goddard and Kalotasl 985, Bryce 1992, Latz 1995). I do this because, as I show through out this thesis, Aangu do not always mention colour, assuming it obvious, and outsiders do not note it as important. Of the written works, Goddard's, transcribing tapes of senior Mimili Yankunytjatjara people, evokes the physicality of remembering, seeking and processing plant material. 130

one. Consuming food from your own country further embodies the connection between land and people, and Aangu are proud of their local area's fecundity.

All animals and birds are regarded as sentient beings. Birds in particular because they talk - wankanyi - communicate directly with humans. A live porcupine, for example, its 'hand' across its eyes, was said to be shielding itself from the knowledge of what was to come (cooking). Animals and birds are not the same as humans, but they have social relationships with one another and with humans. Their character is determined by what happened to them in the Dreamtime (cf Rose 1992;45). What food animals themselves consume is thus also known, and mentioned. A person, and an animal, smells of what it has eaten. People who do not eat kangaroo meat smell different from those who do. Mostly people were too polite to say this, but among strangers, who did not know I understood Pitjantjatjara, I heard the following. Field notes; close of initiation ceremony The little girls and teenagers are giggly and whispering. A teenager says loudly walypaa pantingku -whitefella smells! and move away from me to leave a gap in the circle. (when I got home my partner said 'Your swag smells terrible acrid smoke and that old fat -iramangka irmangka'). When hunting, even in a car, one must be careful to stay to take account of the wind and not transmit one' s odour to the hunted.

As Rose has written, 'country is alive with information for those who have learned to understand' (Rose 1992;225). Such information is also auditory. The desert oaks tell stories as the wind rustles their leaves. Birds often have pertinent remarks to make about human action or lack of it. A nyu nyu /zebra finch flew into my Toyota where I was sleeping at dawn one morning. Nura told me the bird was telling me to get up, 'pakara pakara!'. Pitijaku pitijaku (the pied butcher bird) sings; he knows where the honey ants are. Field notes; inma camp in country near Amata. Around the camp area were numerous birds, miners, hawks and falcons (Itatura) but crows mostly (kaanka). When birds sang (wangkanyi - speak) during inma people laughed and joked e.g. once when 2 women were both explaining something to me which I was having difficulty understanding they said the bird was calling 'kulini, nyuntu kulini!' (Understand! You understand!) another time when Panjiti's dreaming was being danced a bird called 'Panjiti Panjiti!' Jokes about a helicopter that flew overhead 'tjulpu' (bird) etc. 131

Birds almost always have onomatopoeic names, the bird 'says its name itself 'walytjanku mi wankanyi'(Goddard 1981).

Plants as well as animals and people are said to pakarnyi /get up when they begin their growth in the cycle following rain or fire, or after he cold season, and kunkunari /sleeping whilst apparently dead or dormant. Animals are described as young /kulunypa, which also means little, or old, as 'tjilpi.' That is, a small thing, is thought of as something that might grow-up into a bigger one, even metaphorically, a billycan for example. Field notes 5th Feb 1998 We should plant seeds from the cedar tree to give us more shade, not these new green seeds but- scrabbling in the sand- these old pilti ones dry shrivelled brown ones in twos. Everything has a malpa and water them every day until they come through - pakara(?) To find only one of something is to lament on its having no malpa. 'Malpa wiya paluru!' To be one alone is to be 'watjil watjilpa', sad and lonely, even if a dead goanna.

I have gone into some detail here because I want to show that what is on the skin of animals and bush mai, is as important as what is the skin of the human body, and the land. As Bell records of the Warlpmn Dreamings, witchetty and bush berry, both change colour as they travel along ( Belt 1988;199). In Ernabella, as in many other places in Central Australia, mai such as iii /figs, kampurarpa Thush tomatoes, tja!a /honeyants and maku /witchetty grubs have become the ubiquitous and apparently 'safe' subject of much figurative painting in acrylics, for the market, especially by younger women. In these, the food is rendered in set colours, which represent cultural knowledge, not only about the appearance of ripe bush food, but about the character of the Dreaming, which is that food. It is always the outside of the mai that is shown, that is, the skin. This differs from European knowledge, that bananas are yellow, or strawberries red, for example, by the interest shown in the colour stage before, and after this; unripe and cooked. Again, for bush foods, in Aboriginal conceptions, the colour transformation of the surface is the transformation

The process of hunting tjala and maku and digging out the roots of the red river gum, apara, for carving /punu to sell, are all also regarded as good exercise, the 132

strenuous digging required helping to keep blood sugar levels low when many people are diabetic. Hunting however, whether for malu /kangaroo, kalaya /emu, ngintaka /perentie lizard, and many other animals is almost always done from motor vehicles and includes very little 'exercise' at all although plenty for that being hunted. An animal is 'finished' /'wiyaringanu' i.e. classified as dead, when it is unable to move along.

There is a huge amount written on hunting kangaroos, classified in the literature as men's activity and highly ritualised, and linked, as it is for the Pitjantjatjara, with the ma!u tjukurpa (along with papa Idog tjukur) used to 'make men,' that is initiate boys. There is little on, say, honey-anting which is a complex and skillful activity

Kuka Animals Almost all animals are considered edible meat /kuka, except horse and donkeys (see above). 61 It is easier to get kuka —beef or hogget - from the store though than kill a small bird say, for meat, although people claim that certain parrots, are 'kuka wiru' The animals still pursued are those which yield fat (cf Tindale 1978). As Rose says for the Yarralin, 'fat is a major indicator of life . . fat animals are prized because to eat them is to become strong' (Rose 1992 ;66). The first thing that is checked, in a hunted animal, is its fat. Kangaroo are immediately slit open at the stomach to do this.

Salt (along with knife and matches) was the thing I was most often asked for by women in bush camps. Before white people came salt was apparently not used. There are rules about what Anangu can and cannot eat with salt. All the important tjukurpa kuka animals must be eaten without salt; nyintaka, tinka, matu, kanyala, kalaya, but rapita /rabbits are very nice (wiru) cooked with onion garlic and salt. I was told that I must not eat salt with malu because I looked after (i.e. lived at) a malu tjukurpa site. 'You mustn't put salt on malu says S Why not ? because you live at KK you're the boss and salt wiya.' 61

Dingo were eaten as photographs and films taken by Tindale 1933 and Mountford 1940, indicate. Dingo are not now classed as 'kuka'. 133

Ukiri /green growth and kuka/meat are 'wanka' translated as alive or possibly raw, until they are pilti /dry or pauntja /cooked, another connection of greenness and life. Plants said to be 'really green' are considered to possess a strong odour and these odours are classified as similar and are associated with the smell and results of rain, that is the greenness and blossom of new growth.

Ma!u '...all the people here, Oodnadatta not allowed to skin a kangaroo. That's in the blackfella rule because the kangaroo is anungu himself. . . You got to cook him in the ashes. That's Dreaming kangaroo. Only whitefella can skin 'em. No aborigine. That one (law) bin in all the time'. Oodnadatta man quoted in Gibson (1989) The Malu /kangaroo is considered to be very intelligent. Pirlyakutu 'spring time' when the warm Piriya wind blows from the north and west and new green growth begins, that is September to November, is the best time for hunting kangaroos, although Aangu attempt it anytime possible. This is dependent on having access to a car, rifle and bullets, the equipment used now. Malu, whose fur is classed as either 'red' or 'blue,' may only be cooked in its skin. The fur is first singed off in a hot, fast burning fire and then scraped using a handy stick, knife or discarded packing, so that the surface is evenly blackened. Women complain, and laugh about, badly cooked meat with the raw red fur still visible, presented by inexperienced young relatives. Only after this blackening of the skin can the meat be cooked /pauntja. The important malu must be blackened to become not just like Aangu, but as the man from Oodnadatta says above, 'Anungu (sic) himself'. The meat is then no longer wanka /alive but cooked and ready to be consumed by Aangu. In fact the roo meat is often eaten almost raw after a short time in the earth oven, but the blackening of the animals fur is always done no matter how hungry the party. Field notes 1st Sept 1997 Cooper Pedy Milly expressing horror at white men, not only shooting too many malu but also skinning them. Near Cooper Pedy is a cluster of dreaming sites which include a flat, un-vegetated area between two hills. This area is the skin of a flayed ancestral kangaroo, which is why, said my Pitjantjatjara male informant, nothing grows there. In the cold, kuka malu, kangaroo meat, warms Aangu up, especially eating the fat, women indicate their own chest, arms, stomach. Even the fat from inside 134

the bones of kangaroo is sucked out. The only roo meat that can be bought in the store is frozen wipu /tails, which are expensive and desirable meat. 62 The meat on these is entirely white fat /muturka. The tails are taken on bush trips, as other store meat, frozen, and cooked in the earth during the day. The wipu are covered in a shallow pit with hot coals and the fire on top. Field notes April 1997 Nura appears with a small branch of mai —bush food , 'parka parka' fine grey green leaves and red, orange and green berries. She hands some of the smaU branches to Dora who uses them to brush the wipu skin. Dora cuts off the very tip of her wipu, peels back the skin and gives me the end, still with skin to hold it. The meat is whitish and glistening, slightly transparent, fatty. The women use the axe to cut into the wipu and eat sections, 6 inches long, at a time. They do not finish all the wipu but leave cold sections in the car, later demolished by the dog. Whole malu are cooked in a large pit and only then dMded

up.63

Field notes Monday 11th Aug 1997. He shoots 3 roos, one red male and 2 females, one red and another Dora calls 'blue' a blue grey Colour. These 2 both have joeys so not all red malu are male. S. takes about 3 shots to finish each roo. N cackles at the distress of the wounded animal as it tries to get up. The blue one is catapulted into the air and 0 laughs at my expression. The second red one she hit on the back of the neck whilst it lies in a heap on its front then takes her knife and slits a small opening in the stomach, pulls out the inards and checks on the greyish/red matter for fat. With this one she takes out the joey 'a friend for dorothy' (the dog). The joey is about 14 inches long, bald ,bloody and chattering. It crawls round the back of the car where I am sitting with N and D until D puts it into her brown paper bag containing store bought bread and it sleeps. The roos are dumped in the spot between bars and radiator on the Toyota until the headlights are needed and then inside. Back at camp D cuts the roos with a knife and a stick from a handy bush. The pinkish bit under the initial cut in the stomach (wila Y- outside of stomach) indicates the fat /muturka.. D cleans all the kuna/faeces out of the tjuni/stomach The alu liver, Yankunytjatjara word, is also cooked in the hot ashes separately She rootles around inside the malu and brings out its heart /kuturu impaled on the stick then uses the stick to 'sew up' the opening. A big pit is dug in the earth and timber placed over it ; huge blaze. The ma!u, like wipu are singed off, blackened, then their legs dislocated for as Pepai who is at the camp says, you gotta cook them with legs straight This is wati work. (Alison tries to dislocate a back leg without success) When the fire has died you put the malu in the pit and cover them about 1 1/2 hours later cooked. You've got to make that hole in the stomach as soon as you catch them', say Pepai or else the stomach swells up The two live joeys are cuddled by T.; 'some people eat them' said D. 62

Frozen wipu are sometimes used as fighting clubs, by women. MaJu are cut into 8 pieces; 'inside' Head Ikata;1 piece, tjunta /thighs;2 pieces, ribslkantil(pa) ;2 pieces, front legs /mina; 2 pieces, backbone /wiapi 1. 'outside' wipu/tail I piece and tjuni/stomach and alu /liver. Compare Hamilton I 980a; 9 pieces.

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Sinews for katji Is pears, come from the back legs, end of, and tail. D gives them to me. Mayningka explains about chewing the sinews and binding the spear in 3 sections. The sinews are whitish and completely relaxed but by morning had darkened and hardened. They are however very strong. Maku Iwitchetty grubs Hunting maku is dependent on rainfall seeping through the earth, like tjala, both for the growth of the grub but also to prevent the ground became too hard to dig. The very young /kulunpa grubs are deep pink but become white after they grow to a certain size (cf Bell 1988;199). Field notes May 1997 Nura has found 3 maku and gives them to me; one fat white one and 2 smaller apricot ones - kulunpa /young ones. Field notes June 22 1997 The maku are big and plentiful. D finds several as long and as fat as a man's middle finger. Some of the young ones are pinkish and a very tiny one deep cherry pink. D rides along with the 'tjilpi' maku hanging out of her mouth like a white cigar. There are two things you look for; cracks and little holes and piilyruru, the discarded skins where the maku have left. Hopping bird tracks, also alert one to these places where they have moved in and eaten the maku. The maku make a nest/cocoon of felted fibres stronger than a spider nit bag. It tears like fabric, is white. The maku exude a yellow-brown liquid like nicotine over your fingers. They are kuka not mai. Maku are eaten raw, or lightly cooked in hot ashes at the side of the fire. They then turn yellow. Raw white maku, with cooked yellow ones, are often represented by women in paintings. Inside, they are bright yellow and are said to look and taste like egg yolk, are fatty and nutritious, and fed to babies to 'grow them up'. The inside of the maku is never represented in paintings.

Ngiaka Iperentie lizard Perentie lizards and goanna both yield nyiti, fat that is prized, and should be yellow. The perentie is an important tjukurpa animal, and still numerous. Its skin, the acquisition of whose pattern is the subject of many tjukurpa, Dreaming and otherwise, is regularly spotted and much more clearly marked than the goanna's (fig.21 ). Their skins are charred to black, like the ma!u. Aside from having arms and legs like a human, (and like the malu, a tail like a penis) they have five black claws, like digits on each 'hand'. Perentie are large, powerfully built animals and are mostly nowadays shot with a rifle. 136

Field notes The ngiaka tastes they say like barramundi, 0 cuts a the yellow nytli Mat out after its cooked from its tjuni/stomach. You eat a little bit of this fat and then a little bit of kuka (the meat). Mayningka cooks the lizard, fastens together its pairs of feet with a puu piercing each. She makes a neat hole in its abdomen 'kuna' (shit) and pulls out a long white tube nearly a metre long. I ask if the lizard is a kungka/girl and she says 'wiya wati' /a man. The very end of its tail is cut off and discarded not eaten M gets the back bone of the lizard 'purpi' S says 'ma!u wiapi, but ngintaka purpi' Yankunytjatjara word. Both animals are charred off. The skin of the lizard shears off in places showing white *The kangaroo's spine is called witapi, but ngijaka's spine is purpi. People also have witapi.

Tinka (P) mi!pa!i /goanna Like the difference stated by Aangu between kanyala and malu, tinka live in the sand /manta and ngiaka live on the rocks /apu. The perentie do also live in sandy areas though. Field notes May1997 Whilst the wipu is cooking Nura finds an area of goanna burrow and D starts to dig a shallow trench from one of the entrances. The burrow is shallow only about 10 inches below the ground. She stops after a metre length and thrusts her crow bar into the ground nearby; hollow sound, She digs again, standing up and grabs at the tail visible in the sand and pulls. A goanna, maybe 2 foot long which she pulls out and beats its head on the ground from an arm swing, above her shoulder. It's red tongue lolls out. Then she dislocates its legs. 'Fat one', she examines it's stomach where the fat is.

Emu Emu are important tjukurpa animals. Around Ernabella they are called 'kalaya' their Yankunytjatjara name; 'tjakipiri' is their Pitjantjatjara name. Kalaya tjukurpa is watiku /men's and miilmiilpa /secret although outside versions of parts of it are danced at public gatherings. Emu meat is rich and often makes people sick (this seems often unrelated to taboos concerning the consumption of one's own tjukurpa). Although large, long necked animals, their external colour is brownish grey. The feathers Iwipiya had many uses in the past including providing the pad for the long pukati /chignon of initiated men and the soles for kadaitche assassin's shoes /puta which disguise the wearer's footprints (Spencer and

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Gillen 1899;483). Wipiya were also used to wrap mingkulpa- 'mingkulpa yuuntjunanyi'. 'Yuun(pa)' is the bag spun by the itchy grub (see Section Three).

Internally and in its life cycle, the emu is highly chromatic. It is for their yellow kanpi fiat that emu are most prized. This word denotes fat specifically from emu and kipara Thush turkey and is used of people jokingly 'nyuntu kanpijara' lit 'you fat-having' meaning you are not ngurka /skinny, are nicely covered. Field notes July 18th 1998 Hunting in white car. Emu, he says, are attracted to red cars, but malu are not. Emu are stupid, malu are ninti /savvy. 'Kalayaku ngura' /(this is) emu place, and suddenly four big emu grazing a little way off from the road. "Al All' A now driving, stops and turns the car engine off and just as he said, the emu come towards us. He is struggling to load a magazine, the rifle has jammed. Nearer and nearer the emu come, 'minyma in front' the big bodied wati Imale behind. They are huge animals. When they are about 15 foot away, A .shoots and they run but then slow and return. You must aim for the legs and it looks as though 3 are hit. They all run and we start after them across the bush. M has her glasses on now and points out where to follow. After about 10 minutes we have 6 in front of us but they are all running fast. They will though 'parapitjalku'/come back around, and we will have kuka pulka kuwaripa' /big /important meat, soon.65 All the women count and recount the tracks; 5 emu. Two of them are pikatjara. One each of their feet is landing badly. But best of all there are splashes of blood/milkali -dark red on the orange earth that all pointed out. 'ngawa hgawal'/Look! Field notes F15:5 1st June 1998 Nura ; emu eat 5 different mai; maku, kumparpa (tjawal-tjawalpa), parka parka (also Aanguku mai) purku /charcoal and apu /rock She laughs at this and says they have un lipi tjingaru /a wide throat maybe.

Emu eat five different sorts of food; witchetty grubs, bush tomato, mistletoe berries, charcoal and grit /stones. They also like tjulypurpa, the fruits of the emu bush and unmuta, a green cress that was also in the past, Aangku mai, people's food. ° This attraction of emu to red cars was mentioned by many older men. The explanation given is a careful 'outside' one suited to my gender, age and station. Emu are a rare sight around Ernabefla. I saw two crossing the track one morning, 15 months into my fieldwork, as I drove into Ernabella. I hastened to tell everyone at the arts centre but no one believed me; 'kunyu' they said of my tale, 'so it is said'. Were they wati or minyma? Nura asked me. Minyma are slimmer, 'ngurka wiya' not skinny. This occasion was the only one I hunted emu and the only time that I saw Aangu track game on foot. All 6 of us followed the tracks of 5 emu for sometime including women who never usually walked far. It was the old women though who continued whilst the younger sat down and began working on baskets to sell, made of the tjanpi /spinifex that was growing around the place, in anticipation of having wipiya to weave into the grasses. 138

Their eggs, which like all eggs are classed as kuka Imeat, are 'rawa /blue munu green' /always blue and green. Another time an enamel mug, dark green and speckled, lying on the floor of the car, was seized upon to show me the colour. In paintings for the market, the same dark green is faithfully reproduced by artists representing the eggs. Baby emu, yakalpa (Y) have dark and light striped markings which they lose as they mature.

Emu are cooked in 'different way' from malu; they are skinned to save the kanpi. Emu kanpi is bright yellow and coats the inside of the skin and around the bones. Aangu exclaim over the kanpi, 'kanpi wiru! The legs are the meatiest part and these are cut off from the body. The intestines are removed and cooked separately, and the yellowish kuna squeezed out. The stomach, full of yellow and green food, is cleaned, turned inside out and cooked separately. The raw meat is bluish but full of red blood when cut. The kanpi laden skin is rolled inside out into a long cylinder stuffed with bloodwood leaves that make the kanpi smell nice (compare Latz 1996;177, Sheard 1964;104) (fig. 23 ). These and the legs are cooked in a pit earth oven. The toes on the feet contract when the meat is cooked. The delicacy of the yellow fatty skin scented with bloodwood leaves is reminiscent of an edible bush buta, the scent like irmangka -irmangka of the land after rain and the skin moist and glistening with fat.

Kipara Field notes April 1997 F 5;15 Suddenly Nungalka sees 2 bush turkeys in an open grassy area to our right. D gets the rifle, (a .22 Magnum made in the Philippines, about 20 years old) loads it, has a problem, mutters. The birds are big goose size with small wings, brownish with paler necks and seemingly oblivious. 0 shoots the first one straight out - I see it flap then sag, about 35 feet away. She drives slowly towards the other with the rifle wedged under her right arm. She uses a piece of wire with a loop to clean the rifle barrel between shots. The second bird she shoots once from a distance then through the head at close range. She uses the wing mirror to rest the sight, keeps the engine running. D or Nungalka tells Nura to get out. Nura takes a plastic bag from me - blood she says, and the birds are flung in the back of the car. They are 'pulka' flat. D drives a short distance and then, in the dusk, the carcasses are thrown out and quickly cleaned by Nura and Ninguuta, heads chopped off, and feet and wings are roughly plucked. 3 dogs appear from nowhere.

I speculate that the emu's chromatic flesh, including its yellow fat, its wide throat and the manner of its cooking connects it to the rainbow. 139

Wombats Field notes Jan 1998 returning after holidays in the hot time over xmas They are going for malu and puu and want a cup a tea. S says they have been on holiday to Yalata, seen the sea, shot 2 wombats (kuka wiru white meat piggie purunpa (like piggie) - D) 'which', says S, 'you eat with salt', and had an emu half way. S also ate a lizard with a short tail 'kata kutjara' (2 heads) which he called a 'karta'.

Wombats do not live on the Lands, but south past the Kingoonnya Hills and around Ceduna, a town near the Aboriginal settlement of Yalata. Many Aangu have relatives here and wombats are commonly made the subject of puju /wood carvings around Ernabella. There was a particular efflorescence of these after the Christmas holiday time trips to Yalata. Wombats seem to exercise a particular fascination although S.'s comment above that you can eat wombat meat with salt implies that they are not an important dreaming animal. These are the things various people, men and women, told me about wombats. They have front feet 'like a malu hands' and back feet 'like a baby's'. 67 They can't see well because they have an eye on each side of their heads but they can smell. They have teeth like a maJu. But most of all, their skin is so tough that you have to shoot them right between the eyes. If you do not manage this they just walk away.

Mal /vegetable foods

Again and again around Ernabella different women pointed out the same mai /vegetable foodstuffs to me as important. The rating of importance given to bush foods now is directly correlated to their relationship to the speaker's tjukurpa, but this is subordinated to the sites on the tracks of Ancestors in the vicinity of their living place. The plants mentioned feature in the inma of these tjukurpa. As I have shown, local tjukurpa sites take precedence over an individual's tjukurpa; most of my informants stressed the same foods as 'number one' or 'mai pulka' or 'mai wiru'. Some of these plants around Ernabella are wa!inkura, kampurarpa and wanguu.

Mal that is ripe is kuru; as a noun this means 'eye'. Dried-out fruits, whose skins have lost their colour and which can be reconstituted with water, are 'mulya' -

67

European settlers seeing these tracks apparently mistook them for human baby tracks 140

'nose' as a noun (Goddard 1996).

lii !figs Fig trees grow on or at the base of rocks, their long pale aerial roots extending to reach moisture within the rock. 'That green place', Walanya, is green because of the fig trees growing over the spring. Their production of fruit is dependent on rainfall. The leaves are green and similar in shape to red river gum. They are also used in leaf games and in love magic, as Nungalka implies below (Latz 1995;197). Field notes Stop to pick ii from a loaded tree at the base of one of these rocks. They are mostly yellow still but red ripe ones too. G. tells me again if you have "tjuni pika" *and eat these you'll get better. Why? 'Cleans the stomach'. Nuna plays with an ill leaf point down over her forehead and laughs. *upset stomach Women must not cook ii because they are 'watiku miilmiilpa'. I only collected figs when with women and men. III are conventionally painted in women's bush food paintings, as dark red and yellow fruits, or sometimes red, purple and yellow with the distinctive leaves (fig. 20). Yellow is the unripe fruit, dark red, ripe, purple spoiling, ready to fall. The dried fruits were collected in the past, ground to a paste and stored in balls.

Wayuta (P) /Mangaa (Y) /Quondong Field notes August 1997 On the Mulga park road Nura and Panjiti wanted to stop at a Wayuta /quondong tree which was the only one. They found it without too much difficulty although quite away from the road 'that green one' said Panjiti in English. The old and dry seeds are for necklaces. Quondong have red, shiny skins and are always represented in paintings as bright red, sometimes with white crescents to show their shine. There are very few of these trees, which grow in sand hill or open country, around Ernabella.68 Although they are an important food and feature in the Minyma Kutjara tjukurpa at sites some distance from Ernabella, I only saw the fruits gathered once.

In the 1970s Anangu in Amata were encouraged to use their timber for puju (carving for the market) and this decimated the population. David Abrahams, pers. comm. 141

Instead it is the tatu, the seeds, large, round and textured, that are sought after for necklace making.

Tjanmata !bush onion FieJd notes May 3 1997 Just past (homeland) we stop for the onions. Nungalka uses a stick she found, mulga I think, Dora has her tomahawk and bashes at the ground using the blade and the flat. Then she shows me how to use your feet to kick away the 'rubbish', the top layer of leaves etc. Gathering bush onions is easy and speedy, compared say to honey ants. N. said Bush onions because the leaves smell like onions.69

These buiblets grow on the iwiri /roots of the plants near salt lakes and water courses, and are recognised by their green succulent leaves 70. The dry papery skin, nyiri (after which paper is named in Pitjantjatjara), is rubbed off between the palms in a circular motion called 'rungkanyi'. Having bush onions engenders social contact; women sit up all night round a fire, talking and eating the onions, perhaps a connection to the past when a large area of onions was sufficiently sustaining to enable a camp (Bryce 1992; 25).

Bush Tomatoes Several of these Solanums are an important part of women's tjukurpa and are avidly collected.

Kampurapa and Kulypurpa

Both are called 'yellow' when ripe, and 'green' in the stage before, although the yellow is a greenish yellow. I found this colour distinction difficult to recognise. Kampurarpa are often the subject of bush food paintings and are always painted as yellow, and shown with their distinctive long pale leaves. They dry to Bush food from one's own country is superior to that from other's. A woman, with connection to Arrente country, said you found really big ones much bigger than these, she indicated a small marble size, nearer Alice. She showed me this place at a Creek beside the Stuart Highway about half way to Alice when we went there with her in early June. Her visiting classificatory sister, also Arrente /Pitjantjatjara brought her a big bag of tjanmaa from the first woman's daughter in Hermannsberg and these were also apparently larger. stand by food in the past as the corms are available even during extended drought (Tindale 1974;97) but as Bryce comments now dug out by rabbits first. 142

brown and are still sought after like this. Kutypurpa differ from kampurarpa in taste and odour, and are cooked. Field notes 15; 9 July 10th 1998 F. shows me a big pannikin full of bush tomato from 'ngananmpa ngura, KK puli munkara, our home, the other side of KK rock. She smells them; 'panti wiru Ilovely smell" she says. There is a fire outside the craft room and she goes to cook them in the ashes, removing them after a couple of minutes. She rolls them between her palms to clean off the ashes. The tomatoes are still green, she gives me one; they taste exactly like stewed gooseberries.7' She says they smell like water melons. They are called kulypurpa, they are kutjupa- not tawal tawalpa. She says there are lots of emu around KK. Kumpulpa Kumpulpa is also 'yellow' when ripe but has a bitter juice, expelled before eating, hence its name - kumpu means urine or bladder.

Greenness, rain and olfaction There are a number of odiferous plants that are used as skin rubs, when combined with fat, or used with water to make tea. Many of these plants , as I have mentioned, are described as 'really green'. 'Men and women arrive complaining of kata pika*. A cure-all lotion used around the station (sic) is a mixture of olive oil and eucalyptus. This was poured on the hands of the sufferers and in most gave instant relief. Evident that this used as bodyThead rub oil and a quick way of obtaining grease' (Mountford 1940; 228). *literally 'head sick' This substance, dispensed in 1940 by Mr.MacDougatl the mission superintendent, was, probably unknown to him, efficacious on two counts. One was certainly the greasing factor, but the other was the smelt of eucalypt which is an iconic odour evoking for Aangu bloodwood /itara itara and red rivergum /apara trees and the intensification of their smell after rains when the odiferous volatile oils from their leaves are washed from the ground. 'Vics' ointment rub which is always mentioned in this regard as an analogous odour, and this, like the manufactured eucalypt oil, must have seemed amazing good fortune, supplied by whites.

143

Mingkulpa; Wild tobacco. Along with kuka malu, mingkulpa is probably the most important and desired bush produce. Gaining direct access to each of these seems to be less social outing from the community (as honey ants and witchetty grubs are) and more a necessity.

Minkulpa wanka has a strong smell Ipanti pulka' and is considered dangerous for children to smell in a confined space such as a car. The first time one tries mingkulpa it makes you feel sleepy and act 'drunk'. Chewing mingkulpa keeps ones mouth moist, staves off pangs of hunger and thirst. You must chew it and then spit - witani. Women hawk copiously and frequently. This is especially important when singing inma to ensure the throat is kept moist and open. 'Oh yes! I'm chewing tobacco at last! I've been without it for ages! .. . And he'd sleep with it, holding it in his mouth. He doesn't sleep without it . . And would travel around contented, with it held in the mouth. They'd feel satisfied. They put some in the mouth, and travel around looking out for game (Sam Pumami, Goddard I 985;98) Ingestion of greenness minkulpa and irmangka-irmangka, turns you 'green' and moist and new, in direct analogy with the rain greening up the country /body. It keeps your saliva flowing and keeps you moving along through the land. Chewed mingkulpa is also said to smell like rain.

These analogies are employed in rain-making ceremonies involving mingkulpa spat onto a pearl shell and white grass. A senior Pitjantjatjara man affirmed this but the details of such ceremonies are secret sacred Field notes F7;30 June 1997 Stand of minkulpa near the trees. The girls uproot whole plants, very green hairless leaves. When L. driving along the creek bed, spots another plant in the distance 'ukiri ukin -really green' and sends Maria for it, she tips it up and L. clucks about the wasted seeds. The bark is gathered from under the low fallen gum branches; It is 8mm or so thick yellowish pinkish brownish "really white' says L. of it. She makes a fire and chars some bark pieces, takes them out to cool and the very edge goes white. This ash she uses to mix a fresh quid. Meanwhile Kumana is stripping 'her' minkulpa down to the leaves all ready to set out drying. The roof of the Toyota is loaded with minkulpa, the inside with piles of bark already with designated ownership 71

Wild gooseberry is, in fact, their name in English(iame\but is not something Aangu said. Latz conflates kulypurpa and tawal —tawalpa (ibid 276). Emus eat tawal tawalpa so this is an indirect linkage the speaker is making. 144

L. spots the minkulpa because it stands out from its context, is so very bright green. Sara mixes herself a quid of new green minkulpa 'wanka' i.e. live, not dried, along with a cigarette's contents and ash Tobacco tin stored between breasts; one tin for leaf one for ash - once gathered mingkulpa is possessed. Mingkulpa contains nicotine and is combined with ash which promotes its rapid absorption into the bloodstream through the thin skin of the lips and mouth and behind the ear, where quids are stored.(Latz 1996;234). The bark /likara of red river gum trees is the ideal for making tjunpa /ash for mingkulpa. Bloodwood tree bark is also used, but mostly when the tree is a tjukurpa tree, that is the transformation of an Ancestral body. The ash must be 4really white'/pianpa. If 'grey' it is cast aside as 'rubbish /raputji. This whiteness is spoken of as though it were already present in the raw bark. Ash made from a type of mulga leaf can also be used with mingkulpa. Field notes M. also had a green branch of mulga Wanari that she first blackened in the fire and then, as the leaves turned to pale grey ash, she shook them over a shovel, picked some up and rubbed it to a powder between her palms; then she rolled her existing quid of pituri in it and put it back in her mouth. When very green before it is dried, it is 'wanka' /alive and, as on the occasion above, may be consumed like that. It is often simply referred to as 'ukiri' /green only. Plants that have become brown i.e. 'pilti /dry' are of no use (fig. 37).

Mingkulpa leaves are pulled off their stems, and dried either in the sun, spread perhaps across the springs of an old bedstead, or over a fire. The leaves are then crumbled as needed into small round tobacco tins or wrapped in papers that are kept about the person. The stalks are usually discarded but can be used in desperation (cf Sam Pumani in Goddard ibid;98). Field notes Sat with Yuminia who is retrieving the last possible morsels from minkulpa punu by placing the stalks briefly on the wire over the fire and running her hand down them to pull off the last parts of leaves that fall into her tobacco tin. The stalk of a plant, of mingkukpa, for example, is also called anangu, literally body, trunk (Goddard 1985;129).

Minkulpa in the Musgraves grows at the base of rocky outcrops often under the shade of fig trees at the mouth of caves or at the edges of creek beds, near red 145

river gum. It germinates in the cool weather and also after fire (Latz 1996, Goddard 1985;96). After winter rains, existing plants green up again very quickly72 (fig 35 and 4).

Piturpa /N.Gossei grows on rocks and is 'mingkulpa kutjupa', but is considered 'pulka wiya' not strong and seldom seems to occur in the quantities that mingkulpa does.

In the past men and women used mingkulpa but now it is mostly women, from teenagers to pampa, that chew it whilst men and some young women smoke store bought cigarettes. The two substances may, though, be combined73. Women say that they can gather bush food 'anywhere' round Ernabella. It seems to be belonging to the community then rather than the 'estate', as in the past, that gives one the right to do this. Areas returned to often, where the mingkulpa grows in profusion, under fig trees or at the base of a rock, are termed 'garden' in English, 'garden pulka'. A woman became very annoyed when, on telling her visiting daughter, her sister's child, of a stand, the daughter and her party stripped the whole lot from the ground. They had taken advantage of her generosity. On another occasion, when great quantities of mingkulpa were presented at the end of a large ceremonial gathering of women near Fregon, the Ernabella women became angry. Although they did not live there, they made other claims to that country and therefore to the mingkulpa, which was being given by those who, they said, had no right to do so.74 Field notes July 1998 She was furious because of the mingkulpa. She started to yell that this was her mother's father's father's country. Other women told her to stop. She raving on in the car between the camp at ( ) and Fregon. Ngayulu tjamuku malanpa tjuta Yankunytjatjara'. That is 'my grandfather's younger brothers and 72

commonest species is, as I identified from Latz, (and Goddard 1988;96 concurrs with me) Nicotiana excelsior, a tall, very green tobacco plant with smooth, strongly scented leaves and perfumed white flowers (although no one is interested in the latter). There is some confusion in the literature about this plant due to naming; 'pituri' is often used in English to describe wild tobacco, but is also applied to the emu poison bush, Duboisia Hopwoodii cf for example Basedow 1929;155-7, Watson 1983, Buchler 1978. The latter plant is called by Aangu, 'tjila' and is regarded as highly poisonous even to touch. Marijuana which seems to be available on the Lands, famously in one community in particular, is known as 'mingkulpa kutjupa'. This 'other mingkulpa' though is said to make Arjangu sad and introspective and is blamed often for the apathy and suicide of young people, boys especially. Tindale relates a similar incident in 1957 on the western border of South Australia between Pitiantiatiara men and neighbouring Nakako tribe who took the former's mingkulpa (1974;97). 146

sisters were all Yankunytjatjara' i.e. she had rights to that country too and therefore the Fregon women had no right to harvest the prodigious quantities of mingkulpa to use as payment. If raw mingkulpa is then sometimes problematic as a mediator of social relations, the processed stuff is far less so. Although ash is more freely given, mingkulpa is hidden, but the quid carried between lips and teeth is visible. Women ask one another, as relatives, holding out an open palm, for a piece of the kapuu, the quid or ball of chewed mingkulpa, and the quid or part of it passes from mouth to mouth.

lrmangka-irmangka, bush buta Whilst white (cool) ash and green pituri are mixed together for internal consumption, and the taste of greenness, white store-bought fat 'buta' and irmangka-irmangka are cooked together to make a fragrant skin grease. lrmangka-irniangka, Eremophila alternifolia or native fuchsia, grows as small shrubby trees, which are said to green up after rain. Field notes, April 1997. Of the 2 lrmangka-irmangka bushes on the Kenmore road; 'he's dry now but him drink all this water and be green again. After the rain everything will be green again, flowers too, yellow one, white one, red one.' lrmangka-irmangka is 'bush medicine number one'. If I asked to learn more about other bush medicine I was told this again. lrmangka-irmangka is used to cure muscle ache, especially that induced by nganpinyi, a woman's dance done with braced knees. But it is most efficacious as a decongestant; Field notes Yuminia has lost her voice, un pika, sore throat, she says, she put 'bush medicine 'on the top of her head to clear her throat, she indicates the crown. Field notes May 1997 Pantily, the women say over and over, good smell (D says like eucalypts, like Vics chest rub) They make that gesture with their hands, down the nose, the throat, the chest, the lungs, indicating the clearance of congestion. D rubs some of the just made warm oil into my neck, chest and top of my back to clear my head. lrmangka-irmangka is used as a cosmetic on a daily basis and particularly when a woman returns to her country after spending time in the city, and has run out

147

of supplies. Then it is rubbed into the traveller's arms and legs; it is the smell of the bush. It is also said to stop mosquito bites.

lrmangka-irmangka, as bush buta, is also used during women's inma to coat the exposed skin of all present. This is only done for inma pulka, important tjukurpa, not for ilbinji, glossed as love magic or watiku mukaringkulpai (wanting /loving a man). Here it seems to be both protection and some kind of spiritual conduit, where everyone smells the same and is recognised by the Ancestors. Bush buta is made by heating the lrmangka-irmangka in the fat. Field notes August 1997 No fat so D used Flora margarine, 11/2 tubs in her frying pan over the fire, some pieces of herb really luminous parrot green before all subsiding into the hot fat. D remarks on this 'ukiri wiru' and the smell of course and strained the lot, with my slotted spoon into an empty milk powder container. The smell of irmangka-irmangka seems to be the smell of life, of the land Ibody, and facilitates easy breathing. Field notes September 1999 There have been rains here unlike the NT. Nura wanted to go to the other side of Double Tank to get lrmangka-irmangka, 'wanka paluru' in answer to my question,

if it was pilti /dry. Buta (irmangka-irmangka) looks to me to be the same colour as ripe kulypurpa, which are called 'yellow', but is definitely 'green mulapa' /really green. lrmangka-irmangka tea made by boiling the herb in water, is also 'really green' and used as a decongestant. This was talked about in theory, but I did not see anyone make it.75

There are several other plants which are said to be like 'purunpa irmangkairmangka'. That is, they are said to have similar odours and are used for similar purposes, as de-congestants. Aratja, another Ermophila species, freelingli, can also be used as an inhalant and as a tea. It has pale blue flowers which, according to Cleland and Johnston, were used as decoration in headbands (Cleland and Johnston 1937;212). Another is apara, red river gum leaves

Seeing flights of Killykillykari /budgies Dora told me that they were Kuka wiru. smell really good like chicken when you cook them.' The greenness of budgies is like Mingkulpa, and Irmangka-irmangka, sudden, outstanding. 148

themselves, which can be pounded and cooked with fat to make 'bush buta'. Another is kalpari.

Ka!pari Field notes August 1997 Further on we stopped to collect kalpari, a very green low plant with 'rat tail' flowers growing stiff and tall 'like irmangka-irmangka 'they said sending me off to get them with F 'learn!' The plant had a very strong smell. You pound it /atuni with a stone and mix it with fat for rubbing or putting on your head. 'Mai too the seed like wakati' said F, i.e. little black seeds for damper. 6 This herb seemed to have a very brief growing season and is not common in the area. It favours disturbed ground after fire and sets seed a month or so after rains (Latz 1996;164). The scent is said to be like eucalypts as well as like irmangka—irmangka. The stiff green spikes are probably also casually connected to ilbinji /love magic. It was after a big gathering of women where watiku mukalringkulpai had been a dominant theme that we saw the plants, above. Some senior pampa bid ladies showed me their processing of the plant a few weeks later at the follow-on gathering which included similar inma.

Other Leaves Leaves are either 'ngalpi', also meaning feathers which are a similar shape, or 'parka'. Parka are narrow leaves such as those of many mulga trees or parkaparka mistletoes, and parka is used as slang to refer to a person who is a 'dead loss' (Goddard 1996). Gum leaves are used to represent people in young girls' tales both in the game milpatjunanyi (see Section 4), and in stories of people's actions and related events; 'They would use the rib side of the gum leaf up to designate men, and they'd use the smooth side to designate... women They did have half castes, they had a sort of pinkish leaf that was fading.. when it was losing its colour and that would be half caste. It wouldn't be a bright one, and then they had the young leaves, the little ones for chiIdren' The leaf that is losing its colour was apparently analogous to a mixed race person. 76

compare Goddard 1985;140 Ernabella staff member Mary Bennett ('Miss Baird') interviewed in 1995 Ara Iritija Archival project, record 1507. 149

Seeds In the past before European flour, the most important plant foods were wanguflu, wakati, kaltu kaltu, wintalyka, tjuntala etc. Grinding seeds was arduous work done only by women (Hamilton I 980b) Although women repeatedly pointed out wanguflu /woolybutt grass and maumacu or wakati /portlaca oleracea as 'mai pulka', or 'mai wiru', there is no reason to harvest them now. They do feature in tjukurpa and knowledge of them is therefore passed to children. Close-up photographs that I took of wakati plants, without other context, seem to render them unrecognisable to women.

Wanguu !Woollybutt Field notes By the humpy just outside the screen door, which has been sprayed with the message in English, "Please do not come in" Nura has mal. Her yard is immaculate, not a scrap of rubbish anywhere. 'Ai Kungka!' She has a grinding stone and a round pebble and has been grinding red-brown woolly butt seeds. F. sits down and grinds some, saying that her older brothers and her sisters knew how to do this but she did not. 'Hard work, for our mothers, our grandmothers, all day'. The seeds are ground dry and turn a mauvish grey when powdered. N gives me a jar of seeds and a mug with the flour in, she will cook a tjampa with it later. The unprocessed wanguflu seeds are classed by Anangu as 'brown', this English term used among Pitjantjatjara or Yankunytjatjara language. According to Cleland and Johnston, all food such as this that are ground up are called 'kona or kunna, that is foods resembling in consistency human excreta'. 78 I was also shown how the roots of this grass, which are very white, are used to make black 'baby rice' which cures thrush (white). Field notes March 1997 Sometimes with a bad mouth like thrush use black, she indicates the gums. Good for baby, if it has thrush; or you might put the black ('baby rice') on the nipple and it gets better that way. She takes me over to some pale grass she pulls up a clump and shows me the small white tuberous roots. They are furry and ovalish, of egg shaped with cream shoots rising out of them. Breaking these off she puts them on the fire. I get a burst of faint aroma hay and when they're black she rubs them in her fingers to powder; 'baby rice'.

78

i.e. 'kuna' in present orthography. Cleland and Johnston 1 937;208 writing of information gathered on a field trip to the Musgrave Ranges in 1933 150

Wakati or maru-maru Wakati grows quickly after summer rains or fire (Latz 1996; 249). The whole plant changes colour during its life cycle, indicating the critical time for the harvesting of its seeds. The stems change from green to pink at this point and later the whole plant turns black. The seed capsules are black and breastshaped, holding many tiny black seeds, hence its other name of maw-maw.

Sweet bush foods Aangu crave sweet foods and love the smell of them too. Large quantities of white sugar are consumed with tea. Sweet bush foods are thus also pursued with enthusiasm.

Ngapari. Ngapari is sweet tasting white scale formed by aphids on the leaves of red river gum /apara and the red mallee /tjintjulu, mostly during the cold time, ninnga in June and July. Heavy rains wash all the ngapari away. Ngapan features in tjukurpa and is the name of a place, now a homeland, to the west. Small infested branches are broken off and the leaves stripped into a bowl. They are rubbed together in a rapid rolling action, wnkanyi, the same verb as used similar actions with minkulpa ash before its mixed, for 'cleaning' say bush tomatoes or maku from the hot earth /ashes after cooking. It is also the verb used for spinning. Ngapari 'cleans the tjuni /stomach' and is eaten raw.

Pukara /waputi Desert Thryptomene flowers dunng the cooler weather at base of sand dunes (Latz 1996). I was shown these bushes when we went looking for maku in sand dune country north of Ernabella during the winter time, June, July. The dew collected in the flowers overnight was gathered before dawn and is sweet, mixed as it is with nectar.

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Panjiti; when men and women go hunting they take the flowers and beat them over a wira or billy, sweeten water like honey, panti wiru purunpa honey /a lovely smell like honey.

Kurku Kurku is a sticky, glittery residue made by aphids on mulga /kurku. The affected branches are stripped from the tree and sucked like a buy or soaked in water to make a sweet drink.

Tjaa /Honey ants These are one of the most popular bush food on the Lands today, as well as and the most frequently used excuse by women to make a trip out bush. The availability of tjala, and their quality, is linked to rain. Just after heavy rain is an easier time to dig for them. The ground is not witu witu /hard, but soft and moist, and the ants are pulka fiat. After long dry spells, it not only becomes too hard to dig, but the honey ants become saggy. The yellow inuntji /blossom of the mulga, which the ants feed off, is also opportunistic, flowering after rain. Women often work alone hunting tja!a, only regrouping around the most successful earth workings late in the day.

Digging for honey ants is very skillful, but when done well, looks easy. Little girls like to practice, and have their own small crowbars. Tjala live under, or near, mulga /wanari trees and the purura /worker ants must be spotted as they run, in spurts, through in the leaf litter. Their distinguishing characteristic is their yellow (striped) rump /mana untan untanpa. When the litter is sliced away with a shovel, it is a small centimetre wide hole that is being sought, the entrance to the nest. Following the movement of ants downwards, 'tjarukutu, tjarukutu', in the expectation of finding a 'nyari', the chamber where the honey ants hang, depends on following the tracks which are pointed out as 'red'. For me, the difference between the colour of the earth and the colour of the tracks was very difficult to see. When I asked, what then was the colour of the earth, I was told also 'red'. Just as with the tomatoes discussed above, I had no idea what I was supposed to looking for - which was the contrast. In fact the tracks are redder 152

than the surrounding earth, small irregular patches of pinker earth. These patches are 'manta piltiringanyu'— earth that has become dry. If you see patches of black and white, kura Thad, the ants avoid these and move away. If there are rocks the ants move sideways. If no rocks they keep going downwards'.

Tja!a are described as maru or pianpa; the light ones are yellow, the dark ones red or reddish brown. They are translucent and glitter in the sun, when dug out of the dark. When representing tja!a in bush food paintings these are the colours —yellow and reddish-brown - that women paint them. The worker ants and their tracks are described respectively as 'yellow and red' but the tjala are 'light or dark'. People frequently describe what type they found. Children especially like to smell the tjaia, which are considered to have a lovely odour.

In paintings tjala are often depicted inside black circles, the nyari, and with little white dabs beside them; these are 'tja!a iti nampu' (lit, honey ant baby eggs), they grow up into tjala.' Men can dig for tjala but do so only under guidance from women, who might draw on the earth as instructions, the next phase in extensive excavations. These are usually adult sons, more rarely husbands. Spouses of senior women usually recline at their leisure beside the hole (cf White 1972, on digging out wombat).

These sites of women's often exquisite, exertions in the earth are much commented on when later passed, 'ngayuku piti' /my pit in a way that they do not over trenches dug in creek beds to extract roots of the apara for carving. I was always asking 'when' and always received the reply 'mungau or iriti', not long ago or a long time ago. Field notes May 16th G tells me the tja!a are pulka and maru. I sit and watch Nuna dig her beautifully efficient hole with a shelf for sitting on, and the edges all neatly banked with freshly dug, moist, orange earth, the little place she makes with her fingers, for the tjala as she brings them out of their cool dark slot-shaped nyari /chamber. Some are dark, some light. They have Katjikatji tjala, pulka , wiru. D shows me. She says 'Different colours' and gives me a pale yellow one and a dark reddish brown one. They taste different. 153

We all end up sitting round her pii as dusk falls and the birds sing. Muwitja had set alight an area of ground around a Ka!Iuka nest and David her small grandson spreads the flames. Tjulkiwa's pakali /grandson ends up shovelling sand on it before we leave.

Conclusion In this section, I have shown how the surface of cultural artefacts, the land, tjukurpa animals and plants, even the human body, effects their use as mediators in social relationships. I have also shown how greenness is an indicator of vitality, through its link with the smell of fecund land, such that things which are said to possess this smell are thought of as 'really green'.

It is first through vision that foods of any kind are recognised among the scribble of the bush. Sound, particularly the noise made through impact with the ground, the hollow sound of roots filled with maku, or the burrow of a goanna, and the thump of the roo's tail as it bounds along, are also used. It is contrast in colour though, that is seemingly most important, and not always a contrast of opposites, as in honey ants, but closer - least differences; a different green among other greens, a different red among other rednesses. Anangu remember things and their position through their formal qualities, through difference. These are not 'just' sensation though, as I have tried to show, but have meaning in a complex structure of colour. Practical knowledge is linked to layers of religious knowledge, which are constantly renewed, as for the Baktaman (Barth 1975). This knowledge can be accumulated over a life time, but its foundations are in knowledge of bush foods and animals. This is what children are therefore taught, and my understanding, as a short term member of the culture, is also at their level.

I have shown that colours are conceived as a series of transformations. These transformations are embodied by people, by the land, and by animals and plants consumed by people, and in the relationship between them, as we will see further in Section 3. These transformations are often effected by another agent, rain, fire, cooking. Hence, although colours are not memorable as single hues according to western psychological experiments, as relational series they are more so. Sometimes, what comes next is known, as in the colour series of 154

bush mai skins. Sometimes, as is seemingly so for the colours of the land, and especially the sky, the actual hues are not known.

In terms of the vexed colour and cognition question, Aangu seem to show a 'gap' between colour classification and cognition. If colour perception was created by language then it would not be possible for Aangu to paint tjala as red and yellow, as they do figs, whilst referring to them as light and dark. That is, cognition is obviously greater than - or at least different from - colour vocabulary. Here these terms are used to describe the contrast between the two colours of tjala simultaneously present, without actually naming the colours, whereas for the fig, the colours are related to a temporal series which show the ripeness of the fruit through the hue of its skin. Colour terms are used both as focals; green for example, and as boundaries at the edges of categories; green and yellow say as for the bush tomato. Or colours, as for the blue of rockholes, are idealised, culturally set. A person sees, or claims to see, what is culturally expected and emotionally salient.

Keeping in mind the resurfacing of bodies, especially fat, water and greenness, explored in this section, I will next consider imported material goods, and the way their colours are used.

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Fig 31: Abandoned car near Ernabella, repainted in household paints 1997. 162

SECTION 3; Cars, Clothes, Blankets and Other Things

Introduction Field notes; football at Fregon At Fregon football ground a match is in progress. About half the players have a team kit or part of one; some have boots. A loud speaker voice makes announcements. There is no grass but a red earth pitch. People are camped around the perimeter at regular distances. S. is draped on the boot of his red car, black and white check shirt, new bobble hat - Port Power black /white/ turquoise - and jeans. Fregon colours seem to be red, white and blue. The goal posts are painted - blue central pair, red outer pair. Lad in this redlwhite/blue football shirt, riding a red, white and blue motorbike. Saw a bright blue car with red painted hub caps. When we first went to live on the homeland which was then deserted, after being cleared for men's Business to go through it a few months earlier, there were large numbers of things, mostly imported western things, scattered around on the ground. I do not list these out of any sense of prurience, but because they were indicative not only of what people acquire but of what they consider disposable. Field notes April 1997; F5;21 Inside KK fence, in immediate vicinity of the three tjilpi huts and laundry and shower block, by our house: One green glass marble Red colouring pencil 'Dustbin' pencil sharpener Quantities of orange Fanta cans Quantities of clear plastic Coca Cola bottles, red caps red labels 'Mortem' pine scented insect killer red lid,/red/blue/green canister Clear Plastic bottle of citronella oil Starter for generator 6 black plastic crates Quantities of tyre inner tubes I child's high chair Car ashtray Rolls of new nylon shade cloth (black and some green) Sheets of corrugated iron Two broken twin tub washing machines One fridge freezer carcass Five old car seats (outside front of house) One sofa, rotten (at rear of house) Quantities of newish clothes (mostly teenagers') Two single shoes, trainer and boot, left feet. One green and white truck (Toyota Stout) In the KK 'rubbish dump' outside the fence:

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Eleven disused motor vehicles spread around in the bush. One top loader washing machine Large quantities of rusted tins spread over big area, Kangaroo head and quantities of meat bones , ditto Quantities of clothes, mostly mens', orange /red, Adelaide Crow's shirt. Child's swing Baby playpen Two push chair frames Large number of tyres and inner tubes Two balls of shop bought red wool Two yellow plastic margarine tubs Cars and clothes and the paraphernalia that comes with them seem to be the most important imported things in Anangu culture, along with mass produced food stuffs. The list of 'rubbish' on the homeland is representative of this. In this section I will suggest how cars and clothes have become crucial as mediators in Anangu social life because of their capacity for transformation. This transformative capacity is effected by the colour of these things, to a very great extent with clothes and also with cars. The surfaces of cars and textiles are used to display correlating sets of colours, offering a socially constructed connectivity between things, through their colours. I will show how Aangu employ certain set colour combinations which are effective in various ways.

How things become raputji /'rubbish', that is, no longer effective, is an English term Anangu used frequently of both cars and clothing. To the dominant culture both cars and clothes might seem markers of the inauthenticity of contemporary Aboriginal culture. In fact, as I will argue, the reverse is true.

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Section 3.1: The Life and Death of Cars; colour , space and motion

'Long time ago people had no car, they had to walk. They walked miles to get kangaroo meat and bush food. . . Today we have cars to go anywhere we want to orto go hunting'. Bertha Nakamarra (1991:18). 'Was life better for grandma and grandpa?' 'I want to live now in Emabelta, not fifty years ago like with my grandma. I'm happy because I can travel all over Australia. I can go to Amata, Finke or Yuendemu whenever I want to. We can see football, inma, play games, eat food like bush tucker and Australian food. If I lived fifty years ago I could not do all this' by Sonia Lewis (from Emabella school magazine)

Introduction Two material things enable Aboriginal people in the Central Desert to fulfill a desire to return to, and live on, their homelands: one is access to permanent water supplies through bore technology, and the other access to motor vehicles. I will show in this section how Aangu use cars as social bodies. The driver of a car must imitate the complex choreography of spatial etiquette of a person on foot. The car is therefore like a prosthesis of the persor inside and its carefully /) constructed uses express much about spatial practices in contemporary Aangu culture. Similarly abandoned cars, which rot extremely slowly in the dry desert, are used as spatial markers in country but are also akin to bodies. The outer surface of car bodies may be re-sprayed in a new colour, or become bi- or multi-coloured through recycling body work from other cars. The contact that a car in motion makes with the land, the track that it leaves, is also assessed by Aangu as a coherent social narrative.

Of all Western consumer goods, motor vehicles seem the most important to Anangu. Life without cars in remote bush communities is considered impossible, despite the fact that two generations ago most people walked long distances everyday. No one now would consider a hunting expedition without a car. There are fewer emu and kangaroo and one has to drive further away from settlements to find them.

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Relatives always need a lift to the shop to work and to fetch the mail and pay. Twice a week when the mail plane comes in from Alice Springs carrying wages, the centre of the community is thronged with cars each bursting with people. No-one, except some very old people born in the bush, wants to walk anywhere if they can help it. The younger you are the less likely you will want to walk.

Both Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara are spread over a wide area of South Australia and the Northern Territory. There is constant travel for business and other social reasons (such as football and funerals) between Ernabella, Fregon, Amata and Mimili. The Aboriginal community of Yalata on the coast of South Australia, for example, is predominantly Pitjantjatjara, as are Areyonga and Docker River in the Northern Territory. Many Aangu live in Adelaide and Port Augusta in South Australia, and in Alice Springs and Cooper Pedy. With family networks extending over such distances, individuals may choose to stay with relatives hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away, for weeks or months at a time. There are always cars going between these places and people decide to go when they wish, often on the spur of the moment. This simultaneous expansion of horizons - 30 years ago few people in Emabella had been as far as Alice Springs - and contraction of time-space in terms of distance is similar to that experienced in Europe with the advent of rail travel (Shivelbusch 1986).

Car ownership is important in this interplay between individual autonomy and the continuous dynamism of social relationships, analyzed eloquently by Myers working with the Pintupi (Myers 1991a, 1991b). Access to motor vehicles is indispensable for fulfilling social obligations and enhancing political status. At the same time, mobility is a means to avoid social conflict, often cited by bush people in their desire to live and move in smaller family units on homelands more similar to the past /iriti before white people came (A.Hamilton 1987;48).

'Two of the most striking features of present day aboriginal religious life are its high mobility and the far reaching communications network' (Kolig quoted in Hamilton, A. 1987;48). Women and men travel huge distances for ceremonies or business as it is now termed by Western Desert people (cf Peterson 2000). Without access to cars tjukurpa sites cannot be visited and secret single sex 166

ceremony cannot be produced without anxiety. This is more of a problem for women than for men since it is men who generally control access to cars, both private and community vehicles. But it is not just the matter of needing a car for obtaining firewood and food from the store, or the social necessity of attending funerals, openings, football and inma, but the emotional compulsion to be mobile, to be moving through country, especially one's own. As women often told me, just being in the bush makes you feel better.

Acquiring cars The relationship between people and cars is by no means an unproblematic one and is further complicated by a vehicle having community status (Stotz 1993 and forthcoming 2001). In this section I will concentrate on private cars. Aangu acquire motor vehicles as the non-Aboriginal population do, through cash purchases from private sales and second hand dealers in Alice Springs, the roadhouses at Kulgera and Maria Bore as well as from further afield Adelaide and Port Augusta. Sometimes non-Aboriginal staff in Ernabelia bring cars up to the Lands to sell. Whilst a minority of high earning families buy new vehicles- almost always four wheel drive land cruisers - second hand vehicles are more usual. Cars are sometimes 'swapped' either for another car or for music systems and televisions. Several of the cases I recorded were swaps between siblings, but one was with a white man when a newly acquired minibus got stuck in deep creek sand on station land and was abandoned there, to be retrieved later by the white man in exchange for his car.

The cars that Aboriginal people in the Western Desert buy are typically in the last stages of their viable life. Indeed new cars are often shunned as unpredictable, 'might be bad luck', perhaps because they are unsociahsed, that is have no accumulated identity (Stotz 1993;193).1 In Ernabella the annual receipt of tourist gate monies from Ayers Rock by those who claim traditional

Returning to visit friends in Emabella in 1999 I faced difficulty in obtaining a car at the height of the tourist season in Alice Springs. I rented the only hire car I could find which to my horror was literally brand new. No one was impressed by this car (despite its speed and smooth ride), because of its newness and also because it had none of the essential bush features, lacking bulibars at the front, tow bar at the rear and a roof rack. It was in short a 4 wheel drive vehicle built for the metropolitan suburbs. 167

ownership of sites inside the National Park causes an efflorescence of vehicle purchasing. Even so most of these cars will not last long. Some sedans and four wheel drive vehicles too last only a few months before irretrievable breakdown occurs on the punishing dirt roadways.

Both Annette Hamilton, working with the Yankunytjatjara, and Myers with the Pintupi, have documented how consumer objects are acquired and disposed of with ease and assert that cars are no different in this respect (Hamilton 1979; 111, Myers 1991 a;73). Myers contrasts the inalienablity of the land (since enduring social identity is formed by a person's relationship with country) with the way 'most objects enter into exchange,' and this includes cars. Whatever was obtained once can be obtained again (Hamilton ibid). In the east of the Pitjantjatjara Lands, much of what is acquired in the way of mass produced western goods - clothing, blankets, car tyre rubber, toys, household good and packaging - is discarded, apparently randomly, onto the ground. The soft sand gradually swallows these things and they submerge and disappear. There is also a sense in which letting western things go into the Ancestral earth ensures their reproduction. Car bodies however do not enter the sand and rust slowly in the dry climate. Even burnt out cars remain as skeletons. Although then it is literally out of circulation, by its physical existence in the land a car has a continuing presence.

Anangu say that they cannot 'look after' country without access to cars, notably Toyotas, that is, 4-wheel drive vehicles. In my experience 'looking after country' now often implies residence and may be a basis for claims to that country, and this is corroborated by Payne, who worked in Emabella (Payne 1984). Such residence on a homeland is impossible without a car. 'Looking after' is also achieved by performing ceremonies. Cars, although desirable, are not 'looked after' in the way that people or country are ideally stated to be2. However Aangu, I suggest, perceive cars as having a special relationship to country unlike that of other things, especially other mass produced commodities, because they are literally the vehicle for social events and the places and journeys which they enabled. I will examine this notion more thoroughly below. 2

'Looking after cars is stated as keeping the oil and water topped up and the battery charged. 168

Cars in the western desert are a better example of things having a social life than even Kopytoff might have imagined (Kopytoff 1986; 67).

The aspect of a vehicle which Aangu seem to consider as a constant throughout its biography resides in its materiality, notably its colour. Thus Hamilton records that one of the first vehicles owned in nearby Mimili in 1970 was known as 'the Red Truck' (Hamilton 1979;110). My old Toyota troop carrier is recalled as 'your white car', although it had other social identities. Yami Lester, a Yankunytjatjara man, remembers the red Emabella truck in about 1954 (Lester 1993;40). Even when abandoned, sold or swapped, or carrying contrasting colour panels taken from 'dead' vehicles, the car is still 'that red one' I'palatja rituwana' or 'that yellow one'. The same colour sets used in clothes, that is allusions to personal tjukurpa, affiliation to a group's tjukurpa, personal status or Christian beliefs, and football strips are applied to cars. In fact in some ways clothes and cars are both treated as extensions of the body. Despite the constraints that this might seem to offer, cars are re-painted and the parts of old cars re-used so that contrast, in the form of different colour pieces of bodywork, can be achieved.

Although it may be objected that as most cars are second hand, Anangu are stuck with what the mainstream market has produced, there are definite colour preferences for cars. Any contrast, even if only 'go faster' stripes or trim, is deemed to be better than one plain colour. The greater the contrast the more 'rikina' /flash, the car is. For example, a white car with grey stripes was only 'rikina tjuku tjuku' /a little bit flash. One of the most frequent is the dust coloured car, metallic gold or copper or beige which looks already as though it has travelled far on the reddish dirt roads and seems akin to the clothes colours frequently worn by old men (see section 2.2). The metallic finish though, is admired and touched, and like shiney clothes is, I suggest, linked to the shine and tactility of fat on skin. White cars are also popular. The young couple mentioned below, had a gold and white car. Field notes 1997 T. and husband, have a metallic gold sedan originally a Ford falcon. Has white roof, white bonnet, white door and front panel containing headlights is orange, same tone as the gold. Previously same man drove white Ute with I orange door. 169

Have not seen this vehicle in a while. Mid August, was in the queue at the store with this man, told him I liked his car, asked if it was originally gold or white; it was gold. He 'nearly split the ute in half' in a crash, hence this new one, combining the two.

Re-spraying a whole car in bright saturated colours such as red, orange, yellow or green is popular. The car dump at Fregon, which I saw in 1997, had many pink, purple and orange cars. Brightly coloured cars are young men's cars, designed to attract girls. Older men too, indulge in such cars. A senior man, reputed to be something of a car dealer, possessed a re-sprayed scarlet minibus with matching scarlet hub caps. Red, unstable and 'dangerous' and the colour of initiated men, made the very red car indexical of his political power. Other cars are re-coloured by the application of household paint, the red, black and white alluding to a ritual colour series (fig 31). Red, blue and white Honda motorcycles are popular in nearby Fregon whose foothall strip is of the same colour set. In the survey of abandoned cars in a 45 km radius of Ernabella, blue and white cars were the commonest. This colour contrast, and its links to a declaration of Christianity, are explored further in the next part of this section on clothing (fig 30).

There were two cars, both yellow with red doors and bonnets, in Ernabella in 1998-99. Red and yellow together possibly symbolise the fire dreaming. There was also an unusual customised Chevrolet, cream with a black bonnet and roof and pristine chrome bumper, which cruised between Ernabella and Balfour Well, driven by young men. This colour combination is unusual in cars, though common in clothing. The car lasted for some months, before finishing up in the car dump at Umuwa3, just south of Balfour Well. The new 4-wheel drive vehicles, which everyone aspires to drive 4 , are so desirable that their colour would seem to be secondary, since Aangu would be

Umuwa is the administrative 'capital' of the Lands, between Fregon and Emabella. ' In 1996, the white male administrator of the Ajangu Pitjanjatjara Executive Council had, at the behest of the tjilpilsenior men, purchased, using ATSIC ( Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) money several new Toyota Personnel Carriers. These were deemed to enable senior men to look after country. Since women hold country too, and the new vehicles were driven not by tjilpi, but by young men, women were enraged. The number of women on the Executive ranges between 0 and 2. Lack of access to Toyotas is a source of much grievance to women and also contributes to the lack of power that they hold in interface with non- Aboriginal or non local governmental organisations. Women remain reliant on men to take them to such 170

pleased to have access to such a vehicle at all. Their perceived power is generated by the ability that they are considered to have, to go anywhere (see Stotz forthcoming 2001). All cars supplied by ATSIC for their staff, and other staff cars, are white. There are a few older green cars, but new models in 1998 included metallic silver, and also an opalescent finish in black or white. There are few black cars and few pale green ones. Black is 'to do with 'men's' secret business. A certain lifeless pale green is associated with infected green puss in the eyes and blindness. However, two of these new opalescent models, with tinted glass, were driven by tjilpi. The resemblance to the iridescent surface of pearl shell and fat may have been a contributing factor in the desirability and power apparently indexed in these vehicles together with their drivers. Older Toyotas, carefully maintained by their now elderly owners, are customised. An old Toyota, said to be from Amata, was navy blue with a replacement orange bonnet and a hand painted matching orange rear panel and roof. Another Toyota in Amata hcct green with murals painted on the front bonnet and side. The 'boss' of the homeland where I lived drove an old yellow ochre coloured Toyota with a white roof. I know this to be the colours of the walka for the sacred site at the homeland. The set of tracks left by a vehicle's tyres, the walkaldesign on them, also lead to the identification of a car's passage and much can be inferred from them about the likely occupants and when and where they went. A car with an odd tyre, or a different wheel, is diagnosed in the same way as the footprint of a wounded animal or person, in that it looks different from normal. Aangu also recognise individual vehicles by their engine sound although on the whole people seem to do this less accurately than with tracks.

When travelling outside their own community cars are identified with their home/ngura. So people might identify a vehicle driving round Ernabella as a Fregon car. When I drove to a mining town several hundred kilometres south, my car was identified and hailed by Aangu living there as 'Ernabella car'. Private cars are also verbally identified with individuals, though this seemed to happen when a vehicle had belonged to that person for a longer time than meetings or allow them access to a car, or on outsiders such as community staff members' 171

average. Such a car will then be identified as such and such a person's when being driven by others, in the owner's absence. Often relatives help pay off car loans but the woman or man in whose name the loan was taken out remains the controller of the vehicle. Children also long for cars of their own. Field notes F10;4 Q. stopped playing with the other kids and came and looked at my newspaper the pictures only - and seemed especially interested in the car ads, of which there were many. She picked red cars for herself 'Nyayuku, Dianaku', mine /Diana's. The History of 'that red car' The history of a red-with-orange-trim Ford Falcon was as follows. Said to be 'mutuka wiru' Ian excellent car, when Kunmanara, a man of about 60, first acquired it from his kuta /older brother in March, it appeared to be a complete, conventional car. He had 'swapped' a bright yellow car with a musical horn for this car, really a young man's car. Like all his cars, as it became more dilapidated, the red car was driven by his daughters and their husbands, and seemed then to become theirs. Field notes April; This red car, a Ford Falcon estate, looked very new when Windlass was driving it, now missing a window and several parts from under the bonnet. 'Someone' sat on the bonnet whilst watching the football at Fregon and the resulting dent prevents the bonnet from opening easily. Mid August; Frank and Linda, Kunmanara's daughter driving the red car. Now when I meet it on the road and its headlights are flashed in greeting, only one comes up a faint yellow. September; lost its rear lights and cannot reverse. November ; Julie, (Kunmanara's wife's ZD) and her partner Eddie Crow now drive this car. Late November; no sign of this car. It may be dead. The loss of working headlamps I heard termed as 'kuru wiya' mo eyes.

Inside and Outside Cars Field notes 1997 On the main road the red car comes towards us lights flashing and arms waving from every window telling us to stop. We draw up, the drivers able to touch. Kunmanara gets out and D. passes her baby grandson through the window to her. N and M get out of the red car into the white one with crowbars and a cars. Stotz (1993;173 -4) has suggested that the combustion engine, particuarly the carburetor, is linked to men's control of fire by the Walpiri thus gendering cars as male things.

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blanket. We drive back to the homeland to fetch the shovels, then off to the west, 'same place', for honey ants.

Cars, like most other things, have many uses, just as a car journey has no single intention, even if only one is stated. Among many reasons for cars being so desirable is their quality of being a convenient mobile camp and ready made architectural element. My own car, because of its size and status among a group of women had, by the end of the fieldwork, become 'minymaku' /women's Toyota. It was used to store all sorts of things, some temporarily, others, including a rifle, for several weeks (fig 25). Clothes, women's ceremonial tools, bags, and boxes of groceries, crow bars, supplies of bullets and innumerable tobacco tins of minkulpaibush tobacco all passed through it. Often I had no idea what was stored inside, especially the business tools which seemed to be safe and out of sight there at a time of frantic ceremonial undertakings. I was regularly approached by people searching for missing bags, medicines or shovels which had at sometime passed through the vehicle. Glove compartments are used to store small or comparatively precious items, cash, tobacco, a bible or hymn book. New passengers in a car thus always seem to rifle through the compartment first and may appropriate something they want. Nungalka, finding her crowbar missing from my car, took a hand crocheted beanie (hat) instead, saying to me in Pitjantjatjara, 'someone takes my crowbar, I'll take their hat'.

Although living in old car wrecks was sometimes practised in central Australia this is not the case around Ernabella. But a 'live' car provides all the useful places for stowing equipment and belongings away from the demands of others afforded by the wiltja. Wiltja, meaning shade, are circular or semi-circular in plan, made with live leafed branches or with dead ones. The timber has one end embedded in the ground and the top parts are pulled together and interwoven with smaller forked branches. 6 The frame is covered in tarpaulins or in the past, spinifex grass. A doorway is formed by omitting several of the 6

There are many different kinds of wiltja still built but these 'humpies' as Aangu also call them are the commonest now. Peter Hamilton made a comprehensive study of wiltja types in Mimili then Everard Park in 1971-2. P Hamilton (ibid ;14) points rightly to the visual privacy achieved by the wiltja interior with its high contrast between outside and in. Cars give less of such privacy but some new cars with tinted solar glass are appearing on the Lands provide the same one way vision effect. 173

uprights. 'During the day, the wiltja may be used as a 'shade', to give protection from the sun's heat, for privacy, or as a place for social retreat associated with avoidance behaviour. The wiltja is also used as a place for storing personal ritual objects to be kept out of sight' (Hamilton, P. 1972;7-8). Meat and clothes are stored on the wiltja roof, safe from the depredations of camp dogs.

Private motor vehicles are used in all these ways too (although meat stored on a car roof is often rendered accessible to agile dogs, via the handy platform of the bonnet). Except in cold or wet weather, Aangu do not often sleep inside wiltja at night (or indeed inside cars) but outside in the yuu /windbreak area where the fire is made, It follows then that on homelands, houses are often used for storage whilst people live either in yuu structures that they have attached to the verandahs or, away from the house, but within the fenced compound, in a yuu. The yuu, an adjunct to the wiltja is made from short leafy branches loosely interwoven with others. In communities it might be made from bits of corrugated iron. Bigger timber structures are hung with cloth or blankets for visual privacy.

Camps are always in a state of flux, their material aspects adapted due to prevailing wind or rain, the arrival or departure of visiting relatives and the current state of social relationships within the camp (Hamilton, A. 1979 23-4). Although many people spend much of the year living in houses in larger communities, there is constant 'away camping' during ceremonial business or sorry camps by old people, and by those who live on homelands and camp both there and, on other occasions, in the community. Whilst wiltja and yuu may be swiftly though laboriously altered, a 'live' car can be used to alter the living spaces simply by someone turning on the engine and moving it a few feet, or by changing the angle. When first asked to move a car in camp in this way I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, much to the hilarity of my instructors. Camps planned around cars look, to me, bleakly exposed during the day when the occupants are out driving in the vehicle.

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When neighbours on the homelands purchased a full size single decker bus, which they said was 'like a caravan' 7, it did seem that in many ways this was their ideal mobile wiltja. It quickly filled up with their possessions, clothes, tape recorders, shovels etc, and the whole extended family of three generations could fit into it, albeit travelling at a stately pace. Usually they owned three or four cars between them. The bus engine failed within a month and the idea was abandoned. However many families own minibuses although their low undercarriage means that they are often stranded in soft creek sand, where their owners take them to transport roots of the red river gum for carving. Other people will always pass in other cars and get them out even without the benefit of 4-wheel drive vehicles, with a mixture of whatever towing equipment, jacks and shovels is available and with much manual labour.

At women only ceremonies, always held in the bush, parked cars screen the singers and dancers from on-coming vehicles. A second car is parked slightly set back from the first and so on, offering information to later arrivals about which group arrived when. This in turn is related to individuals and group's rights to sites and to the enaction of the inma. At a boys' initiation camp cars were parked in a dense group, making - to those outside - an invisible ring at their centre. Car headlights are used during nocturnal ceremonies to illuminate the dancers, augmenting large bonfires replenished continually for the same purpose. Toyotas are preferred for this, possibly because the lights are more powerful and the battery is larger and can stand the strain. Toyotas seem anthropomorphised in these circumstances, their slow movements apparently self-sufficient and choreographed.

At public meetings or church inma drivers group their cars in a rough semi circle facing the action, sometimes banked two or three vehicles deep. Although Anangu usually sit on the ground, during bad weather, at meetings or football matches, people might sit on or inside their cars. At a sports carnival held during a dust storm, women moved from car to car, from group to group, climbing into each car in turn, just as they would do in camp between wiltja or in Caravans are sometimes used as supplementary housing on homelands but are not towed around as mobile homes. 175

the community between houses. Cars have the added advantage of built-in radios and tape decks, a facility that young women particularly are addicted to. Aboriginal Police Aid vehicles which are equipped with loudspeakers are used to broadcast community information as they drive around, as well as on occasion, country and western music. Men in particular (for it is men who are usually the 'bosses' of cars) may retreat alone to their cars for a smoke, or to listen to music on tape or the localjNPY radio9. Being able to do this is an expression of power. I laboured with three women to prepare and cook the game, that one of them had shot on a hunt, whilst their (and by then, my) male relative sat cocooned in the car, smoking and listening to a music tape. Sometimes men simply sit inside their cars amidst a family camp. In women-only ritual gatherings women often withdraw to the interior of the car they have come in to eat or drink. If you do not want to be asked to share your food, cigarettes or mingkulpa/tobacco, it is advantageous to conceal your consumption, for to turn down requests flat without an excuse is to deny your social relationship with the other person (cf Myers 1991a;56 on the Pintupi). Children, from babies to teenagers, are left to sleep inside open cars in the day on these and bush tucker trips, where they are safe from snakes. In the event of an argument breaking out those who wish to avoid confrontation retreat to the car and move off a little way in it, if possible. In all these situations the car is used as a liminal space, separating those inside from social demands, avoidance relationships or aggression in a similar way to the wiltja (P. Hamilton 1972;7-8) But the car's capacity for motion gives more scope for such retreats; thus women at boys' initiation camp are able to go back to their own camp in cars and avoid meeting male relatives, as they would have had to take much trouble not to do on foot. Most of all a car universally gives one the ability to leave - quickly. At the sorry camp of an important man in a neighbouring community of Ernabella, a dispute broke out among the mourners as to where the deceased should be buried. The family I was with made hasty preparations to leave and we went instead to a party at Ayers Rock, but returned to the sorry Ngaanyyatatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara radio 176

camp in the small hours of the next night when all the trouble and the funeral had finished.

A car then can be used both as a wiltja and as a super-yuu providing visual and some auditory privacy, often as an addition to other camp structures. On one night camps cars are simply angled appropriately in relation to other camps, to the prevailing weather or in relation to features of the surrounding country. A fast variant on a wiltja in the middle of a suddenly rainy night is achieved by parking a car to form a windbreak and attaching a tarpaulin to its roof to make a lean-to shelter. Cars parked for shelter at night are moved at sunrise to let the sun's warmth fall on the occupants of the camp.

Going Along As they travel along dirt roads 1 ° cars are transformed, rapidly modified both by the bush through which they travel and by their owners, acquiring contrasting panels, odd wheels, fabric instead of window glazing and, inside, an accumulation of rubbish. The further they travel the more modifications occur. The orange desert dust makes red cars almost invisible in the distance, and especially white ones become gradually transformed until their lower panels are the same colour as the ground. Several Anamatyere artists, of whom Mavis Holmes Petyarr is one, working from Utopia in the Northern Territory, made paintings in the late 1980's using old car panels as support. The head of a person is painted on the window as though they were going along inside the car and red and green country - rocks, trees, earth - is depicted on the metal paintwork part of the door. I imagine that the artist was showing how the travel of the car through that country had transformed both the vehicle and those inside it through access to Ancestral power, that is, through access to country.

Women are constantly seeking time and opportunities to go on bush trips looking for honeyants /tja!a and witchetty grubs /maku and, during August and September, goanna lizard, as well as hunting for larger game of which the 10

In September 1999 the centre of Emabella was laid with bitumen roads in an effort to minimise dust.The centre of Amata west of Emabella has had bitumen roads for sometime but generally all roads on the Pitjantjatjara Lands are dirt 177

commonest is kangaroo. There are regular sorties to obtain the roots of the red river gum for carving, and mingkulpa /wild tobacco is gathered whenever possible as it is seemingly addictive. One of the most pressing reasons to gain access to cars, for men and women alike, is for the production of religious ceremonies. Passing near a women's site or the tracks connecting sites, women sing the inma connected with the place. Sometimes they sing Pitjantjatjara hymns from a Christian inma the night before; most often 'Alleyujah Jesu!' or a hymn whose chorus is translated as 'Oh Lord give me water, give me life'.

A group of persons in a car generally stay together and camp together when arriving at a large gathering. Thus, picking up a group of people to travel to such an event may last hours. Not only is everyone rounding up necessary material items - blankets and mattresses, food, clothes, crowbars etc - but they are also negotiating the composition of the group in the car; this will depend upon kin relationships and political maneuverings of the moment, in the constant flux and re-negotiation of social bonds. The car then does provide 'a temporally extended objectification of shared identity' (Myers 1991a;55). The pick-up involves serial circuits of the community, importuning others, searching for children, missing equipment - billy cans, water containers etc, and acquiring food and drink supplies, as often from kin as the store. Tiny cars and petrol tankers too are one of the most popular toys for both girls and boys and are often bought for them at a store on the journey. Toy cars are soon discarded, like their bigger counterparts rapidly losing wheels, but unlike them, disappearing into the red sand. Field notes Fl 118th October 1997 On the way to Mutijulu. When we stopped at Eridunda, before Curtain Springs, I saw that all the children (6) in the car each had a new toy car. Each child's car had a different pair of colours; yellow with red bumper, bright pink with blue bumper etc.

Inside the car, this arrangement of people hierarchically and spatially in relation to the front of the car is ideally the same as in camp in relation to the fire when sleeping. The most senior person in kin terms sleeps next to the fire with others ranked behind. The most senior passenger in relation to the driver (spouse if

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they are present) sits in the front passenger seat. Behind, other passengers sit ranked from front to back according to their relationship with the driver. Often two competing powerful women, jam into the passenger seat together.

Through the care taken by the driver and the instructions shouted by others, the car must be made to navigate space as though it was a person. Vehicles must be made to conform to strict spatial rules, aligning the car precisely under the shade of a tree, or in the sun on a cold day for the comfort of those it carries. As a social body the car must approach persons with the same attention to proximal etiquette as a person on foot. For example if approaching a group seated on the ground, one should cough or call from a distance and wait to be invited over. Similarly, unless a close relation, one does not drive into the fenced front yard of a house, but waits in the road way and shouts or hoots until the occupant appears and comes out in greeting.

One does not make tracks on other peoples' land which includes their domestic space of the moment, unless invited to do so. When visiting another's homeland, an event unlikely to take place without a vehicle, Aangu wait inside the car until greeted, even if the place is the residence of close family. When dropping someone off with their bags and bedding after a camp, or with other produce gathered from the bush on a day trip, goods are unloaded by the passenger outside the house and dragged inside the fence by the occupants of the house later. The same curtilage of private space seems to exist round houses now as in the past around wiltja (P. Hamilton 1972;8).

Anangu make tracks with the car on the country which are intelligible in the same way as those made travelling on foot12 and drive cars across the bush in pursuit of kangaroo or emu as though they were on foot. Women have used cars to circle likely looking goanna burrows when hunting, (to ascertain if the 12

Tracking is an essential part of hunting and gathering skills and was one of the few things for which Australian Aboriginal people were admired by the colonists who thus often employed them as police trackers. Spencer and Gillen (1 899;24-25) for example have this to say; The tracking powers of the native are well known.., not only does (he) know the track of every bird and beast, but.....from the direction in which the last track runs, will tell you whether the animal is at home or not', and ',the native will recognise the footprint of every individual of his aquaintance'. Today, the tracking ability of Aangu extends to cars and distinguishing the 179

lizard has made recent tracks) making the car turn tight circles to view the burrow from all angles just as they do on foot. Women will drive right up to bushes to harvest leaves or fruit. Similarly car tracks go as far as is practically possible to open sacred sites, that is sites that men women and children may all visit. Older experienced women drove the heavy Toyota across bush land with great skill avoiding hidden punu/ logs and tree stumps, piti /rabbit warrens, pull /rocks. Driving after powerful inma must be done with care. Similarly at ceremonies associated with mortuary rites, the ground is disturbed as little as possible by cars on their way to and from the grave, by driving slowly in single file each car keeping closely to the tracks of the car in front.

Aangu, then, can track a motor vehicle in the same way as a person or animal, and in many ways the marks a vehicle's passage makes on the land are conceived as the gestures of the driver. Hunting roads made by driving across bush land are named as the driver's road. One who makes the road on the outward journey should drive back along it. (The ability to see tyre marks as faint depressions in springy grassland for example, was one I did not share with my passengers; 'Kuru wiya'/ no eyes!). 'Para-pitja' translated by Aangu as 'go round' was a habitual instruction to me whether in a community or in the bush. My attempts at reversing or three point turns were classed as 'wrong way'. Anangu point out tyre tracks, revealing a vehicle's passage as it reverses, as 'whitefella's' or tourist's tracks. All around communities on the Lands are 'roundabouts' where cars entering a confined residential area habitually turn, perhaps round a rock or a telegraph pole. Furthermore turning is ideally done in an anti-clockwise direction. Roads with many bends are described as kalikali / crooked, bent (kali = boomerang) or '11w ruta' /snake road, because the tracks the car leaves and the way it moves are like those of a snake.

Road signs to homelands and tracks are not usually language based. Fig. 29 must date from the Mission /sheep camp days of the I 960s or earlier. Glass bottles threaded onto tree branches are common signposts, glinting in the sun, as are coloured rags or clothing tied to posts, or red and white painted stones. White painted hub caps contrasting against the red dirt are sometimes used to patterns on an individuals shoe sole. Aeroplane tracks across the sky are also noted.The 180

indicate a track opening off a wider road . Driving on white roads near Amata, I was told to 'take that red road', a turning that reverted to the usual red. Sacred sites each have their own walka /design, a set combination of colours used in ceremonies referring to the events of the tjurkurpa which created them. These colours are used a sign posts, plastic streamers tied to posts, during business (fig. 28). If single cars out bush are driven gesturally, rather than with the intricacies of camp and community social space in mind, gatherings of many vehicles are choreographed when arriving en masse at large camps, especially where outsiders are present. Ernabella cars wait for one another and enter such gatherings in stately single file, keeping close together and creating a dramatic and moving impact of power and solidarity. The following of one track at funerals relates to the social cohesion of the mourners, all making one line and one set of tracks from the place of the church service to the cemetery. If the colours of clothes for certain events are conventionalised, there do seem to be similar rules for cars. At funerals and sorry camps there are rarely brightly coloured cars; dark red, white, silver, metallic bronzes, and on one occasion, the black and cream Chevrolet mentioned above, are the norm.

'Ngananmpa ruta' /our (collective) road, 'minymaku ruta' /womens' road, the history of roads was often told as we went along. This is the old Finkeku ruta (possessive, belonging to Finke), this is where we used to come on donkeys, this is the old cattle road, this is the old Amata road. These things are generally only spoken of as they are passed. Older people especially use hand signs to commentate on what is passing, but no one mentions abandoned cars. Roads are a major form of human mark making on the country, all witnessed or made by the last two or three generations. The narrow tracks - iwara - through the ranges are no longer trodden and within another generation may become lost to memory.

Aangu know dirt roads, with their potholes, bends and rocks, as well as they know the surrounding country, and shout out warnings to the driver accordingly

relationship of mark making to motion then, continues to be important. 181

'purkara Icareful slower. Women remark on old honey ant pits that they dug in the past, and events that happened on the road caused by the interaction of car with country: We hit that big bump there and we was all crying (with fright)'. They point out where, out hunting, Kunmanara drove into the wire fence, while looking the other way at malu Ikangaroo.

Navigation All the driving I have done with Aangu was in country and communities known to at least some of the occupants of the car. In these conditions Aangu seem to remain aware of the position of the cardinal points all the time, inside the car or out of it (although people often check the position of the sun) and small children in remote communities are knowledgeable early about their orientation (cf Lewis 1976). Asking someone where they are from, for example, elicits silent pointing towards a certain direction.

The ability of Aboriginal people to navigate in the bush is legendary and one of the few things, along with tracking, which non-Aboriginals admired them for. Aangu are well aware of the vulnerability of whitefellas left alone in the bush who have no idea where their car is, after taking 100 paces away from it in mulga scrub. When walking away from the car, hunting for signs of honey ant among mulga trees, women seem to note intimate details of the land, a fallen tree, animal tracks, things which stand out as different or contrasting in colour, but in the car in open country more distant landmarks are used too. Older women's knowledge of the local tjukurpa places, created where Ancestors paused (to sleep, eat, defecate etc) as they moved through the country, is embedded in their navigational skills, as such places are often also prominent landmarks.

Left /tjampu and right /waku were not used as direction or orientation words in the past (Goddard 1991). Anangu use these terms when directing nonAboriginals, but among themselves use cardinal points. Possibly left and right terms were used only for things in direct association with the body (Wassman I 994), as whether someone is right- or left-handed is always known by others. 182

At a night camp, when it was critical that women leave fast after a ceremony, I was told to park the car facing north. As they were preoccupied by the potential danger of the situation their usual allowance for my ignorance of the cardinal points went astray. Eventually I asked 'You mean towards Ernabella?': 'Yes, yes' they said, aware perhaps that both were equally impossible for me but habitual to them.

If, then, in communities cars are moved to respond to the shifting dynamic of social space, as well as the time of day and the weather, navigation in a lone car driven across open country is in response to the absolute cardinal points, to landmarks (Lewis 1976) and to the mental imagery of the navigators. Nura R. would say, tapping her forehead, 'kulini na - thinking' meaning 'I remember, I know'. Says one of Lewis's informants, the Pintupi Jeffrey Tjangala, 'I keep these (north south east and west as a cross) inside my head' (ibid 264). I do not wish to confuse language (words and sign language) concerned with space with spatial cognition (Wassman 1994). However, in Pitjantjatjara Ivankunytjatjara, kutu is a case ending used to indicate orientation towards usually in association with movement (Goddard 1996). When travelling the question 'where are we going (towards?)' will be answered either towards place X or towards a feature —sandhill /rock etc or it could be answered with cardinal directions. Most likely the answer will be gestural, either with hand signals or with the mouth. An established road, that is a socialised route, is named for the place it goes towards. Aangu might say that the main road towards Ernabella is the Ernabella road, but travelling the same road towards Amata, a community to the west, the road becomes the Amata road. As Sam Pumani says; (Goddard 1985;98.8) uAnd as the hills got closer, fresh tobacco would get closer'.

'Short cut' can mean either a wavy circuitous route often to avoid other people or places, or a direct straight line back to a base point, for example, after the long zigzagging pursuit of kangaroo. When asked directions, Lewis found that the Western Desert men with whom he worked visualised themselves at some frequently distant point of reference from which the directions are given (often a sacred site) and gestured as though they were there. Ernabella men and women, who have long experience of non—Aboriginals' route finding, draw maps 183

for white people away from their bodies. The bottom of a sheet of paper nearest to their own body is the present position and the route straight up the page leads to the destination. Recognizable features along the way which cross or lie adjacent to the route are listed as karu /creeks, pu!i/rock or hills and to a lesser extent, punu /trees. Aangu move around in a car as though it were an extension of the body because I suggest, their sense of space is not only an egocentric one such as Kant hypothesized as universal and westerners regard as 'natural' (Wassman 1994). Aangu move the car not in response to some abstract spatial rules but in a way that, in the bush especially, is in relation to country. This articulates a spiritual and emotional tie to the country and to the navigational skills of hunter gatherers travelling on foot. Of course, when on the main public roads, such as the Stuart Highway which runs from Adelaide through Alice to Darwin, and in towns, Anangu are perfectly able to drive according to the highway code13, although many of the women who are such good bush drivers are not so confident in towns, away from the perceived safety of the Pitjantjatjara freehold Lands. This is perhaps partly due to unease at the number of white men.

Dead and Declining Cars Field notes Feb 8th 1998 Spent last week taxi-ing New Well mob about for spanners, petrol etc White Ute, white sedan and coffee coloured mini bus all sick apparently. Clem removed petrol pump from white ute stuck at Ten Well and took it to New Well to fix into another car, pale yellow/coffee. He had to go into Ernabella to buy a set of spanners14, although he tried to borrow one first from N. on another homeland. No sign of white sedan. The battery is one of the parts of the car which receives attention in case of breakdown (Stotz forthcoming). Batteries are regularly transported into Ernabella garage for recharging and jump-starts with jump-leads or push starts, by ramming the car, preferably with a large Toyota, are a way of life. This contact between car bodies, aside from being the best way to push start a vehicle, is analogous to the contact between people and totally at odds with the 13

The Stuart Highway is the place where the drivers of bush cars are often stopped by the police for breaking the law for drunk driving and for lacking various statutory car parts, full sets of lights for example. Young men in particular are often in and out of prison for these offences, a situation presently compounded by the Northern Territories mandatory sentencing laws.

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prissiness of non-Aboriginal attitudes to cars and to personal space. Batteries, wheels and even engines are often transferred between cars in an extended family. Young men in particular, having few employment opportunities, may spend weeks bent over car engines or combining two or more cars, in order to have a car at all. Since most cars on the Lands are still of a few preferred makes only this is easy to do, but great ingenuity and imagination is exhibited in order to keep at least one car of the ailing group capable of going along. Field notes July 1997 At the camp, a cold night results in move back to YW. Both the red car and the green car have flat batteries. Whilst E and I and Frank try to get the red one going, the Toyota is filled with blankets and children and the trailer fixed on the back full with the mattresses. S., I notice is behind a bush on the road with the beige car waiting until all is packed when he takes N. and M. and all the finished puu/wood carvings. B. picks up the gold puppie carefully and puts it in the red car. This car, Frank starts eventually, by sucking fuel from the feed hose into his mouth and spitting into the carburetor. The green car pegs out twice on the way to YW and we shunt it into life with the Toyota. Maria and husband had a rapid succession of cars between March and November 1997. Field notes; May 1997. Maria, 'daughter number 4,' and her husband, Junior, have a parrot green Ford sedan with one pale blue (?) or white door, that seems to go along airight. Recently July, it acquired a new, yellow bonnet. Mid August; seen this car parked neatly at the back of (homeland) in the death row for cars and Junior is poring over the bonnet of a blue car with white roof. Looks similar, but I think is not, Linda's car. October: this blue car is also dead. They seemed to have a white sedan for a few weeks. Start November; Maria and Junior have another car; a slightly turquoise metallic blue. At the moment it is all one colour. Junior is most days to be seen with his head inside the bonnet outside the caravan at YW. The engine winch is now under the shade of a tree. I have passed Junior with this car, stopped, ie broken down, on the road into Emabefla, several times lately (Nov 15). Junior now ignores me on these occasions so I drive on. 0. told me - 5th November- that they swapped the white car for this one. Cars are still usable without brakes, lights, reversing capacity, petrol gauges or windows, to give but a few examples. These kind of cars, always in need of mechanical attention before they will leap into motion, are classed by Aangu as 'raputji' /'rubbish cars'. Nearly all cars eventually become rubbish cars. Such 14

The non-Aboriginal garage manager expressed continual surprise at the way people bought sets of spanners, made the required repair with them, then drove off, leaving the spanners in the sand.

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vehicles are habitually stranded on the road side nose to nose with another, jump leads strung between open bonnets.

A car that no longer goes, as all machinery, is 'pikatjara' /having sickness, or 'pika pulka' /very sick, or ilunyi (ilura pupanyi lit, crouching dead /unconcious (Goddard 1996, Hamilton, A. 1979;11O), the same description used of persons. The euphemism for a person's death wiyaringangu / finished, is now more often applied to vehicles and people both than ilunyi. Aangu class game such as kangaroo as 'wiyaringangu' when the animal is unable to move along but is not necessarily dead. I have here used the term 'live' cars for those that go along but this is my construct and not one I have ever heard Aangu actually voice. However there is evidence to suggest that the engine and the battery of a vehicle are regarded as having a life force. When engines 15are swapped between car bodies the carcass without an engine is ua which Anangu translate into English as 'useless'. Coming silently to rest as all the car's power cut out late at night on a potholed back road, and trying push starts to no avail, my women companions, muttering about my ignorance of car engines, insisted that the battery was to blame and, gathering around the car bonnet, prayed to Jesus. On other occasions, after drinking alcohol, people who are Christian stop the car and pray, before driving home.

Once a car is abandoned the wheels almost immediately disappear. These are always in demand not least because the pursuit of kangaroos across the bush often results in the complete loss of tyres. Cars travel short distances on bare wheels if need be. The next items that are removed are the battery and the engine. The body panels, the bonnet, boot and doors disappear too. Seats are used as domestic furniture. Car parts are used to make other things especially women's shallow digging dishes, wira, previously made from wood, out of hubcaps. A high degree of ingenuity and improvisation is employed in re-using unlikely found objects as well as parts from 'dead' cars, to continue the life of another vehicle. Car bonnets are regularly employed as support for written sign posts not only because they are large handy sheets of durable material but for the equally functional reason that they are the front of the car and arrive first.

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Like 'live' cars, 'dead' ones and spare parts have many potential uses. Intact 'dead' cars, marooned outside houses, are sometimes used as retreats by solitary young men. Anyone can take parts from abandoned cars if they are on the road, but wrecks on or near homelands are the property of those who live there and br the ngurantja ITraditional Owner (if these are not the same person). Men visiting another's homeland might take the opportunity to peruse the dead cars inside the compound. Car dumps in communities are also 'public'. Field notes; Alpara towards Katatjuta. This D tour was, I had thought, mostly for my benefit (to show me country), although it was said that we were going to get good water. Soon we cut off the road. Open country, few rocks, many flowers 16. First stop at a dark brown ford falcon with orange trim. S is practically in tears 'car wiru, engine wiru, headlights everything only the windscreen gone.' N. says it has been there sometime. Lola finds a bill with 'Barbara' written at the top 'what this name ?' she asks me, 'must be her car'. S. is after the tyres, so with my roo jack and spanners and N.'s muscle we get 2 off. Several of the car dumps in Ernabella were near men's sacred areas. I know this because there were notices saying that they were sacred areas and out of bounds, in English. Perhaps this dumping in an area inaccessible except to initiated men was a statement of rights over the car wrecks too. Cars that are first abandoned where they terminally breakdown, at the side of the road, gradually get pushed off it, sometimes upended or overturned as various parts are stripped. Many end up far away, but still visible from, the road under trees or upended or lying on their roof. Here they may remain for years, their recyclable parts long disappeared, the remaining carcass used for shooting practice. Field notes FlO 1 Sept 1997 We, S. driving, went again to Katjikuta for water because Amata water 'kura' Thad, not to the house but to the rainwater tap. S. pointed out the same old green car (looked like a 1960's car) as Yangkui yesterday. I admired another derelict van, white roof and sulphur yellow body, and S. said nothing but 0. said 'palurumpa' le his. There is a high frequency of red cars under bloodwood trees, which produce red sap when cut; I do not know if this juxtaposition is significant. But the 15

Stotz (1993; 173-40) has suggested that the combustion engine, particuarly the carburetor, is linked to men's control of fire by the Walpin thus gendering cars as male things.

187

relationship between topography, dead cars and dead people is, I suggest, one that Aangu make (viz Stotz 1993;175 on the Warlpiri). 'The ancestors continually move from place to place, or they travel around one place until they go in forever. A kind of perpetual motion is remedied by images of permanence...' (Munn 1971 143).

The dead car is for Anangu, I suggest, an image of permanence, the stopped motion of its driver embodied in the abandoned car body. Unable to go along any longer, the car has finished making tracks. Unlike Ancestors though, cars can never 'go in', but on community land are periodically cleared by contractors from Alice Springs.

Until the early 1970s Aangu buried their dead at or near where the death took place. The burial party was small and after the decay of the body, the pit was covered and left unmarked, but the place was remembered. Since the early I 970s, Anangu have decided to bury the dead in Christian cemeteries. Among the Pintupi, says Myers, goods, including cars, are not allowed to carry the deceased person's identity forward in time (1991a;71). Contact with the deceased person's things that they habitually used and the places they frequented makes the living sad —'sorry'- and may attract the dangerous spirit of the deceased. These things are therefore destroyed, or given away or, in the case of houses, special rules and rituals applied to their cleansing. In the past when someone died the whole camp was torched. But for Aangu in the I 990s the accumulated car wrecks are still present and so do to an extent carry the identity of the deceased driver forward, reminding those who knew him of all the places and events where and when he drove those cars.

A homeland often has a grave to one side of the house and a car dump on the other. On many occasions abandoned homelands were pointed out to me 'There is my uncle grave, ngaltujara /poor thing'- and near the grave several /' abandoned cars, un-remarked upon. Visiting her husbands decorated grave on their now abandoned homeland, his wife turned away from the pile of old cars he had once driven with a gesture of sadness and disgust. The dead cars 16

It was here that I was shown many bright blue flowers ( a sort of scabious?) and asked to take 188

seemed more of an affront than the house or the land they had camped on. The cars had not only connected her to him (she could not drive) but to all the places on all the days they had travelled the country together.

Whilst bodies are now confined to burial in restricted areas, cars may be dumped in the bush. Thus when, for one reason or another, the motor car belonging to the deceased is not given away to kin in another community, but abandoned, the inverse of the traditional burial system occurs. Hunting goanna in thick scrub some way from Ernabella, we came across an intact, newly abandoned vehicle. My companion immediately turned away from it and walked rapidly in the opposite direction instructing me to do the same, checking over her shoulder for mamuTharmful spirits. It was the car belonging to a recently deceased man whose body was by then in the cemetery at Ernabella. This was not a remote spot but one frequently used for hunting. Both he and his car may cease to go along but whilst his body is confined to the cemetery, where the grave is labeled and decorated, the car is out in the bush, marking another spot, that for those who knew him, that will make them 'sorry', and will be associated with his memory and where he went and with whom in that car.

Conclusion The car then is a thing of many potentials. It is a social body, an anthropomorphised vehicle, and operates in various modes of spatial negotiation. It can be wiltja, windbreak, ceremonial prop, light and music creator, and at the end of its lite may modify the topography where it evokes with sadness for those who knew it in motion, the events, places and people it connected.

It was not until 1961 that a Pitjantjatjara person owned a motor vehicle, although from the 1930s onwards, cars driven by Europeans would have been seen in the area (Edwardsl gg4;148). In Ernabella children's drawings from 1940 onwards, cars were one of the first western things, along with windmills (for bore water) to appear. In the earlier drawings, cars are shown with totemic a photograph of them, as Ayers Rock, 'that blue rock' came into view in the distance. 189

animals, emu, perentie lizards, kangaroo, and elements of country, rocks, trees waterholes. In the collections of Ernabella school children's drawing that remain from the 1940's, 50's and 60's 17 cars and trucks appear frequently, whilst camels, which were at this time the favoured mode of transport for many desert Aboriginal people, figure far less. Those children are the car owners of today. There was, and is, obviously something magical, enchanting about the car. Why then are cars so desirable, and so eagerly appropriated, from among the plethora of western goods on offer? The obvious desire for mobility by previously hunter-gathering peoples has been well documented, and Annette Hamilton has stressed the desire for mobility for the maintenance of ritual connections in her work with Yankunytjatjara people. Myers emphasises the objectification of shared identity residing in the car, as well as the need for autonomy. I have suggested that cars not only mediate, as do many other things, the constant dynamic of social relations, but crucially, the strong emotional relationship of people with country. Rather than rendering this relationship more distant or 'inauthentic', the car can reinforce the spiritual connection of Aangu with the land. This connection with country then is not just one of identity but of a wider sense of well being, of being in the land. Like digging honey ant pits, and fencing, making roads is an intentional form of human mark making. Aangu talk in English of 'taking the wrong road,' with a similar metaphorical meaning of a moral way as when white people use it, but another one too. Making roads connects places just as a tjukurpa track does. Aangu have made sacred sites become like 'drive-in' sites, such as 'Dreaming number 3' and Walanya, described in Section Two. Making roads connects places, sacred or not, strings them together, just as places are connected by the track of an Ancestor in the Dreaming. This is why, I suggest, making a three point turn is so irritating, so 'wrong way', for Aangu. It breaks up the 'string', the continuous linearity of the car's track inscribed into the land, linking together all the (now) socialised places it has been. Thus travelling, sometimes all day inside a car, hunting for game, seems to be just as satisfying emotionally as physical contact with the red earth, especially if malu /kangaroo is obtained.

17

Drawings from the C.P Mountford Collection State Library of South Australia, collections in the National Museum of Australia, the A!a lrititja Archival Project and Ernabella Arts archive. 190

I have also dwelt on the materiality of cars which hetps rather than hinders this act of mediation. Work with hunter-gatherers has often stressed the simplicity of their material culture and among Central Australian Aboriginal groups the Pitjantjatjara were particularly singled out in this respect (Tindale 1972). A woman's digging stick or a man's spear thrower were used in many ways, including symbolically, where their material form evokes analogies to other things. That the car is a complex thing deployed in complex ways is evident even in the way it falls apart, is deconstructed and recycled. The materiality of the car also offers the possibility of doing certain things better - the production of religious gatherings for example - with more efficacy, than before the car's existence. Whilst it creates certain serious problems, petrol sniffing for example, and drunk driving, the car also resolves certain other conflicts, as in the provision of a new kind of privacy within the very open nature of Aboriginal camp life.

I suggest that the capacity of the car to be an agent of transformation, in a camp say, as well as becoming transformed itself through its journeys across country also links it to the strong concept of Ancestral transformations in Aangu thought. In short, Western things which embody this capacity - clothes would be another example - are more 'successful' than things which do not possess such agency and this capacity is inseparable from the ways in which cars are deployed. The coloured surface of the outer car body is treated very much like clothing and shares the same colour 'sets'.

191

Cars Abandoned Around Ernabella, 1997-98.

Location

Main Colour

Contrast



Vehicle Type



Paint Job

KATJ I KATJ ITJARA Katjikatji

PALE BLUE

Katjikatji

SKY BLUE

white roof

SEDAN

SEDAN

x

Katjikatji

RED

TRUCK pale blue

Katjikatji

PALE BLUE

TRUCK red

Katjikatji

RED

TRUCK

Katjikatji

PARROT-GREEN white roof

UTE



x

ROAD FROM ERNABELLA TO KENMORE Kenmore Rd

WHITE

blue door

Kenmore Rd WHITE Kemnore Rd

SEDAN SEDAN

WHITE

yellow ochre roof, SEDAN was blue

X

pink bonnet, navy trim Kenmore Rd Kenmore Rd

WHITE



WHITE



black bonnet,

SEDAN lying on roof SEDAN

x

red/black sides Kenmore Rd

PALE BLUE

red maybe rust

SEDAN

Kenmore Rd PALE BLUE Kenmore Rd

PALE GREEN

UTE ancient

metallic copper wing, SEDAN



x

traces pink Kenmore Rd WHITE

SEDAN v rusty

Kenmore Rd

SEDAN bullet holes

PALE BLUE

SEDAN boot,bonnet,

Kenmore Rd YELLOW OCHRE

front side panels all removed by march '98 Kenmore Rd

BLUE

Kenmore Rd WHITE

white

SEDAN binocs

turquoise

SEDAN

X

white (trim lines)

UTE was white

X

pale yellow

UTE was pale yellow X 192

AROUND ERNABELLA S.Side

BLACK

S.Side

PALE GREEN

red (trim lines)

SEDAN black I side low

S Side

MET. BLUE

S Side

METALLIC BLUE

SEDAN 4 doors missing

S Side

BRIGHT GREEN

SEDAN I door missing

S Side

DARK RED

white door black/ white graffitti

SEDAN

X

S side

WHITE

SEDAN

S Side

SKY BLUE

SEDAN was white

S Side

BRIGHT YELLOW

SEDAN

S Side

RED

white

E Side

BEIGE

orange/grey/blacktrim 2 ford falcons

E Side

BEIGE

orange/grey/blacktrim SEDAN

E Side

MID BLUE

SEDAN 2 doors missing

E Side

BRIGHT YELLOW

SEDAN 3 doors missing

E Side

BRIGHT METALLIC BLUE

SEDAN

E Side

DARK BROWN orange trim

SEDAN

E Side

ORANGE

SEDAN v rusty

E Side

METALLIC GOLD

SEDAN

E Side

METALLIC GOLD

SEDAN bonnet Ifront gone

E Side

WHITE

E side

WHITE

SEDAN was black

E side

WHITE

MINIBUS

E Side

WHITE

blue base yellow & MINIBUS

MINIBUS was white

pink paint splotches SEDAN pink

X

X

X X

green trim E Side

METALLIC COPPER

SEDAN

E side

CREAM

SEDAN

E side

BEIGE/YELLOW

SEDAN on roof

W side

BRIGHT RED

SEDAN duff to see

W side

BRIGHT YELLOW

SEDAN

WSide

RUST RED

WSide

PALE YELLOW

SEDAN

WSide

PALE YELLOW

SEDAN

w Side

OLIVE GREEN cream roof

SEDAN

WSide

WHITE yellow roof

UTE

WSide

RED

SEDAN

WSide

YELLOW OCHRE white trim

SEDAN

W side

METALLIC COPPER

SEDAN

black trim

beige roof

SEDAN

193

W Side

WHITE

SEDAN

W Side

BRIGHT RED

SEDAN 1 door missing

W Side

RED

black trim

w Side

RED

black trim yellow trim SEDAN

WSide

RED

orange trim

SEDAN

W side

CREAM

pink paint

SEDAN pink

x

WSide

SILVER

pink paint

SEDAN pink

x

Nr Emabella

METALLIC GOLD

SEDAN

SEDAN no bonnet I door gone

Nr Ernabella

EGG YELLOW white door

Nr Youngs W

WHITE

After katjikatji

WHITE

After katjikatji

PALE BLUE

After Katjikatji

MET. OLIVE GREEN

SEDAN as no below

Katjikatji road

WHITE

SEDAN 2 doors missing

UTE lying on roof

SEDAN lying on roof, photo white

SEDAN V old, faded

AMATA-EAGLE BORE ROAD Amatand

Amata Rd

RED

white rough

WHITE



over painting

SEDAN

metallic gold roof

SEDAN



X

SEDAN

Womikata

WHITE

Amata Rd

PALE BLUE

SEDAN lying on roof

Amata Rd

MET. OLIVE GREEN

SEDAN lying on roof

Araluen

METALLIC GOLD

SEDAN lyingon roof

Araluen

PALE TURQUOISE

SEDAN

Araluen

BEIGE

blue door

SEDAN v rusty

Amata Rd

YELLOW

white door

SEDAN

Umuwa Rd

BEIGE/PINK

white roof

SEDAN

Umuwa Rd

RED

Umuwa Rd

WHITE

Umuwa Rd

BLUE

SEDAN rust/paint?

Umuwa Rd

CREAM

SEDAN bonnet missing

Umuwa Rd

WHITE

Umuwa dump

RED

SEDAN

Umuwa Dump

BRIGHTmetaI blue

SEDAN

Umuwa Dump

METALLIC COPPER

SEDAN

Umuwa Dump

METALLIC. COPPER white roof

SEDAN

SEDAN doors missing? metallic gold boot

SEDAN abandoned 3/97

red rusty doors /roof SEDAN

194

Umuwa Dump PALE BLUE

SEDAN respray?

Umuwa Dump YELLOW OCHRE

UTE

X

MAIN BODY COLOURS:

White /cream Red



Blues /turquoise Yellow Green Black Silver

21 14

Gold /copper Ibeige Orange Brown Metallic finish

17 10 7 1 I

13 I I 9

195

0

-

)I.

_Q -

)

S Fig 32: Field sketches of hats.

196



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•t

' •141

J4. a

.

..-'.

-

• .

I.

...

(c -

.

•::

.:e:

I

'' ' :t. i

r

.T;Ir.'

;

L q

: •

Fig 33: New dresses ready for Sunday morning church', 1957. 197

4

2

Fig 34: Women and babies in Mission clothing, circa 1940. 198

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:'

1.;3 I

__

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4.wr; -

•

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IIè?7 ;, ..-

1 •• •

.; i; '

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1- ' ) .

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4:

•-

,.

.

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Fig 35: Dora Haggie and her grandson, May 1998. 199

d. -'S.-

121



4-

i..

Fig 36: Margery Okai in Rasta T-shirt. Nura Rupert and Nungalka digging for tjala 200

I.

7

1.

fib

ii

I,, .. .,.,a

"V i,,,

p.-

,

':2

E1' : Jp)

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414' 4"

1

Fig 37: Diggie, surrounded by dried out mingkulpa, near Womijara. 201

Fig 38: Children playing on the trampoline, Alice Springs swimming pool, January 2000 202

k. ,',

L

.

• .. 4 •

.1.

I

4

Fig 39: Wanka /spider mite bag, hanging from mulga tree. 203

-! -I -w

-

&

-Ir. -i-.'

4:



4IP

.

I

•

-

Fig 40: Field sketches of women's clothing contrasts, skirts and tops (1). 204

-

4,

t--

Fig 41: Field sketches of women's clothing contrasts, skirts and tops (2). 205

• .4

15.

Ip)

Fig 44: Boys in blankets or school uniform shorts, 19l. 206

j-I

-

Fig 45: Young women wearing jumpers they knitted themselves, 1951. 207

k

Fig 46: Take-away food and shop at AP Sports, September 1999. 208

Section 3.2: 'Hungry for Clothes' Introduction Clothing, like cars, is highly desirable to Aangu. Examining textiles as colour begins to show why have clothes been so successfully appropriated.

Aangu, said Dora, are hungry for clothes. Women, when away from home, buy clothes, often second hand, for relatives and clothes circulate among members of an extended family with great speed. A garment may be worn by several different women within the space of a week, or even a day. Clothes are most obviously employed to show group membership, football teams for example, local and racial affiliations, gender and life cycle. These are 'obvious' because they are public, readily discussible knowledge. There are many nuances to the way clothing is worn on the body, particularly to its colours and how these emphasize the topography of the body and relate to emotional expression. This is especially important on the head, either as hats or headbands that cover the forehead .

Clothes resurface the body with different colours and patterns analogous to the way in which the land changes. I discussed in Section One the way in which the surface of the land/body changes temporally through sequences

of

bright

colours as a consequence of the agency of rain and fire, wind and sun. The skins of animals and other bush foods do the same through cooking or ripening. Ajjangu use clothes like a skin, or when worn one dress on top

of

another, a

succession of skins, in what seems a conscious imitation of the transformations of country. The popularity of 'African' prints as Aangu call them - zebra, snake and big game cat skins - as prints on clothes and fake fur blankets, also allude to clothing and textiles as skin, as well as to Aboriginal identification with other black people.

Clothes are mediators

of

social relationships in many inter-connected ways. One

of these is a direct allusion to country as a mediator in relationships between persons. Another is social enhancement, looking flash or 'rikina', that is used to 1

The emphasis of areas of the body and their socially constructed relation to kin, such as the teleaesthesia, mentioned in Section one, was not something that I had time to research. Shoulders for example, seem to be emphasised, particularly in men's clothing. 209

attract others, specifically a lover in men's and women's 'ilbinji' glossed as 'love magic'. Such attraction may have sinister overtones too. The contrast of colours and the form of patterning on garments, figure as assessments of 'rikina'. Certain set combinations of colours in clothes appear to communicate to others the social circumstances of the moment (and in ritual this may change rapidly over hours), and a person emotional response to events, of how she is situated vis a vis the external world. Coloured clothing activates these relationships. 'The metaphor of the attached that detaches is an analogy of a child-mother relationship. A child is detached from its mother at birth, a boy is once again symbolically detached at initiation, and a girl during growth ceremonies. Being detached allows people to be attached through marriage to the people of his or her spouse. Hair string or cloth, as a piece of clothing, is to the individual who wears it what a mother is to her child during pregnancy.'

'If clothing also covers, hides or prevents from seeing, then we can say that clothing is both the symbol of alliance bonds between men and of their need for physical separation into autonomous entities' (Glowsceski 1983;236 on the Waripin) my emphasis. Maertans, a Lacanian, suggests that the separation between mother and baby is recapitulated, in pre hierarchical societies via body painting 'centred on the separation of the fusional body mother and the social self... the coat of paint recapitulating the fusion between one's own body and the enveloping maternal body' (Gell 1993;24). Glowsceski is arguing the same thing for clothing. Clothing is used in a similar way to string, for both Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, and Warlpiri, in the way it can socially attach and detach people from one another. Unlike body paint, which, as Maertens suggests, can fulfill the same role, cloth and string are used also to contain, reveal and conceal.

String, along with fat and wipiya /emu feathers, was used for wrapping to conceal things and images. String was also itself employed in the creation of coloured images. Clothing is now used in sophisticated ways to reveal and conceal things and bodies, but cloth too is used to make potent imagery. Clothes as wrappings around the human body also trap odour, a person's own body odour being an index of well being and relationship with others. Clothing is used for payment, in the sense of ngapardji returning a favour, but also as a payment to a ngangkai /healer, or in ritual2

2

Mountford 1940 ;223 reports that Jimmy whose 'lumbago' the doctor had treated earlier said he owedThè doctor a shirt for the treatment. He had to pay or the doctor would become nasty 210

L

Clothes, and other classes of textiles such as blankets /pulangkita and tarpaulins /tiinta, have largely replaced hair string as payment for work in ritual and as garments worn on the body, at least for women (Gtowzcewski 1983). It is through this link that another of the reasons for clothing achieving value appears. String in its capacity to bind and attach, to 'keep safe' the individual or part of the individual wearing it, has been replaced by shop bought coloured wool in some contexts, but clothes printed with stripes that go around the body allude to the agency of string.

The Naked and the Clothed; a short contextual history There is a paucity of literature of any kind on clothing, let alone fashion, in remote Australian Aboriginal communities. Therefore, although it is not clothes per se, but colour that is my interest here, it is useful to give some historical background to the contemporary situation in Ernabella and the homelands.

Before the time of contact with Europeans, Anangu wore no clothes, but certain items made from hair or fur string. This was coloured using ochres in fat. Pubic tassles for men (see Mountford 1940;101, Tindale 1933;reel 3) for example, which were according to contemporary accounts, made to decorate rather than conceal. 'The tassle for the older men is made from darker fur and human hair string and coloured with red ochre. Those of the younger men are of white fur at the present day rabbit fur' (Mountford 1940). Men also wore a hair string belt used to attach small game that dangled from it. The long (phallic shaped) chignon of initiated men, fastened at the nape of the neck, was made from emu feathers and bound and attached with string. Mountford describes the careful morning grooming of a man adjusting his string headband / puuru so that all the strands are parallel across his forehead (ibid). Of women's string garments there is less information in early anthropological accounts. Old women I worked with told of the gum nuts /tjinytjuu threaded into the fringe over their foreheads which helped to keep flies out of their eyes. Women, also wore, as they do now in ritual contexts, necklaces of string or strung seeds (the bright red, yellow or purple ininti Thean tree seed which was and is exchanged from further north where it grows), and string head bands were worn.

211

The string apron features in one of the women's secret sacred tjukurpa near Ernabella, and the women who live near the site draw it in their batik (see Section 4). Women's contemporary ritual paraphernalia, their 'tools' as they call them in English, may also consist of hair string garments as worn by particular Ancestral women. Men have the secret sacred (and therefore powerful) string crosses (Munn 1971). These are made from coloured string which creates a walka /pattern specific to the events at a particular site, through the arrangement and rhythm of different colours (see Section 4).

Babies wore their own umbilical cords, which were left to dry until they fell off. The cord was then soaked in water, greased and red ochred by their mothers and fastened around the child's necks with a string, until they walked (Mountiord 1940;161, Berndt and Berndt 1940 XV no2;158). If this was not done, states Mountford, the child would not walk.

One of the ways then, that string was used, as for babies, was tied around

I

karpinyi a particular part of a person. This is considered to keep the tied area safe. The headband, worn in more photographic records by men than by women, was made from parallel windings of string that cross the forehead at the junction of skin and hair.

Spinning 'native string' in Ooldea was, 'a universal avocation of all blacks, even children being sometimes so engaged', 3 (Bolam 1925;86). Wool was greatly in demand in place of it; 'old socks and other articles are always unthreaded for wool' (ibid). By 1940, when the Berndts were fleldworkers in Ooldea , they note that any money people got hold of was spent on 'clothing, knives, axes etc or coloured wool '( 1941 XIII no 4;168).

In Ernabella, during the early stages of the craft room, young women learnt to knit and made themselves stripey jumpers. These were apparently unravelled by their male relations, who wanted the multi-coloured wool, presumably for ritual purposes. Also at this time, the craft room girls were learning to weave, making blankets, using the Ernabella sheep's wool spun by older women.

212

There is no evidence to suggest the wearing of skins as clothing in the Musgraves in the past, or the use of them as blankets or cloaks as farther south - people slept between two fires (Museum of Victoria 1992). There was no weaving, yet cloth, which like steel axes travelled before the colonists into the Centre, seems to have been greeted with enthusiasm and actively sought out by Aboriginal people, refuting Hauser-Shaublins recent claim that all cultures privilege either string or cloth (Hauser-Shaublin 1996). As I will suggest below something more complex was taking place.

Clothes entered Aangu culture as exchange items - unlike cars which were controlled by Aangu later and were bought for cash. Clothes were part of exchange with whites, first randomly through doggers, then as part of rations and through the sexual relationships of Aboriginal women with non-Aboriginal men. At the Ernabella Mission clothes became explicitly linked to evangelism. The women who spun the Ernabella wool were paid in rations and dresses (see Section 4) as an incentive for them to stay.

Anangu have worn clothes in Ernabella perhaps since the 1930s when single items or rags were starting to be acquired. Most contact with non-Aboriginal people was through dingo scalping, an important economic activity that first introduced Aangu to western consumer goods through exchange. (details in J Tjupuru/Edwards 1994). The dingo skins were exchanged with whites for flour, tea and sugar, and the dog hunts are still remarked upon in the Piryia time /spring by those who were children in the 1930's and '40's. Clothing was also issued as part of rations in Central Australia, at ration depots, which were often cattle stations.4 The history of clothing as rations from either party's view point, as Rowse has recently done for food as rations, has yet to be written. However many of those women and men with whom I worked said of the old days 'we was working for mai (food), and for clothes, money wiya!'. Most clothes obtained like this were presumably second hand. Yami Lester on his time working for the Granite Downs Station owner, 'Oh he'd feed us workers and dress us well alright... But the only time we got money was at Oodnadatta after trucking time TindaIs 1933 film, reel 3 Technology' shows a man in Emabella spinning wallaby stomach fur into string using the same method as women employ today. As I spent little time in the company of men I do not know if they still spin. 213

'

or at racetime' (Lester 1993; 52).

Women also obtained dresses from white men as a result of sexual liaisons. Hamilton (1980a) points to many of her informants at Mimili in 1970-1 as having actively sought such liaisons as young women and being appreciative of the material rewards, especially of clothing (also Nganyintja in Hilliard 1968;81). Winifred Hilliard records that clothing (with flour), had (by the I 950s) become a part of marriage payment at elopement.5

It is a coincidence that dingo skins and spinning were the first ways of earning money for Aangu. It is possible that this added to the attachment of value residing in cloth, both among kin and with whites.

Although adults were already wearing some clothing, Dr Duguid, the founding force behind the non-conformist Ernabella Mission, decreed that children should be naked during the first years of the Mission. This was in order to keep them free of disease, until patterns of cleanliness were established. As I have shown previously, the daily hosing down and hair washing that school children went through, left a deep impression on them, affecting their relationship with water and with Christianity. Thus photographic records of the first day at Ernabella school in 1940 show the besuited young white male teacher surrounded by small, naked children. This is pertinent to what follows as women remember the getting of their first dress as making them kungawara /young girl. They were desperate for dresses. 'They gave Angkuna a dress and also one to Nellie and Pulya; those ones and they are parading round proudly (?) The others are saying 'hey proud ones you are not walking around in your sleep!' and they laugh at them '6 From the remarks that older women made, it is clear that they were aware of their nakedness by then and the eroticising of their bodies by others. 'Nganana ipijara /we had breasts!' but they were still naked. This is a typical way of ' Noted in, but not the main thrust of, Rowse's recent admirable analysis of food rationing in central Australia, chiefly among the Arrente (Rowse 1998). Mary Bennett remembers Nganyintja, eloping with Charlie and taking her bag of clothes with her. Also Muwitja eloping with Harry Brumby, 'She had her bag of clothes with her of course.' Ara lntija Archive, 1995, tape 7A/B. 6 Ara lntitja nyiri 2036 letter from Watulya to Mary Bennett. Mary Bennett's 1995 translation with note' a bit hard to get sense'. In Pitjantjatjara text the word for dress is 'dress'. 214

remembering that time. Field notes April 1998 The 3 old women say how they grew up at Ernabella, went to school there. Of the teacher, (wati wiru wiya says M. The was not a nice man). S. says how they were naked even when kungawara7 - naked here - she points between her legs and here, breasts. She (or her daughter, later) put a blanket round her waist. The grey mission issue blankets were adapted to many uses (Wallace and Wallace 1968 (fig 44).

Anangu attitude to nakedness has passed through many transformations since. Recently it has been suggested that old photographs showing naked people be expunged form public records. Dancing nikiti /naked is considered very powerful but only in the context of single sex, non-Christian ceremony. Very different rules of deportment apply to 'church inma.'

The anthropologist C.P. Mountford, visiting Ernabella in 1940 notes Aboriginal peoples' use of clothes and his own disgust at it. a ceremony this morning.. .imported from some northern tribe (later note 'Mt Leibig') and chanted by a group of men clad in all the castoffs of civilisation. Occasionally a man would step out from the main group and perform a curious shuffling dance, but almost all were in rags. I had especially taken the petrol lamps to take photos of the ceremony but in the main the evening was wasted. The little girls from the school who normally wear no clothes whatever seemed to have borrowed all the castoffs of the elders and danced the women's curious shuffle in this regalia. To have these dear little youngsters in such filthy* rags after having watched them around our camp day after day with their lithe handsome bodies unencumbered with the cast-offs, was an experience that filled me with almost loathing. I was able to take a few movies of the girls who could be persuaded to shed their clothes but went home in the main disgusted'. *(filthy crossed out) This unpublished passage shows two things. Firstly, that textiles were not worn on an everyday basis, but as 'rags' were saved for inma, (and that perhaps, being 'filthy', they were relatively colourless or dust coloured). Nonetheless one might draw the conclusion that wearing them somehow enhanced the efficacy of the inma action for Aangu. I will return to this point below (fig. 34). Secondly, the idea that nakedness made Aboriginal people more authentically Aboriginal, which has remained common both amongst tourists, as well as

Kungkawara is usually glossed as 'young girl' by Aangu i.e. teenage. 215

anthropologists, for some decades. The film that Tindale made of Aangu in 1933 shows them all naked and conducting a 'traditional' life moving through the bush. It is frequently used now to show 'iriti' /a long time ago, as it is the only film existing of such a way of life in the Musgrave and Mann ranges. If clothes are regarded by researchers as inauthentic, as intrusions into 'pure' Aboriginal culture in its status as 'other', their very presence on peoples' bodies making them 'more like us', those clothes become invisible and remain unrecorded. In fact Aangu were remaking their own culture during this time of cataclysmic change and clothing was one of the material items that embodied that change (Thomas 1999). There is much important literature on African and Polynesian clothing and fashion, yet a paucity in Australian contexts, where the transition from no clothes to fashion, and the influence of missionaries, also existed (Comaroff on Africa, 1996, Thomas on Polynesia 1999).

The difficulty of relying on contemporary photographic evidence for clothing is amply illustrated by Mountford's complaint 8. Hilliard relates how Aangu themselves recognised posed photographs when a women's magazine published a picture of a young Aboriginal woman with neatly cut hair who, commented Mayawara, noticing this, had taken off her clothes for money (Hilliard 1968;210). Ernabella staff member Mary Bennett comments, 'people didn't mind taking their clothes off then. Clothes were an ornament' (1995, tape 7). If this was so in Ernabella, it was not the same for those who came to visit from other missions or stations and were used to being fully clothed. Dora remarked often of how she came regularly from Areyonga as a girl for 'holiday' at Ernabella, and had to remove her dress.

The word 'nikiti', a P/V transformation of 'naked', is always used in remarks about the old days; 'Nikiti tjuta!' or 'We was all nikiti then'. Today, in mixed company, women must keep their bodies between upper thigh and waist covered, a taboo obviously different from pre-contact days when the idea of 'nakedness' could not exist. The only time women show this area of skin is in women only ceremony when such revelation has a powerful ritual effect. Older women are accustomed to showing their breasts when dancing at public inma 8

David Kauss explored this theme in a BA. Thes4s ANU 1996, an ana'ysis of the veracity of the photographs of Herbert Basedow in Central Australia. 216

but younger women and girls are not. In an inter-school dance competition, school girls from Emabella refused to dance a set from the Seven Sisters tjukurpa without having their chests covered. Baring her breasts in public is an indication of serious aggression and anger by a woman, and is done as a prelude to a fight.

At a women only ilbinji ceremony a young woman had to dance naked, though decorated, to try to bring back her errant husband. She was mortified by this, compounded, she intimated, at my (the sole) 'whitefella' gaze. This kuntaringanyl Ibecoming ashamed is a feeling common to young women especially. Small children though, as soon as they can move about on their own, are often naked and on homelands in particular children run around without clothes. Older Ernabella children wore clothing in school from 1957 (Hilliard 1968; 1 57)•9

Clothing Styles Dresses are called 'tiritja', a word derived from 'dress', but fabric including finished batiks are known as 'mantara' or 'raiki', from rags. Blankets are pulangkita. Patterned clothes are walkajara Ihaving walka. Since walka applies to any purposeful mark—making, it also applies to writing (see Section 4). A Tshirt with a slogan or numbers on it, is described therefore as 'walkajara'.

There are several recognisable styles of clothing worn by men and women. These are my descriptive categories, not those described by Aangu. Some have a more obvious link to the values promoted by the Mission than others. Values connected with the Mission are cleanliness and lack of body odour. However the original meaning of types of clothing has often become changed in the contemporary context, whilst the clothing remains virtually the same. Styles may express a consistent identity relating to the weare past or present /' occupation, or aspirations. The stockman style for men and what might be described as the clergyman's wife for women, are the prime examples here. A nurse on the Mission staff, Shirley Gudgeon Hill made some school uniforms out of plain bright blue fabric. In view of the interest that Aangu have now in plain blue clothes, this is quite a co-incidence. Apparently the uniforms she made were too small and not in use for long (W. 217

Generally though, particular clothes are worn for particular events and the colours of the garment are the determining factor. This description might make the wearing of clothes seem rigidly systematised but it is also characterised by great fluidity as clothes move in and out of individual ownership.

Women's Clothing Women do not wear trousers, 1 ° only dresses and skirts, although 'young girls'/kungawara do wear loose track suit pants. Clothing in Ernabella followed fashion in the rest of Australia so that during the 1960s, film and photographs show women in much shorter skirts, during the early 1970s in 'maxi' skirts, and so on. The knee length or longer dresses and skirts worn now are combinations of bright prints, bright plain colours, stripes and animal skin prints. But the colours or walka of clothes are, for much of the time governed by the wearer's relationship and response to deaths, initiations, inma of either kind, changes in the land and other events. Mature women, girls in the 1940s and early '50s, who are Christian and who never or rarely attend others sorts of inma, favour dresses which are an updated version of the fifties frocks with 'set-in' (short) sleeves that they might have worn as girls on the Mission (fig 33). Out of the bush, in Alice or Adelaide, women favour this sort of dress often worn with white ankle socks and black canvas shoes. The contrasting socks are considered by Aangu as very smart. One of the presents I received when leaving the field was a pair of black trimmed white ankle socks which disappeared almost immediately.

By far most common skirt worn by younger women is the straight or A line style. The skirts are of plain saturated colours. There is a selection of garments worn with these skirts, which are normally short sleeved; the tie dyed shirt, brilliantly coloured, such as yellow, with a multi-coloured spiral of tie-dyed pattern on the back and front, or T-shirts of a plain contrasting colour to the skirt. Pink /orange, dark red/orange, pink /purple and green/blue are common pairings of colours, of skirt with top (figs 40 and 41). Sleeves in contrasting colours to the body of the shirt are another variation. Sports shirts provide this, often providing shine too, Hilliard pers comm). I found out about this after leaving the field so had no opportunity to ask people in Emabella how they remembered the blue uniforms. 218

like the black glossy Adidas shirt with blue sleeves trimmed with black stripes. In a single brilliant colour or black, lycra sports wear is also worn by women in ritual contexts.

Men's clothing Men's fashion has changed more slowly as it has generally in 'western' fashion. Old men /tjilpi favour trousers and shirts of browns and beiges which are already, or become, dust coloured, and are camouflage against the red dirt of the country. At night they are almost invisible. This camouflage is indexical of their ritual power and influence (fig 37). Like the drabber women's outfits, all black for example, it is topped off with a multi-coloured concentric ringed hat. Men often wear their red wati's 11 headband of string or fabric underneath the hat.

The seeming opposite of this elusiveness is the flamboyant dandyish stockman, which most wati /men, young and middle aged, seem to adopt at sometime. Many of the older men were stockmen and a few of the younger ones living off the A.P. Lands are today. The stockman shirt has a yoke in a contrasting colour or print, to the main body fabric. Black shirts with a printed yoke, often multicoloured florals, are 'rikina'. A checked shirt, often with the sleeves ripped out is a more casual version of the stockman style. With this are blue jeans or jean type trousers, preferably with a belt decorated with silver studding and a brilliant buckle. Pointed toed, cuban heeled cowboy boots are also crucial to the style. To really look 'flash' or 'rikina', and attract women, the stockman needs a ten gallon hat, a wati mukata. The hat, black, white or brown can have a plain band or a studded one or acquire feathers tucked into it.

For both young men and women sportswear is fashionable. Boys /nyiayira and young wati wear singlets with the team numbers of black American basketball players on the backs. These are in basketball team strips such as the Los Angeles Lakers, orange or yellow singlets with black and white trim and numbers. Chicago Bulls shirts are also a favourite with young men; red with white numbers.

is however an element of cross dressing in the inma of both men and women. ' Wati means an initiated man. 219

Girls wear these shirts too, but with short sleeves. In 1999 when I returned to Ernabella, there were new versions of the basket ball shirts with, the player's photographic portrait printed on the backs of the shirts, instead of his number. Jogging pants are highly desirable wear for children and teenagers. The black shiny fabric with fluorescent stripes up the outside of the leg, originally designed by Adidas (three stripes) is much copied by other clothing manufacturers but with two or four stripes, preventing copyright infringements. Field notes Inkajili is racing around on a new bicycle which has flouro orange wheels. Has on apparently new clothes, blue T, black shiny jogging pants with silver and flouro orange leg stripes. A. too in blue T shirt adult size hanging off her slim shoulders, white lettering on front about the wonders of natural gas.

Another sports generated style, worn by young people of both genders and by men, is football strip clothing. The two Adelaide Aussie Rules teams 12 , Adelaide Crows and Port Power are the sides Ernabella people support. These football colours are similar to the site specific walka used in tjukurpa in that they are always two or three contrasting colours.

Both genders, mainly older people, wear padded checked shirts over their usual clothes during the few colder months. These shirts are made in China and are available in shopping centres throughout Australia. Black and white checks are the most popular.

Colour series

The patterns that Aangu favour in clothes are animal prints, dots, stripes, bright florals and Rasta prints. Striped clothing mostly has stripes going around the torso (figs 35 and 45). Rastaferian prints, which identify with black 'African' people through the fabrics printed with images of Bob Marley, are also sought because of the colour combination of Rastaferianism; red /green /yellow I black. Another common print in Central Australia at the time of my fieldwork was a repeat of the Aboriginal flag, the yellow disc on a split red and black ground. This flag is used on the name boards of the so-called 'town camps' in Alice Springs but is not used in this way in Ernabella. The flag has been made into a striped print circling around the body. 12

This is Australian Football League or 'AFL'. 220

These are some of the frequent sets of colours series in clothing bought in the mass market. Fluorescent colours on sports clothing, and fluorescent orange patterns on black trainers for example, are also 'nkina'/ flash and sought after. This list of colour series on the next page is by no means an exhaustive one13.

W.H.R. Rivers reports of Torres Strait Islanders colour naming during his visit there in 1900 (Rivers 1901;53), that an old Murray Island woman gave her own name for the first colour shown to her and for other colours gave the names of her friends. Concluded Rivers,' the names she gave were almost certainly dependant on associations of some kind, probably connected with dress'. Later (ibid;53) he notes that finding the task of asking people to choose a colour they liked a dubious one as he was not sure they understood the question, he instead notes down Sunday Church dress. For women, 28 red dresses, 3 pink, many white with red edges, 16 blue, 8 yellow and no green. For men's dress, a singlet and trousers with a scarf at neck and waist, he notes of the scarves, 24 black, 8 red, 4 green (all 'vivid'), 4 blue. Of those who did not wear trousers but 'loin cloths', no black, 9 red, 2 pink, 4 white, 1 blue, 2 yellow, no green. 221

The Colours of Clothes

red

black

red

green

red black green

green

black red

red

red

blue

black rinr

black 'lltf1turquoise

purple pink

orange pinks

blue

red blue V'flT11

blue black

green blue

green orange black

green red purple

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Hats and socks The sort of head covering, woolly hat, headband, scarf for both genders, and sometimes straw hats for women and Stetsons and baseball caps for men, vary with the weather, and the age and present social circumstances of the wearer. In hot dusty conditions people may arrange the neck opening of a top around their foreheads and use the garment to protect their head. The woolly hats which older people like to wear are less commonly worn by the young, and children wear head coverings less than their older relatives.

Much head gear is chosen for the way stripes wind around the head in the pattern, if not actually, as they do in the puturu /string headbands. When seen from above, then, the hats are concentric rings centred on the crown of the head. Concentric rings are multi-valent symbols throughout Western Desert cultures, employed in body painting especially (see Munn 1973 on the Warlpiri). It is on the crown of the head that bush medicine is administered, whilst the mangkuri, the doughnut shaped headrest made from hairstring, leaves the crown free.

The woolly hats are either shop bought football strips or hand crocheted by women. In this case individual combinations of colours are made (fig. 32). For example; Field notes Inma at Fregon 1997 We drive to a camp at the far end, full of old ladies, many in gorgeous hand crouched beanies. Three heads are wearing the same wool batch of orange but each of the 3 is in different combinations with other colours. As the sun set, the orange beanies of all those seated, singing women were lit up by the last rays. I later learned that the fire dreaming is an important tjukurpa for women in Fregon. The orange /red or orange Iyellow beanies were an assertion of this, and the old ladies' seniority in relation to this Dreaming.

Undyed grey, beige and cream wool stripes is also a favourite combination. Many of the colour series listed above figure in shop bought hats; red, yellow and green are a frequent choice as a narrow band of stripes on a brown hat.

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Although Aangu desire direct tactile contact with the earth through bare feet in the cold time and in heat it becomes uncomfortable. Feet develop bad cracks due to hot dry conditions followed by humid weather. Men are more likely than women to have substantial shoes like trainers, cowboy boots or leather city shoes. Women mostly have thin canvas shoes or thongs (flip-flops). Socks however, especially football socks, are often worn alone without shoes and foothall players often play barefoot or in socks. Children especially want to wear striped football socks. Football socks are loved because of their stripes, most often round the leg imitating tied, coloured string.

Blankets and tarpaulins. Blankets were Mission issue for many years in Ernabella and they were grey. Women wear blankets as clothing during the short cold season. The blanket is draped over one shoulder and under the other, leaving one arm free. 14At a tjilpi camp I attended in 1997 there were free blankets but few people wanted them because of their plain grey colour. The most sought after blankets are fake fur fabric with a pile, and women love 'African' animal skin prints. Coloured, and patterned blankets especially, are considered just as valuable as clothes, and are used in ritual payments (fig 4). A woman told me that we must get 'lots of pulangkita for inma so we can dance hard'.

At the start of the cold (May to August) Aangu acquire new blankets and quilts and pillows, having lost the used ones from last year during the preceding hot time. Textiles of all kinds are crumpled into a heap, there is no cultural concept of folding but instead, a sort of topological crumpling. Tarpaulins Itiinta (from the English 'tent'), are also sought after textile items. These are manufactured in dark green or bright blue, and although both are desired, it is the blue ones that are most wanted. Sugar and flour bags succeeded spinifex grass as a covering for wiltja, and coloured tiinta have now succeeded these (see figs 12 and 13).

14

Cloaks of many possum skins were worn by men and women in NSW, VIC, TAS and SA but not in the Central Desert. They were worn draped over one shoulder and under the other arm leaving one arm free in just the same way Aangu wear blankets now. Photograph in Womens' Work: Aboriginal Women's Artefacts in the Museum of Victoria '1992, Aboriginal Studies Dept., Museum of Victoria. 224

Clothing and events Mourning Black and white Blue and white Blue Bright multi colours

'One of my relatives dies', said the woman who was reckoned as my older sister, 'I'll wear black and white'. It was one of the few direct communications on clothes colours that I received. The clearest form of this clothing, and the ideal is a white T-shirt and black skirt or black dress with white pattern, often polka dots, for women and a black suit and white shirt for men. I also saw women with a black dress worn over a white one at funerals. Both of these have obvious similarities to the Sunday church dress of the white male missionaries that Aangu also adopted for church events. The dark Sunday suits of the missionaries, evoking Protestant austerity, have an association that in Europe harks back several centuries. I do not think that the same meanings apply to the mimesis of the black suit and white shirt which Aboriginal men use at funerals now. There are many possible similes relating to symbolic meaning, that black and white together might have, but in the context of funerals I think they are miri /skin, black and tarka Ibone, white and are perhaps relate to the moieties (see Section 2), but there are certainly other meanings. Field notes Funeral of a middle aged man who died unexpectedly. The presiding minister Rev Raymond Bandicha from Yirrkala is a large man with much black curly hair, dressed in white shirt, black trousers and black cloth with tiny gold bits at the ends hanging round his neck. Black and white worn by a few men; F. has on black suit type trousers and white shirt with black flowers! insects print; Graham Kulyuru has same type black trousers and white shirt with black vertical stripes either side front band. J. is in immaculately pressed white shirt and black trousers. A couple of other old men have on whitish with pinstripes western suit type shirts which never usually see them wearing. One younger woman wearing black and white diamond print. Angkuna in white dress with black tiny dots. However this description makes it sound more homogenous than it was. Many people looked as though had clean/new clothes on e.g. Nyukana in black with red and white and green sparse flowers, but many others, especially kids and young people, in everyday stuff. Also some tjilpi in black and white shop bought AFL bobble hats 'bears on the white middle ring, someone in Port Adelaide strip hat, black! white I turquoise, and a woman in a bright green /turquoise striped hand crocheted beanie.

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As people have so many others who are reckoned as relatives and as Aboriginal life expectancy is short, an individual may wear black and white clothing frequently. For an unrelated outsider, it is easy to overlook, and it was only through field notes taken over a long period that I understood the frequency of dark navy and white or black and white spotted dresses. Clothing that is predominantly black and white but with other colours too, is apparently efficacious enough, for example; Field notes August 1998 News of the death of a young man at Docker River who was a drunk and whose kidneys had failed. A short burst of wailing ensued and Y who was related to the man was, wore a black skirt and white T-shirt (but with tropical fruit in the 'window' on her chest) for the next week or so until after the funeral. Once someone is dead it is very difficult to discover who they were, or when they died, and therefore who an individual is mourning. Thus on the occasion below I do not know whose loss was expressed in the clothes. Field notes D is wearing a white T shirt with fluorescent daisies splashed about it, the centres of which have a silver sequin, and a skirt of fine black and white round and round the body stripes. Nuna has a skirt of which she says 'elephants lions and tigers' in green with black and white linear jungle and a mauve green rust patterned top, a usual colour combination for her Also another skirt under the top one. When we go out hunting D wears a white crocheted beanie There is perhaps a minimum amount of time for wearing black and white in connection with the death of relatives but for individuals who are 'sorry' for a long time, such clothing is worn habitually for months or even years. A woman in her early forties whose equally young husband had died four years previously, only changed to coloured clothes at the end of this period. When women symbolically lose their sons and grandsons at initiation (cf Myers 1991;230), they also wear black and white clothing as mourning. Field notes; clothes at Double tank initiation. Nuna (it is her pakalil grandson's initiation) comes over in a new black dress with white print and her hair dressed over her forehead / muli muli and hugs me. Kunmanara comes over, he has a new inhaler and oxygen in his daughter's house, has no head band and a blue denim shirt with the sleeves ripped out. All the women about 15 of us including Nuna, Dora, Yuminia,Yangkui ,Mayningka and young women move forward closely connected. lnawintji is there also in new clean black and white print shirt and skirt, she squeezes my hand 'palya7 OK?. Panjiti is there in a plain white T-shirt and plain black skirt and a head band whose colour cannot make out. She waves. 226

At the opening that follows a funeral after weeks or months, and which signals the end of the social mourning period, plain bright blue, or blue and white clothing is worn or very brightly coloured clothing. Bright blue or blue and white clothing is also worn for Christian inma. In both contexts it is important to wear clean clothes and have washed one's body and hair. Field notes; April 1997. She had come round because S. wants to ask if we will take them to the inma at Fregon tonight. She says ' we might clean up eh?' and reappears in a clean dress, blue and white, white cardigan and wet hair. E. too is in a clean dress cream with an animal fur print. S is in blue jeans and a blue shirt. All have blankets/quilts etc with them. Mourners seem to wear black and white, followed by bright blue and white or a plain bright blue garment. On an occasion when an elderly women had told me of her adult daughter's recent death in Alice whilst drunk, she was wearing black and white clothes. A day or so later when we moved camp, she put on a clean blue and white dress. Another old woman who had been in mourning for her son for several months, first ventured back into coloured clothing in her head coverings. She was usually quite casual about her possessions but was keen to find the blue and white headband. Field notes July 1998 Then N. appeared coming out of the pit toilet. She has on her new hanky bright blue and white that she and I went back to look for the other day at the end of an afternoon honey anting. Hanky wiru she said. Bright saturated blue is always 'kala wiru'/ lovely colour. Field notes during boys' initiation ceremonies Nail Armunta is after more clothes 'second hand clothes', she says in English admiring my big blue dress,' ka money wiya' I But no money. Diggie; If it rains tonight, no inma. If it rains tomorrow, no inma. Everyone will wait until there is a fine night (the ceremony must not be interrupted). The sky is still overcast but a small patch of blue is appearing. Nail says' ilkari wanka' literally live sky, meaning a blue one and Diggie says 'Pianpa (white (people) say 'enough blue sky to make some clothes." For sometime I did not realise the importance of blue in contemporary Anangu culture. I noticed that people wore plain blue or turquoise blue clothes, and even that the ex-chairman of the council had acquired a matching car and shirt (which he seemed to wear most days for a period of months), both bright

227

turquoise. He even kept a blue and white 'eski' 15 strapped to the car roof but I dismissed this interest of mine as anthropological over analysis. Later I saw a young man wearing a blue sports shirt with its metallic sheen matching exactly the metallic blue car he drove. The commonest colour in abandoned cars was blue and white. I met several very old ladies, on various occasions wearing sky blue dresses and speculated on the connection between elderly women and blueness.

Dora, who worked in her homeland craft room and ordered her own dyes, told me many times in her strategic way, 'my batiks are blue', 16 but I had no idea what to do with this piece of information. During the year she had started several bright blue batiks, crumpled on the floor of the craft room, dyed once only, and therefore blue and white (showing the white of the cloth). As I discussed in Section Two, rock holes are idealised as 'blue', as reflecting the clear blue sky, and distant ranges are also 'blue'. Blue is evocative of both sky and water on the ground and via both conditions constitutes a material embodiment of Aboriginal Christian belief in heaven - ilkari- the clear blue sky. Field notes Thurs 22 May K, E. and N. after a funeral in Mimili, said E., 'funeral wiru, piranpa way, Lutheran way. Paluru with the devil wiya' she points down- ikarangka wiru munu Anangu tjuta pukulpa' N. has on a bright sky blue head band. Translation: Lovely funeral, White people's way, Lutheran way, she (the deceased) isn't with the devil (down below) but in the wonderful sky (heaven) and everyone is happy. Wearing bright blue at openings seems to be a statement about one's beliefs concerning the destination of the deceased person's spirit. The blue headband indicates that the wearer is thinking, imagining this even, but also actively helping to send the spirit there by doing so 17. Those who are avowedly Christian, such as the senior man with matching shirt and car, are also broadcasting their beliefs and all that these entail in terms of (idealised) choices about how to live. Wearing blue when very old is I think, a preparation for death.

15

'Eski' is Australian English term for a cool box , the commonest brand and all such that I saw are blue with a white lid. 16 I asked the Emabella Art Co-ordinator to tell me, from the order records, which of the batik dyes was most used. It is blue although this is also the most expensive and therefore rationed, used by senior artists only. 17 As also brightly coloured clothes do at the opening. People told me that, if you are Christian then you do not mind seeing photographs of your dead relative because they are in heaven and happy. By this I take it that they mean, your own belief affects where your relative's spirit goes. 228

S. wore blue clothes much of the time throughout the two years I knew him, the last two years of his life, when he was periodically very ill, and went to many Christian inma. This was work for the future, for his spirit's safe passage to heaven.

In order to send the spirit of the deceased to heaven, the living who attend the opening must wear very bright coloured clothes. The most spectacular opening that I attended was for an old, ritually powerful man near the border with Western Australia Field notes June 1997 Gradually people cluster and sit down outside the fence of a house. It is not that of the dead man's sister's. It is in the middle of Kalka with a tall ridge tent in the garden green and red striped. D has on a clean dress and goes into a house to wash her hair, borrows a comb and mirror to style it. About 250? people are here, cars, buses, the Pipalaytjara women's bus and many are wearing really bright colours, certainly most clean clothes. I am told to stay in the car but am near the crowd. A wati has on a shot (i.e. iridescent fabric) blue jacket and green shorts. Another in purple white and scarlet. There are lots of blue and green clothes worn together, also yellow and brown striped beanies. A girl in shocking pink and orange harmonies and discords -orange and mauve. M's older sister who is the widow is in a blue dress with grey and pink tartan stripes, a green skirt under that flashes now and again as she moves, sits, and a yellow green and blue jumper. She looks magnificent. Her younger sister is in a black dress with white jumper over the top, black beanie with red and yellow flowers knitted into it. Another woman from the sorry camp is all in black. The colour mixture of the crowd is startling. Blue and green are popular choices, more among younger people, in combinations for openings. Blue is usually worn on the bottom half of the torso, green above. Blue, as I have described, followed by renewal, growth, greenness.

Clothing and inma A black underskirt worn as the first layer against the skin, is something all ritually active women own. Hamilton ( 1979;259 )notes that black is very strong 'inside'. As for men, black has sacred meanings for women. The explanation given routinely to me, and to other white women, is that black is purunpa miri /like skin. Another explanation is that it does not get dirty. Purku /charcoal, as a

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product of transformation is also secret sacred in ritual. 18 During inma, that is minymaku Law, women's business, the norm when dancing is for women to wear black skirts19. Field notes August 1998 dunng prolonged women's ceremonies Most women wear black skirts and I for inma. Black T shirts in many variations. One old lady has 'party till you drop' across her front. M. has 'Noosa beach' with fluorescent pink and green underneath (her hair also dyed deep red again) Panjiti, 'surf.

The other part of this normative inma dress is a red headband. 2° Red is a sacred colour and a dangerous one. Its perceived danger and attractiveness are, as I stated in Section One, a function of the properties of red as constructed by human physiology. Its dangerousness is evoked from its formal qualities as energetic and unstable. It is attractive in its tendency to appear forward of other hues. Red is a manifestation of strong Ancestral power and it therefore of great spiritual and emotional import. If red cars attract emu, red clothes are said to attract lightning. Red ochre is a sacred substance and commentators have often privileged its substance, as transformed Ancestral bodily fluid, over its colour. Certainly ochres may have other sensory attributes which are considered important, texture and smell for example.

On a man the red headband is the sign that the wearer is a wati, that is, initiated. Local stores sell red knitting wool as ready-made puturu. 2 ' Red headbands though are also the prerogative of ritually powerful mature and elderly women and are often worn everyday during times of women's inma. Field notes; August 1998 during women's inma. N. now in red sweat shirt as well as red beanie. That is, her clothes are getting redder the more business she attends. The red of all these headbands appears to be of a constant hue, a bright focal 18

According to White, in Yalata 'maw' appears often in song texts where it refers to black body (1981;9). For the opening of the Uluru cultural centre, P/Y women had multi-coloured tie dye skirts, but did not, in the event wear them, reverting to black. (Sofia Peters pers. comm). These skirts have been used since for ilbinji. Women from Other Central Australian communities have acquired dancing clothes similar to football strips; for example the Mt Leibig women who wear yellow and red, evoking the Fire Dreaming which is important there. 20 For example, as for other public occasions the P/Y women wore black skirts, bare torsos and red headbands at the opening ceremony to the Sydney Olympic Games 2000, in which they presented an inma 1 See also Bell 1988;201. 230

red that in English would be called 'scarlet'. Women do wear red in clothing though mainly mixed in with other colours in a print. Younger women wear more of it, most notably in the Rasta prints. Toddlers and small children wear plain red clothes. It is true that men wear red with impunity, that is, red shirts, red shorts as well as red base ball caps and red head bands. Kunmanara had a Sydney Swans football strip which he wore often on an everyday basis. Sydney Swans strip colours are bright red with white trim and numbers. Men who are powerful advocates of Christianity, wear red coverings, baseball caps for example, in the context of church inma too. The system of colour is flexible. One might then, at such an inma, wear a shop bought hat of red, white and blue stripes. This would combine allusions to Christianity in the blue, with the white, along with one's ritual status in the red edge of the hat which encircles the forehead. The white in the centre, contrasting with the red, perhaps alludes to lightning in the colour series of the three. Or, on the other hand it could imply that one lives, or lived, or have family living, in Fregon and br supports their football team. The coloured headbands of dancers during inma indicate aspects of the tjukurpa presented. Thus yellow headbands were worn by women from Mimili dancing publicly the mala inma ('tjanampa inma' Itheir inma, said my Ernabetla companion) at a football weekend. In certain competitive political contexts, usually large gatherings of women from many places, specifically coloured skirts and headbands are worn for dancing; a bright red skirt perhaps, or green one. This was done to a more totalising extent in videos of inma made by Panjiti Mackenzie (Kunmanara) and her husband for educating younger P/V people. For each segment of the inma, dancers appear in different coloured skirts; two dancers , one in pink the other in black; 5 dancers, two in black, the central women in yellow, flanked by two more in black with headbands also in different colours. The coloured skirts and headbands, in addition to the painting on the torso of the dancers, are expressing the transformations which the tjukurpa

22

Rose relates how, in 1962 Arthur Liddle of the Angas Downs station family told him (Rose 1968;239) that his father 'could never issue clothing to the women in which the colour red appeared as the use of this colour was the prerogative of men'. Whether women used red cloth for their own ceremony at this time one may only conjecture. It was not a question I asked about the past. Among the community of Aboriginals based in Alice and working for Aboriginal corporations , it is folk law that women especially should not wear red in bush communities. However on only one occasion did women utter any explicit strictures to me regarding the 'danger' (in English) of my bluish red skirt (i.e. not scarlet) , when we were in a bush camp near to a site where men's business was going on. 231

Ancestor passes through on her journey, and are perhaps also making more explicit the complimentary information contained in the songs.

At the final 'open' culmination to boy's initiation, a ceremony that lasts all night and finishes at dawn, the final revelation of the 'new men' to their female kin, is visual. 'You'll see and understand,' I was told repeatedly, even though there were strong olfactory aspects - the acrid smoking fires - and auditory ones.23 Field notes Double Tank 1997 All the fires along the women's camp are now smoking. We are facing the eastern dawn and a rim of pink is arriving at the horizon. As the sky lightens a sound of thudding comes up right behind us and everyone in the group runs forward to the women's camp. This thudding is young men, in day clothes but red headbands, running in and stooping to the piles of smouldering punti puu. Wala Diane! some one is shouting, 'Hurry up!'. When I run round into the women's camp and face the west there is a wall of wati coming slowly towards us. They are clothed but dust coloured and are shoulder to shoulder like an army. A lot of them are grey haired. In the middle of the row is a 'blank' of pale tarpaulin held as a screen and a man puts out another dark tarp a little way forward on the north side. The sky is a pale yellow now and just as the sun rises, perfectly timed, the 2 new wati come running out from behind the pale tarp. They bend briefly at the smoking punti, and then run off very fast north, pursued by the other young men. The women wail, almost laughing and crying 'w000000000000,.

The new wati are red ochred very thickly and naked except for a 'laplap' once whitish now red dust coloured. It is their heads which are decorated, hair braided back a round bun in the nape of their necks about 5 inches in diameter. The chignon are bound with wool red at the base but one man's is bound all over in red, the other's in green. They also had red headbands and the front of their heads were covered in a halo of pink cockatoo feathers. I was unable to ascertain why one young man wore bright green and the other the expected red, as binding on their hair, but the potential for elaboration had been seized by the tjilpi fold men in charge of the proceedings. The tjilpi's own ghostly appearance and the use of the tarpaulins made the drama of the sequence, first slow then rapid, as the sun rose, even more memorable and emotional for the new wati's ' mothers', 'sisters' and 'grandmothers'. The bright colours of the 'new men' passing in a moment, a glimpse, a flash.

23

See Meggitt I 962 for an account of this ceremony among the Wartpiri. 232

Football Football matches have become very important events for all Western Desert groups, not least because of the large number of people gathered together. They are probably the best example of the multiple reasons for any one event that I sketched in the first part of this section on cars, and provide an excellent excuse for other business. During the football season families often leave for the fixture being held in another community on Friday and return on Monday or Tuesday, making the school week for children, a short one. Openings are often early in the morning of a foothall fixture. Matches are a time when young people can meet24. The AFL competition for Aboriginal teams often takes place in Alice and here young women seem to feel free of the constraints, the kuntaringanyi /becoming ashamed that governs their behaviour in their own home community. The Ernabella sports weekend is also a time when men and women, who have come from all over the Lands and further afield as well - Yuendemu Warlpiri, Kintor Pintupi, Ngaatjatjarra from Blackstone, as well as urban dwelling Ajjangu from Port Augusta and Adelaide - plan boys' initiation (cf Peterson 1999). Coming to take the boys begins directly after the sports weekend is over, as I witnessed in both 1997 and in 1999.

Football matches are used also as opportunities for inter community inma. Since it is mostly men who control cars, and it is men who frequent football matches for their own sake, 25 it is thus a good opportunity for women without cars to accompany their men and gather in one spot. Inma at some relevant site in the bush, hidden from the road and football ground, can then be created with the spoken excuse of going for honey ants /tjalaku or witchetty grubs /makuku. The complexity of this social gathering with its potential for many other social strategies, influences what people wear. If the match is preceded by an opening, then those who attended this event will be clad in clean brightly coloured clothes, also an excuse to look 'rikina' all day to attract potential lovers or a spouse.

24

inter marriage of many young Waripiri men, from Willowra and Yuendemu, with young Emabella women, is facilitated through their meetings at football fixtures. 25 Older women told me repeatedly that they watched because their grandsons /pakali were playing. 233

The football strip, the team colours for each Aboriginal community, and the often different strip colours of the professional AFL teams with which the community associates itself26: these associations are interpreted effortlessly by people of all ages. Miniatures of the oval AFL balls, coloured in AFL strips, are popular toys and children of 5 or 6 years old chant out in English the team to which the colours belong, e.g. 'blue, red, yellow - Adelaide Crows!'.

Ernabella's football team colours are black /white ('magpies' said in English) or black /white /turquoise. The latter combination are the colours of Port Power, one of the two Adelaide AFL teams. The other team Ernabella people support is Adelaide Crows whose hats are ubiquitous, dark blue, red and yellow. Port Power clothes are popular in Ernabella with men and women alike, predominantly jackets and woolly hats. Wearing these clothes is an expression of identity with a locale, whereas the American basket ball players seem to be individual heroes. Hence people from Kalka and Pipalyatjara wear yellow and black striped beanies, the strip of the Perth Eagles, thus denoting their Westerly allegiances. At the Sports weekend in 1997, the Ernabella council painted 44 gallon drums, (which have two metal seams around them) in the competing teams strips, and set these around the football oval as markers for spectators' car parking. Field notes Ernabella sports weekend Sept. 1997 Haasts Bluff; white with red diagonal across top. Finke; as Adelaide crows yellow/dark bluel red. Fregon; red, white and blue. Docker River; bright blue, bright yellow socks and numbers and trims. Papunya; red and white. Emabella; black, white and turquoise, as Port Power. Mimili; blue and white. Mutijulu; black and white vertical stripe. Amata; red diag/black and white numbers however the Amata 44 gallon drum was yellow/black/yellow the colour of the Perth Eagles. Pipalyajara; maroon shorts, blue top, yellow number.27 If football strip clothing is an indicator of community allegiance, batiked clothes were also used like this in Emabella. Batik clothes were always ordered from the craft workers by Aboriginal health workers going to Adelaide (Tamura 1985). 26 These associations seem to be made, at least in part, by compass point. That is, in the same way that Aboriginal groups arrange themselves relative to one another in a camp, as the compass points of their country of origin are to one another. 27 The petrol station in Pipalyajara was painted in stripes of these colours and a little landscape 234

The same was true of the Ernabella choir, who wore batiked clothing when they toured. Anangu in Emabella now rarely wear clothing batiked by Ernabella artist. It is all sold to outsiders, or bought as presents for them by Aangu, through the Art centre.

Clothing and country Field notes Mon 25th Aug 1998 Magenta pea flowers out especially round the Amata road. N. has on a new dress of plain magenta, like the pea flower. Field notes May 1997 Another 'outfit' I've seen a lot in Alice worn by women of all sorts of ages is a pink T shirt with mauve-purple skirt. Usually pink on top purple below. An old lady in Emabella in the most saturated version of this; fuchsia T-shirt and violet skirt. Field notes May 1997 Later when I got my photos back, saw that Linda and Dora are weanng identical colours to the sunset later that day which I also made photos of. Mauve and bright pink/yellow/orange then red. Women (and children) often wear clothes on an everyday basis that mirror the colours of the country, of sunsets, of changes in the surface of the land, sheets of flowers, green growth. As I discussed in Section Two, the colours of a sunset are a powerful manifestation of Ancestral presence. Field notes September 1997 Fl O;21 D is in new clothes, bright green skirt with a ball of correspondingly bright green minkulpa behind her ear. Must be new stuff. S. apparently sitting amidst heaps of other clothes. We've been shopping for second hand clothes says D. As with the series of colours in clothes worn for mourning, there is a sense in which an individual is expressing and reflecting their own emotions towards an external social event - in this case the state of the land /body - through their social skin, that is, their clothing. But they are also effecting that event in doing so, in the same way that body painting is used to achieve certain ends, the growth of a girl's breasts for example. It is not always clear therefore whether the clothes generated the sunset colours, or the other way around. At the time of heavy rains in January and February 1997, many men and women were wearing head scarves, or bands, folded, to give red /yellow /green over the forehead; the Rasta print and the Rainbow serpent. I visited an old ladies' camp in a settlement north-east of Ernabella, just after the rains had ceased, where 235

women each wore three separate headbands of red, green and yellow fabric. Rasta prints are worn by people of all ages. The prints are often overlaid with text such as 'emancipate your mind from slavery', but it is the striped colour juxtaposition that it is worn more for (fig 36).

The very definite contrast affected between skirt and top in women's clothes possibly alludes to the contrast between land and sky. Skirts become the colour of the land anyhow, from their wearer's contact habitual contact with the ground, as I discuss further below. Field notes Children's clothes There are 3 small kids playing, Margery in her fluoro pink T shirt with purple 'Mickey mouse' she tells me, printed on it. Margery also has a big chocolate Easter egg wrapped in puce coloured foil. Another child, her brother, in a violet Tshirt with lions and leopards, is a common T-shirt for small kids at the moment, and is a very strong violet. A 3 year old in royal blue. When the sunset comes it is very similar to the children's clothing colours.

Acquiring textiles Secondhand clothing, like secondhand cars, seems to be desirable, although there is much more possibility of obtaining new clothes unworn by anyone previously, than a new car. Like secondhand cars re-cycled clothing is already socialised, whereas new clean clothes are for Christian inma, as Dora says above. When women go shopping for secondhand (or new) clothing, they buy for their whole extended family - children, grandchildren, as well as for themselves. After visits to Adelaide everyone would be in bright new clothes the day after a home-coming, but most of these clothes I never saw again. Clothing in Australia is far less expensive than in the U.K. Much of it is manufactured in China, India and Indonesia. Aus$40 (15-20) is an expensive dress, but if desirable Aangu still buy. The rancher style men's shirts are also comparatively expensive. Particularly dandy ones retail in Alice for Aus$40-$60. A chain store T shirt or shirt can easily be purchased in Alice for Aus$5-$10. A stetson therefore is an expensive item at Aus$70-$90. Field notes 1997 Staying in Maruku House at Mutijulu. N. has that blue print with big white daisies - from Balfour Well store she says and another new dress from Mulga Park red /violet/ green tie-dye shiny material. M. agrees how expensive the clothes are at Balfour Well - $35 for this dress purple and pink splodgy print. 236

The same bush stores that sell food, often also sell clothes.28 Field notes July 1997 The new store at Balfour Well, half way between Umuwa and Emabella, is doing a roaring trade today. it stocks everything Aangu might need for a trip; wipu, cool drinks, crisps, different types of gum, (chewing, bubble), Diet Coke, icecream, cigarettes, country and western cassettes, small sequinned bags (plain black, plain pearly, mixed patches e.g. red blue green gold) shirts (black wati ones with 'Jack the Splash' fluorescent. yoke and front band). Also pointed cowboy boots with cuban heels, trainers, canvas shoes (women wear these not trainers) skirts and those shiny black jogging' pants so beloved of teenagers, children and young men; Adidas np-offs with different colour stripes down each leg. As with food, Aboriginal people in remote communities pay more money for poorer quality goods than in the rest of Australia. A travelling store also visited Ernabella twice a month on 'pay day', (Thursdays) during my fieldwork. From this van were sold new clothes, blankets, swags and even furniture. Alice Springs or Adelaide are for real bulk purchasers of goods, especially clothes. Field notes April 1997 Much laughter over clothes, amount of them brought back from Adelaide trip. Tjikali says that when they all went to Berlin (for an exhibition in 1995) they bought masses and masses of clothes and then could not take them on the plane. Whenever they go anywhere Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Darwin - Clothes tjuta (lots of clothes). Field notes Alice Springs June 1997 All Dora's shopping haunts, all the places she knows in fact, are on the edge of Alice town. Even the charity shops that I know, and which are frequented by Aboriginal people, are not the ones she knows. 'That red shop' figures largely, also the Mission Block. She is very rapid in her appraisals. Never tries on anything 'I'll take that one'. M., her grandson, acquires lots more red clothes and a black and white striped romper suit. The stripes go round. I end up buying him a white and blue baby grow in Chain Reaction. Cyril 's Bob Marley T-shirt is easy to find. She buys blue socks for herself. She buys a dress with a pinkish grey flowered print which she later gives to me, saying something about it going with my skin. I find a bright 2 piece of yellow, lilac, pink and turquoise 'flower' splodges. Colours wiru, she says and suggests I buy it for N., which I do. She wants to get S a wati mukata i.e. a tall crowned brimmed hat in black but even at the mission they cost $90. She buys herself a new dress 'For inma, clean clothes for inma', navy blue with a print of big red and yellow flowers. She finds a little red and gold fancy paper bag in Kylie's toy box which she takes 'shopping bag'. During 1997, the Emabella Store, stopped selling clothes whilst operating, with many difficulties, from a shed whilst the new purpose built-store stood empty, having failed to fulfill certain South Australian health and safety requirements. During this time an independent store run by the same non-Aboriginal family who run the Kulgera Roadhouse on the Stuart Highway, opened at Balfour Well, 15 minutes drive from Emabella. This, like Mulga Park to the north stocked a large range of goods including clothes, shoes, T.Vs, videos and video tapes. Since the new Emabella Store opened, with a take away food section, a second hand clothes area has opened too (1999). 237

She also buys 2 blankets; one pink, the other turquoise and cream checks, and a big pillow, because the house is cold and there is no fire inside. This shopping trip to Alice showed what different spaces Aboriginal and nonAboriginal people inhabit within the town. 29 Dora hated going into one of the two central shopping arcades and I had never been to or heard of the Mission Block shop on Gap Road.

Within the first few months of my living in the homelands, both of the women who were initially my 'sponsors' (one had signed my residency permit) bought me dresses. This may have been motivated by my, in their terms, unsuitable clothing, trousers and men's shirts, but these presents were also part of building our social connection with one another. 'Ngapartji ngapartji' reciprocity, is always a governing principle. If you 'borrow,' or are offered ,another persons clothing you are expected, in order to maintain care for that person, to return the favour. If someone likes an item of your clothing and expresses this, the garment can then and there be swapped, sold, given or 'lent', depending on the relationship and the state of that relationship, between those concerned. The verb 'mukarininyi' means both liking and wanting.

Dora also made me a batik T shirt which was signed with her name on the front. Field notes lnawintji admires my Dora T-shirt and later traces the pattern down my spine with her fingers. lnkatjili is hanging about too in pink shorts and a rainbow tie-dye shirt. N. comes in later and ignores me so pointedly that lnawintji laughs. This moodiness due to either my having given mingkulpa to Dora and not N. last night or wearing Dora's T-shirt or both. Women do give clothing and blankets to their kin as 'presents,' but also 'work' for clothes by dancing in (tjukurpa) inma. From the comments women made, it seemed that they enabled the dancing to be strong. The payment is made by the nguraritja to the dancers. During these 'Law' camps clothing is passed round at an accelerated pace. Field notes; Gifts After the inma ended on Friday am, some women went back to the inma ground

to get clothes and blankets. I. came back with red shorts and lime/yellow t shirt for her grandson and a pink/mauve flowered dress for herself both of which sets That is to say, Aboriginal people in Alice Springs occupy peripheral spaces at the edge of town, as has been historically designated (cf Rowse 1998) and also the creek bed. it is in these out of town areas that retail outlets dedicated to Aboriginal shoppers are situated.

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were worn immediately. This dress she wore all the next week until, as happens to all clothes here, the colours were more or less obliterated by the stain of orange sand. She also got a new black leather handbag 'from my auntie' Field notes Women's inma camp August 1998 Clothes get passed round, the same garment worn by many different women. Panjiti has a long skirt she was clearly fond of and stopped another woman using it to wrap her child in. She wore this skirt only on Sunday, I think she did dance in it once, but was striding around the inma ground being queenly, and giving orders wearing it. On Monday, after the camp had finished, I saw her wearing it at Umuwa. Orange white and black vertical stripes with a print in these colours contrasting over the top. M. changed clothes about 3 times a day especially top half but did not dance. S's niece was trying on a very bright blue dress with white flowers, yellow centres but did not wear it. Y wore a clean mauve pink green dress for a short time on Sunday but then seemed to return it to someone else. L. only, kept the same clothes on - a flamingo pink and grey checked shirt over yellow/ mauve dress She told me her husband had burnt all her clothes and swag. Although at the very end when we were all packing (people leave within 15 mins of the inma finishing) there were cries of blankets! but as far as I could see none exchanged. Y and S's niece danced a lot and Nura a fair amount and all 3 did seem to acquire new clothes. Clothing routinely circulates round women and girls and children of both sexes in a family. For example; Field notes Sept 1999 I. is wearing the leopard print vest that L. (her sister) was wearing when I picked them up at Kulgera the other day. D. was wearing the hat that M. (her grand daughter) had on before D. came back —its black with red, purple and grey stripes Two or more dresses or skirts are often worn at once, one on top of the other during ninnga Iwiriter. Older women often wear several dresses on top of each other at any time of year, topped by long woollen cardigans. The underskirt's colours show as they move and are meant to be seen, a bright red under a dark blue dress for example. The layering of garments is, I suggest, a statement of their extensively developed exchange network and therefore also of the ritual contacts and power. Field notes April 1998. F8:7 The other very old lady in 4 dresses and a coat looked really like a corpse with her face daubed in ash. Her top layer dress was the same bright blue as M's with a striking white pattern over it. If wearing all, or most of one's clothes at once, is also a way of hanging onto them, and becoming a moving wardrobe, bagging clothes up is another. In the same way that I was asked to store things in my car to keep them out of circulation, to prevent their appropriation by others, I also stored bags of clothes. 239

These were being kept aside as presents for relatives living far away, whom the donor was planning to meet with soon. There is little scope for storage of clothing or blankets, and as described above, these are often purchased a new every cold season. But some women did reappear in the same winter garments a year later. Clothing that is not being worn is thus 'stored' on the ground in the yard of a house, left in cars, or drying on fences after washing.3° Field notes Women's camp, September 1997 A young ironwood tree on the east side of the ground had I bag of waka /spider mites in it and to this was added garments not in use to keep them free of tjilka/prickly burs. Wardrobe tree. V also showed me 'quick way' to dry clothes by hanging them on trees. The waka /spider mite bag was one of a few textile-like things that existed before contact. The spider mite or itchy grub is a kind of processionary caterpillar that cause considerable skin irritation if touched. Its nest is a spun bag /yuunpa, which was used as an artificial skin to cover and heal burns (fig. 39). Thus, 'yuunpatjunanyi' means to bundle up, as in mingkulpa wrapped in wipiya /emu feathers in the past. Clothes are often hung up on trees in the same way as the dangling waka nests or bundled, screwed-up into black refuse sacks or cheap red white and blue zipped bags. On camps, women sometimes bought clothes along in bags or suitcases or black refuse sacks. The inexpensive striped red, white and blue zip-up bags are a favourite for bringing clothes back from major sprees in Adelaide. Since these colours together are linked to lightning, with its ilbinji connections, this is another fortunate coincidence of mass produced goods almost made to measure for Aangu culture. More often though clothes, like swags and blankets are loose, piled and crumpled into the car (fig 25), and seem then to be potentially accessible to anyone who is part of the social group defined by the car.

3°

For some reason, Aboriginal housing is not supplied with washing lines, though on homelands people do rig these up. Washing is thus festooned on yard fences around communities. Washing machines are considered essential and are often left outside on homelands where a generator or long extension lead from the house powers them. Like cars, their life span is short. The idea of hand washing clothes, other than batiks, is generally considered unfeasible.

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Losing clothes and blankets Like cars, clothes become 'rubbishy'/raputji31 and then 'finished' or wiyaringanyu. Clothes, as the list, above, of discarded items on the homeland shows, are simply left on the ground when no longer needed and quite rapidly disappear into it. Items may be retrieved from the yard of a house, and washed and re-worn. In the road outside the gate of the homeland where we lived, the front of a pair of dust coloured trousers appeared and disappeared in the shifting sandy road surface according to the weather. Clothes are often discarded into the middle of the road, thrown from cars. People do remember about hygiene rules that they are assiduously taught by non-Aboriginals, but they leave dirty paper nappies around at camps, or throw them out of the car window; they do not burn them. The packaging of bought food stuffs is often treated in the same way. Clothes are disposed of at the death of close kin. A mother had no clothes, other than black or black and white ones, and no blankets after the death of her (biological) adult son. Some men do burn their spouse's clothing, including her blankets and swag (bed roll). This is regarded as a serious symbolic assault and one preparatory to an assault on her body. As well as denying her means of attracting others, other lovers perhaps, burning clothes, like losing them at the death of close kin, is also a curtailment of social links with others, or the potential for them.

Clothes become no longer efficacious, when they lose their walka or colour. Field notes, Puuku /digging for red river gum roots in the rain. Panjiti's turquoise dress 'tiritja wiyannganyi' / finished/spoilt dress, is soaked in brown wet sand up to her breasts. Says this regretfully, she likes the dress, the colour. .She has a floral one underneath.

31

Winifred Hilliard told me how she had tried many times to correct this terminology. For example, a dress with a stain on it, the woman wearer proclaimed to be 'raputji', despite Miss Hilliard's repeated explanation of it being 'dirty'. 241

Clothes that one sits in the desert sand in, become dulled and brown in the skirt, or trousers, whilst retaining brightness in the part of the body held upright. Field notes Mr. Brumby dug for a goanna He has the lime green T shirt on now almost colour obscured by orange dust. The sun along with washing, fades fabrics quickly. Women keep a faded dress for working in the bush, for honey anting or going for punu involving digging into the ground. Older women often temporarily discard the good top dress whilst digging. Field notes May 1997 Nura reappears lamenting as usual on the shortage of tja!a. She also has one maku. As before she has come out in her pink /violet /green flowered dress and taken it off to work in her underdress, a faded dirty pastel print. Such faded or earth stained clothes are worn as casual dress, an absence of communication when there is none to transmit.

Clothing and inma and ilbinji I Love magic The efficacy of pattern and colour is used directly to attract lovers, by both sexes. Ilbinji also involves singing over an item of clothing, rather than string as in the past (Berndt and Berndt 1941), to reel your intended lover in. White headbands are used in this context and sheets are sought from outsiders, to use for this (cf Berndt and Berndt ibid, Hamilton 1980a). Butterflies, for boys especially the multi-coloured butterflies, pinta-pinta are thought of as analogous to persons and their clothing, particularly to men's shirts. In the Honey ant men's love song, AnmatjaraiVvarlpiri, the messenger between the man and the desired woman, is a red bird; 'Red bird messenger Aroused a woman struck by magic They travelled on the woman aroused She followed a blue butterfly Looking out from a flower' (Dixon and Duwell 1990) The colour of the butterfly is substituted as required as it refers to the colour of shirt worn by the singer. The shirt is imbued with power which will lead the

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woman, following the butterfly, towards the wearer. She will be irresistibly attracted to him.

Shininess is thought of as tactile rather than just a visual quality, linked as it is to fat. Shiny clothing is thus doubly attractive. Field notes Sunday during preps for business. Y's niece pink sweater, redder skirt and green shiny sports shirt, told me she had a new man. He already has a kungka but ;kungka kura' (she's not a nice girl). It is not only the young who are interested in love magic and gorgeous clothing. I have mentioned old women, but old men too are given to looking flash. Shiny satin boxer shorts as the only clothing in camp, are also worn. Flash clothing, or the walka on them, can also attract undesirable attention. In this case, all the women were in a vulnerable emotional/spiritual state because of the inma they had been making. Field notes August 1998 It was a very dark moonless night and around 10pm Mrs. P. said half in English half in Pit that there was a man walking around out there, a really bad man and he could smell us and Anne was to take that jumper off and put on that (plain) brown one. The offending jumper was dark brown with a chest band of white with red diamonds on it' walkajara' said Mrs. P. Anne grizzled 'Ngayulu Nikiti' /l'm naked now, and L. reached into the swag we sat on - Nura's - and produced a plain white sweat shirt which she put on. A whole car load of 'young girls' from ( ) arrived about then, someone with a round the body stripey jumper and was told to take this off but the alert seemed to be over.

Conclusion I have shown that clothing has accumulated value in contemporary Aangu culture and suggested several reasons why this might have become so. A large part of that value, I have argued, lies in the colours and the walka /design of the fabric from which the clothes are made. This applies no less to blankets and tiinta. The colours of clothes that people choose to wear and the blankets and tarpaulins they use, provide a constant dynamic commentary on their own emotional state, what they are thinking (of) /kulini and their relation to others and to country. I am not sufficiently encultured into Aangu society to understand fully this non-verbal communication and its multiple nuances. I cannot make this imagery transparent for you the reader, even if I wanted to. I do not know how 243

everyone at any gathering is related to everyone else, nor what their Dreaming is or what country they belong to, all of which would make the colours people wear more salient. However there is no doubt that it is going on.

That a colour was not a part of the indigenous artefactual system does not prevent it from becoming vital in new social contexts, as I have shown with blue (contra Comaroff 1996). As with cars, clothes also resolve certain difficulties that were present before their use. They allow more effective and complex communication of events and the emotional response of those caught up in them. As at openings, the colours of clothing helps the right spiritual consequences to evolve from the ceremony. Like Thomas (1999) I argue that things actively constitute these new social contexts, in this case particularly, the incorporation of evangelising Aboriginal Christianity into an existing religious system. My ethnographic data shows though, as delineated above, that for Anangu, colours operate almost independently of the things of which they are a material aspect. This is effective as a means of communication because of the use of culturally learnt analogies. The materiality of the body is not a passive blank surface over which merely 'symbolic' clothing is used to articulate identity, or mediate social relations (McNay 1999;98). Instead clothing is embodied practice, not just in the obvious sense, but in its colour, and tactility, as mutually constituting both the wearer and her world. Wearing certain colours of clothes makes a difference to events, can make things go right or go (the) 'wrong way'. Colours are social agents.

The connectivity between things is through their colour. Human bodies become coloured things through clothing, as well as body painting. Cars, I have argued, are a special category of thing, because of their mobility, and are conceived of as like a prosthesis of the body. Furthermore the colours of things, of people, cars, land (and food), are always changing, are always a part of a series of transformations. People (and Ancestors) change as they move along, not only modified by the potency of the country, but by being a coloured, clothed object themselves, in constant dynamic contrast to what is around them, as in the quote from Gage in Section One. As Strathem, discussing imagery in the Pacific has written;

244

'A succession of forms is a succession of displacements, each a substitute for what has gone previously and thus in a sense containing it, as it contains the effect it will have on the witnesses' (Strathern 1990 ;29). In Yankunytjatjara/ Pitjantjatjara culture, there may be a succession of forms, displacing one another, as I will discuss next in Section 4, but there are crucially colours, which do the same, displacing one another in a series. Gell suggests; 'Rather than think of formal analysis as an adjunct to semiotics, it is more helpful to imagine it as 'morphology' applied to visual objects 32. The aim is to derive, by the comparison of related forms, a series of transformations through which given artworks or artefacts can be converted into other one. . .The purpose of formal analysis is to identify axes of coherence, . . Once these axes of stylistic coherence have been identified, it then becomes possible to understand the cognitive significance of a cultural 'style' in rendering features of the culture cognitively salient' (1998;167). Gell goes on to suggest pattern and the notion of contrast to explain the dynamic relationality between persons and objects. The connection, he says, is in the least difference between translations of pattern in Marquesan art works and the relation between Marquesans themselves. 'Art works are like social agents, in that they are the outcome of social initiatives, which reflect a specific, socially inculcated sensibility'(ibid;220). For Aangu, as well as being conceived as a series, colours are also contrasted to one another. The difference between them, and their relationship to one another, is crucial in mediating the relationship between things and persons, or persons as things. If we substitute colour for pattern in Gell's argument, we might then explain more about that dynamic relationality.

The notion of difference and least difference between colours, effecting their emotional, spatial and luminous aspects, is one I pursue further in the next section.

32

would of course, challenge here the hegemony of vision in Gell's analysis.

245



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Fig 50: Pastel drawing by Ernabella schoolchild, probably a boy's, early 1950's. 251

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Fig 51: Stanley, boy aged c. 14. Black and white photocopy of drawings in coloured pencil on the rear of a letter to Mary Baird, June 1951. 252

Fig 52: Watulya (or her younger sister Nyukana) early 1960s (?), Ernabellaku Walka, gouache on card, 8 x 10 inches. 253

Fig 53: Patjiparan; Ernabellaku Walka, published in Hilliard 1968. 254

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Section Four Walka; The Tactility of Colour

Introduction I now want to examine the role of colour in the deliberate mark making, called in Pitjantjatjara 'walka', which are made on, or in, any medium. This leads me specifically to the Ernabella Walka, created by children and young women, apparently since the establishment of Ernabella as a permanent watering place, ration depot, Mission and settlement; that is, since the mid-1930's. The church in Emabella is hung with large Ernabella Walka, and rainwater tanks in the community are painted, section by section, with brightly coloured Walka (fig 60). Aangu say how important it is to keep the Walka going, and it has become emblematic of Ernabella as a community1 . The Ernabella Walka has become a currency familiar to all Western Desert peoples. Teachers in remote community schools apparently report that children produce the Ernabella Walka spontaneously when given free rein in their art making (Johnson 1997;89).

How do Walka articulate the rapid historical changes in the material aspect of Aangu culture and society during the last 60 years, and the incorporation of Christianity into their spiritual life? These changes have brought the possibility of creating and accessing many more colours as pigments, as well as in the other things that have been the subject of the previous sections of this thesis; cars and clothing. I have shown that sets of colours are almost independent of the thing of which they are a part because they are understood as referring to the continuous flux of the land /body. The Ernabella Walka are multi-coloured, they '...were strikingly bright from the beginning' (Hilliard 1968). Winifred Hilliard2 points out that all the colours used with such flair by the painters were already familiar to them in the land and 'the riot of colour from miles and mites of wild flowers' (1968;175).

1

Fregon artists also took the Walka there when the settlement was established as an outpost of Ernabella in 1961 and here it has been developed into a recognisable Fregon style. 2 Deaconess Winifred Hilliard (Miss Hilliard) was craft adviser in the Emabella craft room, now art centre, from 1954-1986. The first 'Craft Room Supervisor' was Mrs. Mary Bennett (Miss Baird) from 1949-51 and 1953-54. I am indebted to both of them for information about the craft room in its early days. I am also indebted to Jenni Dudley, art-coordinator, for her insights.

262

In theoretical analyses of Aboriginal art, the Ernabella Walka, 3 save for its tireless promotion by Winifred Hilliard, has had little space devoted to

it4,

despite its unique 50 year history. The creators of the Walka have had little to say about it except that it is not sacred, not a Dreaming story. The Ernabella Walka are non-discursive imagery.

By foregrounding the way colours have been used in walka from pre-Mission times, in the early children's drawings 5 dating from the establishment of the Mission, and the relation that Aangu conceive between colour and tactility especially, it is possible to construct the start of a different kind of analysis of practice and product. I will show that the Emabella Walka are conceived as four dimensional; they evoke movement in space and time, condensed into a single image through the use of a series of curvaceous, coloured parallel lines. They form the basis of mark making in the other media which Ernabella artists have made their own; rug making, batik and printmaking. It is for batik that Ernabella has become famous. Younger artists began by using the Walka in batik this has remained the case, though an individual's oeuvre often evolves into something else again. Through the examination of practices associated with making Walka, the manifold sensory modalities of colour become apparent.

The following text is translated from a tape made in Pitjantjatjara as part of preparations for the 50th anniversary show, a retrospective of Ernabella art 6. It is aimed at me and at a non-Aboriginal audience and tells the story of the craft room and the different work in various media that has been produced mostly, but not entirely, by women. The repetition and rhythm of Nungalka's speech is not easily translatable:

I use capital letter to distinguish the Ernabellaku Walka from other Walka ' Winifred Hifliard published extensively on the Walka cf 1968,1998, Eikelcamp recentlyl998, 1999 and Partos 1998 in the catalogue for Emabella arts 5O anniversary show. The CP Mountford Collection, Nicholl collection and Wallace Collection in the State Library of South Australia; N. Tindale Collection and Dug*d Collection in the South Australia Museum; Ara Intija Archival project in Adelaide; Winifred Hilliard Collection and in Enid Bowden Collection in 1ational Museum, Canberra ; Emabella Arts Collection; private collections of Emabella ex-staff.; collections in Museum of Victoria 6 At Tandanya, Adelaide August 1998. I curated this show together with the Emabella artists. Another show 'Raiki Wara' (Pitjantjatjara for 'long rags") ran partly concurrently at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. This included batiks from Emabella and Fregon as part of a large exhibition of textile art by indigenous Australians 263

'My name is Nungalka. I want to tell you about the work we did long ago. In school we children used to draw with chalk. We spent lots of time drawing like this in school and having learnt from school we drew the things we thought up, our own Walka . We used to draw on the ground like this and this and then we'd take these Walka to school and draw them there. Then when we'd finished school for the day after dinner (mid-day meal) we'd go to the craftroom and there we would learn craft work. I spun wool. When we'd spun the wool we would wash it in hot water with soap powder. Then we would dye it. We'd dye the white wool red black green and purple* these were the colours we dyed the wool and we'd make floor rugs from that wool. We would wind wool into balls working in pairs. Then we would try our hand at hooking floor rugs. We would practice and practice and learn how to do it well. A white woman taught us how to use the hook, putting it through the opening, grabbing the wool to push it through and then pulling it out again. That's how we learnt from this one white woman teaching us. At first we couldn't grasp it but by watching for a long time we learnt how to do it and did it ourselves. Then we drew our own Walka, our own ideas. We would hook the rugs according to the Walka we had drawn. When we ran out of wool we'd wash some more wool and then sit down and work on the rugs again with the new wool. Other women would wash the wool and then weave it. They wove a number of different items, scarves, blankets for children and lengths of woven material. So, as they were weaving we worked on the floor rugs producing many. Then we were taught how to sew up moccasins. We were shown step by step how to do it. We practiced a lot and learnt how to do it and so we began producing many moccasins. Then in more recent times Miss Hilliard went to a far away place and learnt the art of tjanting (batik). They (3 women) brought it back to Emabella and we learnt from them, and tried it out and became very adept at the whole process of producing batik scarves, material and things. Now we are able to execute the whole process with a great deal of skill We also know how to carve wood, we paint Walka on canvas and do many other types of art and craft. And we sell our various works. We make T shirts and sell them and many other things and we find white people love our work and buy it. And so now we produce many different things - we've learnt to do lots of different things, for example at the moment I'm making tjulpuku ngura / birds nests'. August 1998, from a tape. Translated from Pitjantjatjara by Paul Ekhert (terms marked (*) spoken as English). 'Painting a Walka is telling a story in your mind. Old ladies don't do it only young girls and younger women. They didn't do it in the old days.' (Nyukana Baker in Elkelcamp 1999;92 )•7 We didn't draw the Ernabella design in the sand before white men came but animal tracks and milpatjunanyi'. (Alison Curley and Kunmanara Brumby in Elkelcamp; 1999). '....Whitefella didn't grab our hand and make us draw - its in our minds. I don't know the first artist learnt it - they never told us' (ibid;86). 'Maybe the Emabella design is really a woman's design' (ibid;74). Makinti Minutjukur Nyukana (now Daisy) Baker is the current mayatja I chair woman of Emabella Arts Inc. She has worked in the 'craftroom' continuously since she was a girl in the 1950s and is a professional artist. 264

Anangu are always alert to similitude in all sorts of objects and sensation. Yet any resemblance to another thing in an Emabella Walka are, and has always been, flatly denied. White Mission staff often remarked .to the artists on the resemblances they saw in the Walka to butterflies, lions, camels, fires, witchetty grubs, flowers etc. but were unsuccessful in having their similes corroborated8.

Ernabella art did not fulfill any of the conservative criteria for authenticity as 'primitive' art (Morphy 1996). That is, the art was not uncontaminated by contact. It was made expressly to sell; materials, but especially colours, used were imported and deemed inauthentic.9 The same could be said of much Western Desert painting begun two decades later by men at Papunya and now far better known, but unlike these, the Walka had no 'traditional' religious content. It has remained the enigma that its creators seem to have wished it to be. It is not though my attention to analyse the reception of the Walka in the art market, but to dwell on the perceptions and intentions of the makers and their practice.

Practice Walka, frequently glossed in English as 'design', includes any deliberate mark making. This could be drawing using ones hand in the sand, rock paintings10, painting on human bodies for ceremonial purposes, the skin markings of animals and plumage of birds, road signs, or writing of any kind, in printed books or by hand. Walka are also used to designate a particular site on a dreaming track. Tracks on the ground are generally not walka except in special 8

Eg W Hilliard, 1968:174) Nancy Sheppard pers comm. Visiting Emabella in 1957 his second time, the anthropologist Norman Tindale, exhibiting Blaxandalls' 'cultural eye' and articulating criticisms made by others through the years, wrote: 25th May 1957;' Was much impressed by the craft work done under Miss Winifred Hilliard. The girls paint designs with bright inks in several colours; selected ones are transformed into woollen rugs etc. Scarves are woven in tartan and other designs in wool, mostly in fine sheep's wool but some of rabbit fur dyed'. My criticism would be the harsh aniline dyes used. Their designs go best with earth colours. I suggested using dyes from native roots etc as among the Navaho Indians. Suggested that greater use of such colours might lead to tapping a high price market not attracted by garish colours'. N. Tiridale unpublished A Journal of visit to the North West of South Australia April to May 1957 10

Other than the Pull number 3 described earlier I was shown no rock painting during my fieldwork. 265

cases which, with regard to animals, seem always to belong to the secret sacred realm. But the pattern on car tyres and the trace these leave in the earth are walka as are those made by peoples' shoe soles in the same way. The Ernabellaku Walka is a specific form evolved since the school began in 1940 and then the Craft Room a little later in 1948.

Walka seems similar to the Yolgnu of Arnhem Land 'miny'tji'; '...as well as the bodily gestures of the painter applying paint 'miny'tji' can be used adjectivally to describe anything that appears colourful, such as the wings of a butterfly or a lump of yellow ochre used as a pigment. Mint'tji can also refer.... to any regularly occurring pattern or design whether it is natural or cultural in origin' (Morphy 1989;24). Ochres and pigments are not considered Walka but otherwise the two seem similar in that they both refer to consequential action. Making the mark or writing is Walkatjunanyi' attaching the verb to put, thus, 'putting down' the Walka (Goddard 1996).

There are two aspects to the practice of Walkatjunanyi that are the most important to Anangu; firstly contrast and secondly tactility, and the two are linked in the construction of patterned surfaces as Walka on paper, skin, fabric, canvas.

The neglect of colour Colour has been neglected in literature concerning Western Desert art, and indeed in Australian indigenous art generally, receiving secondary or no consideration. In the anthropology of art, the elucidation of Western Desert mark-making practices has been constrained by Nancy Munn's highly influential 'Walbiri Iconography'. Munn more or less ignores colour when noting body paintings. She says for example that the relation between yawalyu designs (painted on the bodies of Waripiri women) and ordinary story telling in the sand do not have critical structural differences between them; 'They are both elaborations of the same graphic code' (1973; 113, my emphasis). The question which Munn does not address, as colour presumably is one such an elaboration, is; what work then are the colours used in body painting 266

accomplishing in terms of creating, evoking, transmitting and remembering knowledge?

Concentration on 'graphic symbols' leaves the colours of things unattached, and makes redundant a whole aspect of the materiality of pigment and the bodily, spatial and social experiences of the artist, and of those with whom the art work is aiming to communicate. For example, recent admirable analyses of Western Desert acrylic painting ignores the multi-coloured aspect of the canvases under scrutiny (Dussart, 1999; Myers 1999) as though their very surface is too beguiling. We are told that what 'lies behind' the surface of the graphics is more important (Dussart ibid). The colours are invisible in the text but very clearly there in the coloured photographs accompanying it. 11An exception to this is Morphy's important essay 'From Dull to Brilliant' (1989).

In her numerous publications on Ernabella art, Hilliard stated that the Walka was derived from sand drawing practiced by girls and women and from a specific form of sand story telling called milpatjunanyi /puthng down the stick. Recently (1998) she discounted this connection. Milpa is a bent stick, or wire, held in one hand and tapped rhythmically on the earth whilst drawing scenes, which are successively erased with the other hand. These are a complimentary aspect of verbal narrative. As I mentioned in Section Two, gum leaves are sometimes used to represent people. As Alison Curley, quoted above, says this was a story-telling game played before contact with settler culture.

Milpatjunanyi is played by women elsewhere in Central Desert cultures and cannot account for the form of the Ernabella Walka, but only something of the practice (Watson, 1999 on Balgo; Eikelcamp, 1999). Sand drawings are sequential, one erased before another is drawn on the same patch of ground, one event succeeds another on the 'canvas' of sand, like a movie (Munn 1973 62-3). I am thinking here also of the invisibility of the painted white wall in the architectural criticism, 'the eyes that do not see', of the seminal modernist architect Le Corbusier, examined by Mark Wigley (1995). Wigley highlights the convolutions that critics went through in order to embed the notion of the painted white wall of Corbusier's influential early oeuvre as transcending fashion, as 'functional' without admitting to its skin thin materiality, where a metaphor of depth was more 267

That is, these drawings are meant to be four-dimensional; they encompass space (place

of

the action) and time. One remembers, hears, sees what comes

before to understand where we are 'now' in the story. In milpatjunanyi the rhythmic tapping by the narrator with the wire or stick against the ground, is like the base line; it represents going along, moving through, like the thump

of

the

kangaroo's tail as the animal bounces through the bush.

Footprints made in sand drawing, '...evoke a sense of passage, of motion and mobility connected with bodily movement although they themselves, like the features of the country, are static" (Munn, 1973:137-8). As I have argued, the surface

of

features

of

the country are not static

temporally, though they are fixed in space, but pass through a series of transformations, particularly conceived by Aarigu as colour transformations.

Access to new media, crayons and pastels, in hues previously unavailable were, over a quite short period, I propose, understood as a means to represent this four dimensional space with more clarity. I will substantiate this claim below using data collected from the early drawings. First though I want to return to tactility and contrast.

Tactility as contrast Munn did not ignore tactility. Drawing in the earth is very tactile, as Watson has

recently highlighted, and the rills and peaks creating light and shade that show up well in photographs documenting them; maru and pi!anpa

I

tjintu and wiltja;

dark and light, sun and shade (Watson 1999). That sand drawings are conceived as intrinsically contrasting light and shade was illustrated for me, when, drawing a tadpole in the sand (as we sat beside a water hole), Mayningka, 'shaded in', that is scribbled with her finger inside the tadpole outline to show it as dark. Field notes Jan 31M 1998 At the bottom of the water holes are scores of black tadpoles. M. draws them in the sand, though she scribbles inside the outline to indicate blackness.

ethical. In order to do this, they simply never commented on it at all, assuming its presence as a given. 268

In Nungalka's narrative above, Ernabella Walka were developed through drawings made by children in the sand and then in school on blackboards with (white) chalk. These quickly became multi-coloured too, with the introduction of new media, pastels and crayons in school and water-based paints in the craft room. In recent years Emabella Walka have been produced by women artists in other media, print making for example, which may not be multi-coloured or even brightly coloured but always have an element of contrast. We have not been looking in the right way, 12 by concentrating on 'graphics' as just visual marks and then separating graphics from colour, and from colour as contrast, as our own cultural sets have taught us to do. For Aangu there is no categorical difference.13

Tactility as knowledge

Field notes 1997 In the morning P. took out of her wallet a Polaroid of a lovely young woman with her own features and with a big snake draped round her shoulders. She had already told me that her granddaughter was 'piranpa', white. Her white father is an old man tjilpi pensioner -ngaujara- poor thing. This granddaughter works in a shop somewhere near Adelaide and the purples, yellow, pinks of the wallet in which her photo was contained had been a present from there. The snake was a kuniya. She showed the photo to an old man who came and sat with us and he looked tenderly at it and traced his thumb over the girl's face. I often saw Aangu touching what others might consider 'flat' images like this. In photographs of the dead, as well as of the living, the image of the absent face is lovingly touched 14. Touching /'pampunyi' is a way of gaining knowledge about images as well as other things since a huge amount of daily practice is

concrete, and is constituted by tactile gestures. The spinning and grinding /rungkai, pounding /atuni and digging /tjawai which form the basis of material processing by women, are employed in culturally prescribed ways, that is as

12

In fact what might seem contrary evidence to this argument is the short-lived craft room practice introduced by Winifred Hilliard of making Walka in relief out of sheet metal. This did not 'catch on'. Too hard to work ( the material) 13 Aangu were of course a non-literate society before the advent of the mission school in 1940 and writing continues to be of lesser importance than other modes of communication in the transmission and storage of knowledge. 14 Although photographs of the dead are generally considered by their relatives to be taboo in public contexts, they are sought after by relatives of the deceased, as the demand for old photographs from the Aa Irititja Archival project testifies. Several women told me that they kept photographs of their deceased parents.

269

gestures. I was always being corrected in the right way to do things. This is becoming 'ninti' /knowing. When I returned to Emabella in 1999, people I knew well kept touching my face, 'nyuntu kanpijara', you're fatter, and hair, 'mangka pulka.' which had grown, as if to feel the difference in me. 15 Novel things are touched, like the shrink wrapped fish that the Ernabella store briefly stocked, of which the cashier always touched the whole body as she put it through the check out. 16 The late Jacky Tjupuru, remembering his first terrifying encounter with a motorcar in about 1930, describes first becoming aware of a strange noise before his sight of the car. He recognised the white man driving, accompanied by other Aboriginal people; 'They were touching it knowingly (kaya nintingku pampuningi). And I was ignorant. Tommy also knew but I looked at it in ignorance (palu ngayulu ngurpangka nyangutta)' (Edwards 1994; 154-155).

Touching /pampunyi is here clearly knowledge, whilst Jacky Tjupuru could only look on in ignorance.

Touch as a means of accessing Ancestral power is a widespread practice in Central Desert cultures. The incised sacred boards, that men rub against their bodies kept wrapped in fur string, away from not only the gaze, but the skin too (e.g. Meggitt on the Warlpiri 1964). There is also rubbing of so-called 'increase' stones in order to engender certain consequences, getting pregnant for example (Mountford 1940;159). Dancing, and the resultant marks made with feet in the sand is all about touch. In women's ceremony, the ritual paraphernalia, referred to as 'tools' in English by women, is touched by all those present before the inma begins. Late arrivals must also do this, in fact sometimes it seemed that those who did not see the tools put in their place had to touch them. These tools are said to transmit healing properties and are used in this way in women's healing rites. In inma women sit touching, overlapping their bodies for the same reason. After days of bush seclusion making inma, women become empowered through Ancestral agency. At this time their hands can transmits this power to others. 15

Long hair of course has many potentialities for Aangu. See also Mountford 1940 voll;54 notes that children want to touch his wife Johnnie's long gold hair all the time. 'Aboriginal women's hair is short and the Mission women's 'bobbed".

270

Field notes August 1998 At Fregon they directed me to the store and I. who lives in Fregon shouted over to her two teenage sons, shouted into the car for 'buta' and smeared Meadowlea margarine all over her sons' faces and exposed arms. Pika said D. to me, 2 sons 2 daughters. Sick. I was imparting the power she had gained from the inma through her hands to her son. At a large gathering of women from all over Central Australia a few weeks earlier, all the cars (mostly white Toyota landcruisers) had been marked with their red ochred handprints by the women at the close of the inma. 17 This seems to suggest that fat and redness both transmit Ancestral power through tactility and vision. This seems similar to Donald Thomson's elucidation of 'marr' in Arnhem Land, where one of the terms for fat is applied to anything 'rich', including brilliant red feathers (Thomson 1975:10).

As I have shown, Aangu revel in the colours now available to them in imported goods; foods, cars, clothes, packaging. These new school and craft room media were quickly used for ritual too. I want to emphasise throughout that practises and media that women in the craft room (now called 'Art Centre' by outsiders, but not by Aangu) have made their own, are all rooted in pre-Mission practises or materials.

Walka in inma I want now to dwell on mark making and its efficacy as imagery in different contexts; painted on the skin of the body and material items during sacred inma. I do not attempt to analyse the specific meanings of walka in these contexts, which are secret.

All tjukurpa sites have their Walka. Women anoint their ritual 'tools', as they term that paraphernalia in English, the kuturu /fighting club with a set of coloured marks that denote the particular ngura on a dreaming track, which the inma will be concerned with. It is not necessary to also be at that ngura /site to produce that inma. These Walka are always of at least two, usually three different colours and are from the four 'original' Aboriginal colours red, yellow, 16

Aangu do not like to eat fish and it is in any case rarely available to them, because of fear that a bone will block their throat, an important emotional area of the body (see SectionTwo).

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white, black, derived from various substances, usually ochres or ash and charcoal. The marks are applied using fingers These are another aspect of the mnemonic for the inma, grounding and orientating it in space, in a particular ngura where the Ancestral action sung in the inma took place in the minds of those present. Field notes The gum trees either side of the Kenmore road where the creek crosses it have had red and yellow plastic ribbons tied around them 'puflu Walkajara kutjara'. These 'sign posts' made from plastic strips appeared, and then disappeared, from time to time. A piece of white board on a stick had been painted over with black paint and a white arrow over painted on that, to indicate a site. As long 'lines' of colour, they correlate with the coloured linearity of the Ernabella Walka. Field notes women's inma preparations products of fire Then the club is oiled. You got any buta? I had almond oil, clearing out my kitchen What's this- mai? We all oiled our skin, women taking their tops off as usual oiling breasts and back. Tjunpa munu purku (ash and charcoal) instructed N. to D. kami to kami. 0 grinds up the ash from the fire with the 2 stones that are part of the business 'tools'. The big round grinder, about 5 inches diameter had a cut face which showed white. It's kanti white quartz. The ash mixed with the almond oil, applied in ( ) rings with D's index finger, are putty coloured, but the charcoal is very black. Kura /bad says D., maru, pianpa wiya (dark not light' i.e. of the white ash). On this occasion the contrast between the ash and the charcoal was kura /bad because the ash was not white enough (as in white ash for mingkulpa). White feathers which become stained with red ochre through use are also regarded as ineffectual.

The introduction of new colours as pigment in novel media were taken up for body painting too. The inma tools includes a small grinding stone (see also Hamilton 1980b;88) and pastels have been ground up, mixed with fat or oil and used as body paint. It became known that my drawing pastels were always in the Toyota and the white and reds and bright pinks were used. These were enthusiastically ground up and mixed with fat or oil by women for body painting in ilbinji and the results pronounced 'rikina', flash (from 'I reckon' Goddard 1996). 17

Su Daigleish pers comm. Two women from the Lands were present at this gathering

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There are photographs in existence of young boys being painted up in pastel colours - pinks and turquoises - for a ceremony associated with initiation now discontinued but which Mountford recorded in text and photographs in 1940. At that date the colours used were conventional Aboriginal ones Acrylic paints are often used for body painting at significant gatherings, when a large amount of pigment is required. Here, blue is used as a body paint too.

The ceremony that concludes the mortuary rites, the opening or atarni, is said to open the tjukurpa 'roads' of the deceased person in order to pass on the rights these roads which have been closed /pati since the death. Women make holes through ininti seeds (the 'bean tree', Erythrina vespertilio) holes with wire heated in the fire, to string them as necklaces, term this practice 'alarni'. I heard the same term used casually during inma, of women's body paintings, in which pigment in the middle of closed figures, concentric circles say, did not fill the centre, and bare skin was left exposed. Filling in the whole figure is pati /'closed'.

The Walka is often overridden by the contrast of colours; this depends on the context of looking. For example, at a women's secret inma in the bush during which a wiltja was constructed as part of the ceremony, instead of a dark green or blue tarp, a blanket was used to cover the framework. This was because the colours of this blanket were the (general, that is, not site specific) colours of the Dreaming Ancestor. Similarly, with the secondhand T-shirts that women wear, slogans in English are not valued as (another's) language carrying meaning, despite the fact that most Aangu can read English, but as Walka worn because of the colour contrast; yellow lettering on bright green; fluorescent pink on black for example.

Making the Ernabellaku Walka I want now to recount some of the history of Ernabella for the purpose of tracing the development of the sets of colours created after access to the new colours of media. In starting to unravel the unique circumstances of the Emabella Mission, the annexing of Yankunytjatjara country by the eastward travelling 273

Pitjantjatjara, which underlies much of today's politicking around Ernabella, something of the meaning in the enigmatic image of the Walka becomes apparent. This image is only enigmatic to outsiders; for Aangu who are encultured to understand it, it is obvious (Forge 1979).

In 1940 a school was set up in Emabella. The first teacher was interested in music and language. The children taught him Pitjantjatjara as he taught them. This was part of Dr. Duguid's vision for an enlightened Mission; all staff would learn the native language. School lessons were thus (but no longer are) conducted in Pitjantjatjara. The teacher, famously and mistakenly, asked the children to draw 'kura kura' which means 'rather badly' instead of 'kutjupa kutjupa' /this and that, '....but at the very beginning I gave them the materials and said kura kura Walkajura' 18 . These first drawings do not exist, probably because they were made with chalk on blackboards. A few months after the school opened the anthropologist Charles Mountlord stayed in Ernabella. Encouraged by Herbert Reed and others to 'investigate native art' 19 Mountford brought with him quantities of paper and sets of pastels, ten colours per box, similar to those pastels that the Ernabella teacher had for school use. 2 ° It remains a mystery why the Mountford collection drawings are so different from the school drawings. The latter were not figurative whereas those made for Mountiord are all of things; trees, animals, fires cars etc. 21 The teachet opinion is that Mouniford did ask the children to draw something. Interviewed in 1992, the teacher remarked of his pupils, 'I can say they were truly primitive and untouched... had never seen a coloured picture before, little girls especially were always drawing in the sand'22.

18

Trudinger quoted in text of a lecture given by Winifred Hilliard in Osaka, Japan, National Museum of Ethnology 10/9/83; p6. 19 Adelaide Advertiser 22 4 40. 20 Ron Trudinger pers comm 1997. 21 These two styles of drawing by children continued, for example flg.51 on the back of a letter from the child Stanley to Miss Baird in 1951. From the sample of drawings I saw more boys than girls continued the figurative style. With the maturing of the Emabellaku Walka style in the 1950s craftroom, by some time in the 1960s school children's drawings became more figurative again. The historical changes in the school children's drawings could be the subject of a thesis itself. I am concerned here primarily with the formative period 1940 to the mid I 950s. PY Media Video Ron Trudinger interviewed by Lucienne Fontenez in Ernabella 1992 as part of her research for 'Then and Now', and exhibition showing some of the early children's drawings alongside contemporary work from artists at Ernabella Arts. 274

The drawings made by children, as well as by adults, at Mountford's behest 23 in 1940 number about circa 350, all crayon on paper, a little smaller than Al size. There are also about 60 finger paintings by men women and children, sheets of white paper covered in one shade of bright coloured paint (24 blue,lO magenta, 11 brown, 8 orange brown, 2 red brown, I yellow, two red, I orange, I lime green)24 which the artists drew in with their fingers whilst the paint was wet. These, with their immediate tactile quality, are like sand drawings but also reminiscent of the marks made in contemporary Emabella batiks. There are a high proportion of these finger paintings in blue paint which is interesting in the light of the passion for blue that Aangu have now. 25 When I took reproductions of some finger paintings to Ernabella for clearance for inclusion in the show, the two women who viewed them remarked on the blue ones as being 'kala wiru' Ilovely colour. The magenta is also the colour of several different species of flowers which form bloom mats around Ernabella and a colour that is frequently used in Walka and clothing. Perhaps because this new medium was so like sand, most of the finger paintings represent the tracks of someone going along, malu, kipara (see fig. 57). The crayon drawings appear less rapidly made. The adult's drawings are in combinations of black, white, red and yellow only. The children's drawings are in many colours. Roughly a third to one half are annotated by Mountford or Sheard, his field assistant, according to the artist's verbal exegesis via a translator. Mountford's main interest in the drawings was as a means of eliciting 'stories' and what aspect of each an individual knew (Sheard 1964;16). Whether or not he was told by the artists exactly what they had in mind when they drew, or the right translation of this is a matter of conjecture. Some of these people were still alive in 1998 and had seen their drawings again, often with great emotion, at the time of the Then and Now show (Lucienne Fontenez pers corn). I knew one of these women but she was not interested in her childhood drawings and as mentioned below, many people did not want to be reminded of long ago by their own or others' juvenalia, ?erhaps for a second time within a few years. senior P. man together with a white male anthropologist had previously been through these drawings and all of Mountford's fieldwork records rather haphazardly to try to have aspects of mens' sacred life that he recorded, hidden from public scrutiny. I am therefore not sure if I saw all the drawings. 25 Neither Mountford nor Sheard make mention of the choice of coloured sheets by Anangu, only ' a layer of paste and pigment is spread over the surface of a sheet of white paper and the children and men asked to make marks. Once the artists became used to it they produced some excellent sheets..'( C.P. Mountford unpublished Journal 1940 volume 3;55) . From Sheard's journal it seems that the finger paintings were done in a rush at the end of their field trip, on 275

From the aspect of what was to develop in Ernabella, the children's pastel drawings are the most interesting. They had been using the new media in school for two months and their drawings are more adventurous than their parents'. 26 The children who made the drawings were the first class of the new school and a range of ages 27 . Taken as a body of work all the drawings and finger paintings are immensely rich on may levels not least as a poignant record of life for Anangu then.

The new media presented a challenge to the representation of movement shown in sand drawing by successive 'scenes' erased one after another on the same patch of ground. Thus on paper, the same figure is often repeated twice or many times to show that it is going along or else tracks simply cascade across the whole sheet. Especially in the children's drawings, both boy's and girl's, a figure is outlined in one colour and infilled in another in the manner of rock art figures. Several of the boys, Tjamiwa and Neiardi for example, arranged figures in floating groups, again like rock art, across the sheet of paper. That they were thinking of their drawings as being like rock art is indicated by Djandinya, also a boy, who adds a dark brown crayon background to his figures which is labelled, in the artist's exegesis given to Mountford or Sheard, as 'rock surface' (fig 47).

Except in two cases, both red and by boys, there are always two colours minimum in every drawing, but most often three or more. The colours used show no particular pattern or consistency either in individual artist's oeuvre or in what is represented in what colour. Puu are red, blue, green, or purple in 4th returning to Emabella (Sheard 1964, Friday Oct 1940, p116) Ron Trudinger, whom I contacted, had no further information about this. There are also women's finger paintings. 26 Mountford notes nervously of his dwindling supplies 'The men seem particularly keen to make drawings but at present they are very simple, just camps, tracks of creatures .. or of their own kind.. (the men) just scribbling on the paper using an inordinate amount (?) of paper' (ibid June I 940;59). 27 List of children and their estimated ages in the school at Ernabella in 1940 (ibid;p55) girls Nanjindin hand a half; Njuwala 9; Diinimai 10; Nali 13; Amaninya 13; Lanaliginya 10; Kokinya 12; Ruby half caste 12;

boys Djandinya 13; llibilitjina 13; Njeiardi 13; Toby half caste 12; Tjamiwanya 13; Apina 12;Panpanpalanya 12; Biju inja 7; Njameinja 7; Windin-bnni 5-6; Tjamu-alinja 10; Winili-djina 11 ;Kanannja 11

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different drawings by different children. Rockholes are yellow, brown, pink, brown in the same way but are always outlined in another colour (Nail fig.48). Colours are generally laid next to one another. Nali overlays colours as does also the child who drew blue /red emu, an effect which makes them almost luminous. But this is unusual (fig.49).

I viewed about 130 of the total. The most common subjects in this random sample are: moons, rocks, waterholes, trees and bushes, (mulga and pine). The next most common are: sun, emu, kangaroo, perentie, snakes, wells, trees (fig and Quondong fruit trees); next; motor cars, euros Thill kangaroos, wanampi, windmills (two of the boys in the class are named Windilbrina /windlass), hands, creek; infrequent: figures on horses or camels, boomerangs, frogs, fires, smoke, persons.

in these drawings there is an absence of tracks represented. Change or movement is again indicated by multiples of the same figure and, in the case of the moon, drawn across the top of the page in a series showing all of its different forms. The drawings are often multi directional. It is difficult to see any sets of colours appearing frequently or even twice. It seems as though any figure can be any colour. Out of 130 viewed there were no great patterns of frequency of colour combinations: 39 drawings contained green, 35 red, 34 blue, 29 pink, 24 yellow, 20 white, to name a few of the colours. Red was the only colour to be used several times with the same pairing by different children: 6 red and blue drawings, 3 red and pink, 2 red and yellow. I could therefore make a statement commonly made by art advisers now about contemporary Aboriginal artists, to the 1ffect that 'people just use the colours that come to hand.' The point is though, how do people use those colours together? In the contrasting outlines similar to figurative rock art the children are representing transformation (as in the rock art). And transformation can be that of surface, of the skin. 'Then with his forefinger he painted in red on the cave wall a figure representing. • . (an Ancestor) When the fundamental design was completed, the artist, stripping some bark from a nearby tree and using it as a brush, outlined the figure in white pipeclay'. (Mountford 1962;87).

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Although there seem to be no drawings extant from the early 1940's, according to Trudinger28 painting with water based paints began a few years later. The works that appear in collections are from 1946 and are small, about 3 x 2 inch white cards with brightly coloured, very neatly painted, abstract figures by girls, often with multiple outlines that are the early Ernabella Walka. A note accompanying them reads: 'This is I think most interesting Ron! Tjantjintinya is the only one of the youngsters (except Nganjintjanja) who has attempted realistic drawing...'29 During this period, 1940, the children's drawings in school had become more and more stylised and looked down on the subject, although more figurative elevational drawings continue to be made as well (see fig 51 ;Stanley, car in elevation and a stylised multiple outline drawing). There are many school children's drawings in existence dating from the next few years 1947-1955.° In the figurative drawings there are hunting scenes, men clad in rancher gear hunting scenes and scenes showing rain, rainbows and flowers. Rain falling is always represented in white. Rainbows are always two or more parallel lines of contrasting colours, but which colour combination is not a constant.

This style of multiple coloured outlines rather than just one as in 1940, is certainly in place from 1946, maybe earlier. Some things are still recognisable, 'pretty flower', 'pinta pinta' /patterned butterflies, fruity, leafy things, windmills, cars, airplanes, and shapes that appear to me as perhaps plans of rocks. Field notes Novl3th 1997 Kunmanara's drawings He is ecstatic about seeing his drawings. Gets out his glasses sits on the floor. The first one is blue and white around a centre with orange grey mauve halos 'pinta pinta' snorts his wife derisively. Another 'aeroplane'. His drawings are marked as 1953 and 1955 there are about 17 of them. ngaltujara' he keeps saying 'ngayulu tjitji' then again 'ngaltujara' dear /poor thing he has tears in his eyes. He looked through them twice. In 40 years he and the drawings have been living 50 yards apart. P's drawings are not here. She came later he says from Warburton and he indicates her height with his hand his voice and gestures tender. She was in school here later on. He scans the list of names and corrects one I have as dead as still living, sees Nampuyu and wants to see hers - 2 drawings only a bit rougher than his and he laughs at them fondly. Said he Interviewed on video by Lucienne Fontanez. Note from Duguid to Trudinger referring to drawings of flowers now in the Charles Duguid collection South Australia Museum. 3° The data I use here was gathered sorting the collection of Ernabella Arts into individual artist's work. The art adviser was concerned to protect the copyright of the material and I did not make photographs of the drawings. 278

wanted to bring all his children and grandchildren in to see them, Ngayulu pukulpa. Then he repeated 'I am happy' in English to make sure I understood. I did not know Kunmanara well. He was one of the few people who wanted to see his childhood drawings. Most others were politely evasive and clearly did not want to be reminded of that time. Field notes 30TH July 1998 I asked ( ) again if she wanted to speak on the tape for the show. Again she said 'kuwaripa' not yet, soon, but then, putting her hand on my wrist, she said in Pitjantjatjara 'I'm not coming to Adelaide. Nyukana keeps asking me but I don't want to remember'. Only two others came to see their work. All three identified the subjects as Kunmanara did; drawings were something though composed of successive coloured outlines or sometimes with blocks of solid colour.

Boy's drawings often feature arrow shapes - probably spear heads - which girls do not. Reflections or bi-lateral symmetry are frequent (fig 50). Curvilinear shapes are predominant; more among the girls' work. In contrast to the 1940 drawings, colour sets are appearing both within an individual child's work and across the board. This is not a system of total coherence or consistency, but is too frequent to be co-incidental:

• Red

green

• blue Red I''Ji1I • blue green Red • greenI''liuIt Red • green orange black • Red black • Red black • blueI!liuI • Red purple green

A coloured line is sometimes over-dotted or given a hairy outline mostly in black. The order of the colours within these series of contrasts is not rigid.

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It seems then that during the first decade of drawing and painting by children in the introduced media, the novel pigments were systematised to represent the changing colours of the country. These sets of colours are those found in the way people choose clothing now, as I have shown, and are still used in the Ernabella Walka. These sets of colours are flexible in other words the order of colours and the adding and subtracting colours from the series, depends on the context. They are, to use a simile from music, like chords around which an individual builds a design. I am loathe to catalogue symbolic meanings and pin down 'meanings' like butterflies on a board. Meaning is derived from the context of a coloured outline among other coloured outlines. With the development of the Walka painted with highly saturated gouache by the girls who graduated to the craft room, the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. Red, blue and green (see Ernabella Walka of the mid -1 960s by Nyukana, Tjikalyi, by her sister Patjiparan and Angkuna fig 53 ) create a dazzling effect together. The colour triad for the rainbow, red, yellow, green creates luminosity.

The following is from the Wallaces, a couple who worked with Ernabella children in the 1960's: Every child started with a full box of pastels, which meant . . . that no child had a colour that every other child did not also have, yet immediately there began a swift swapping and lending until no child had the full compliment of colours.....The exchanging continued until. . .some boxes contained nothing but blues and whites, while others held brown and blacks. Red, from sheer popularity was worn right away. Yellow did not last much longer' (Wallace and Wallace, 1 968;39).31

Spinning and the craft room The Mission, which continued as a sheep station in the manner of the pastoral lease, provided work for the men but little for the women arriving from the west. With the intervention of Dr. Duguid, Mrs. M. M. Bennett of Kalgoolie, 'a skilled teacher of Aboriginal children (and) excellent craftswoman', visited Emabella in late 1948. Mrs. Bennett worked with four older women, learning from them their traditional spinning technique for human hair and animal fur, enabling them to 311 have not mentioned brown, which seems to be used, for example in the piti Dora made (fig 24), and in paints chosen for buildings, as a colour that is like the skin colour of Aangu. But 280

adapt this using lighter tension, for wool. She also brought with her two small looms and taught four younger women to weave and to scour and dye the yarn. Rug making, first using the Ernabella wool poked on burlap using old sugar bags, and then knotted through canvas, became the main items produced, until batik more or less superceded them in the 1970's. It was the intersection of Ernabella school children's drawings, developed by the girls in the craft room to become the Ernabellaku Walka, used as designs for the rugs and the spinning skills of the women that the craft industry as it was called, was able to develop. This is the Mission staff view. What did Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people think? Nungalka's narration above is a conventionalised narrative for outsiders but she stresses as many women did, 'nganana ninti pulka' /we know how to make lots of things. I became aware of the gulf between the two accounts as I helped to put the fiftieth anniversary show together.

The spindle body is about 18 inches long. At the first spinning stage there is one arm so that the spindle is in the form of a (Christian) cross. 32 The traditional spindle, which the women also used to spin wool for the craftroom, and still use now, is an X cross in plan and a crucifix in elevation. In Western Desert acrylic paintings, notably those of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, the spindle is represented figuratively, seen from the side. Spinning is used in love magic and (Morphy 1998;199) and can make the spinner feel light-headed.

At the second spinning the second arm is added (fig.42). Fleece is teased out into fibrous lengths and wound onto the cross arms,' tjaru, katu, tjaru katu' /over under, over under in a three-dimensional figure of eight, and the body of the spindle twirled up and down the spinner's thigh as she sits cross legged, holding the yarn away from her with her other arm (fig 43). The spindle shaft forms a bobbin and the ball of wool is oval shaped but is then rewound into a round ball. Whether or not the preparations for the show reminded them of that time, there was an efflorescence of spinning for ritual purposes by women in brown is certainly not confused with or categorised as black. The difference between them as this quote from the Wallaces' experience says, is a salient one. 32The spindle is still made from utjunypa / spearbush. This is called ngunytju/mother and the second cross piece kuntili/auntie (Hilliard 1968) In fact these names I did not elicit. Another resemblance unremarked between the artefacts of Christianity and Aangu's own material 281

1998. As they remembered those years, women repeatedly mentioned their mothers and grandmothers spinning, spinning /rungkulpia, rungkulpai. Field notes May 1998 The spinning women sitting in the creek bed 'spinning for mai',' minyma pampa rungkalpai rungkulpai rungkulpai'(women old women, spinning spinning), "inyu'(fur) 'wool' wiya', Nyukana corrects Tjulkiwa as she translates. i.e. sheep's wool is also fur like that of any other animal. The spinners received three meals a day and two dresses per month. What did they think about this spinning for clothes and for mai /food?33 Now, in ilbinji ceremonies, women often wish for money not men and perhaps this has its origins in the spinning for food and dresses. Perhaps the exchange relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people are implicated in the Walka? The women are impervious to the struggle of the then art co-ordinator to keep the craft room afloat financially, and to the Mission's plan for them. Firstly to keep their mothers spinning for rations and therefore on the Mission where they could be 'protected' and converted to Christianity, and later to provide employment, as the Presbyterian work ethic necessitated and to fit them for 'integration'. After leaving Ernabella, when I looked again at the photograph I had made of Nyukana's(?) gouache that some Mission staff had thought of as butterflies, they appeared to me as whirling spindles. Certainly they are full of movement, each apparently propelled forcefully around a centre (fig. 52).

As a woman said, whilst looking at herself bent over a floor rug in the 'iriti photos'; 'The craft room was like our mother. It gave us three meals a day'. But she, like several others, claim they received no money in those days, or when pressed 'money tjuku tjuku'. I was met with stoney glances when I suggested that the Mission staff themselves (the young women in particular) were paid very little. The rations, instead of money, was what women returned to again and again; 'we was working for mai'. The tensions between all these factors and

culture is that of the cross. The waningi, is men's secret string figure made from wool arranged in parallel strings wound round a timber cross shape. 'When they finished spinning they would just put the 2 ply skein of wool around their heads, knot it around their heads, this skein of wool, and then they could go out and get their rabbits or their native foods and then they came in at night and I collected the wool. (They handed it in as they lined up for their evening meal)' Mary Bennett Afa lrititja Archive record no 1506 23 /8/1995. 282

relationships are, I think, present in the Walka: resistance, pride in living in the country that is Ernabella, and making one's Walka as flash 'rikina!'

History of Walka That the women were able to make colours themselves from the imported packet dyes was important (contrary to the opinion expressed by Tindale and others). The colour names that Nungalka strings together are arbitrary 34; they are used to give a sense of the many colours that - suddenly - could be not only used, but created. Nura Rupert, speaking of the craftroom kept returning to the colours she and other girls made, 'We really made some lovely colours on our own initiative. Then we would dye it (the wool) once again and then after that we would weave'.35 The making of colours was something novel but also special, powerful. The floor rugs first of all employed school children's pastel drawings. The outer edge of the Walka was put down first, though finished Walka, like many of the children's drawings, have a centre. Hand painting walka onto fabric, silk squares for scarves for example, and burlap hangings, made in the 1950s and '60s, were stiff with unthinned paint because of the saturation that the artists desired (Hilliard 1998;27) Acrylic paints, which offer the choice of fluorescent and metallic colours, are now used by Ernabella artists when they paint Walka on canvas, to sell. For them, their Walka looks 'rikina', pulsing with colour and tactility. Alas, these paintings are very slow to sell, as non-Aboriginal people conceive them as kitsch. Eric Michaels is near the mark when he says: 'There is no such thing as traditional colours. There is evidence of pre contact palettes green oxide, pink and blue flowers and other shades now judged 'nontraditional' Authority not authenticity is the issue for in judging these art works, their history can then be appreciated as expressing precisely the extreme contradictions of colonialisation and racism in which they are generated and sold' (Michealsl 994:157). It was not just in the craftroom that Ernabella spun and dyed wool was used. Women crocheted hats as they continue to do, beginning at the centre, the Robert Hoogenraad pointed this out to me. Interview in 'Warka irititja munu kuwan kutu; work from the past and the present' 1998;98.

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crown of the head when the hat is worn, and circling out, using contrasting coloured wool. (see Section 3)37 The tactility of creating the colours and the poking of the dyed wool into the rug canvas in the precise spatial way that Nungalka describes above seem to have been matched by spatial disposition of colours in drawing. Mary Bennett told me that a child would use one colour all over the drawing before picking up another colour and doing the same. This is anecdotal evidence that the artist had in mind what features of the drawing were at what level, that is the colours of the whole figure would be already set out in her mind. Further with the rug Walka, as described by Winifred Hilliard, a chief designer instructed the others without a drawn pattern.

Recognising another woman's Walka, as they peered at unsigned works in the photographs or at unnamed batiks in the Ernabella Arts collection, women moved their hands over the shapes, would say in answer to my questioning, that's (X's) Walkal palurumpa Walka, /purunpa/ its like so and so's - maybe a sister (cousin) or daughter. Or they said, she liked to use those colours (in combination). The Walka is a woman's bodily praxis, as recognisable as the way she digs honey ant pits, her way of moving through country. It is a mark, a pattern as individual and as recognisable as a bare footprint in the sand. The Walka relates directly to a woman's experience of being in the bush. Lucy Lester, who grew up in Ernabella but moved to Adelaide as a young woman, continued to paint the Ernabella Walka but found she could no longer produce the curvilinear design in the gridded environs of Adelaide city. Her Walka became angular. We make lines, follow this direction, then look the other way. Wiru, beautiful' Tjikalyi Cohn (Eikelcamp 1999). The shape, which forms the central part of a Walka is the individual design, and around this are drawn successive outlines of colour. Although women work in loose family groups within the craft room, and also in their own homeland craft rooms, there is little similarity between their Walka. Mothers and daughters,

Curators of a prestigious art collection in Australia refused to have Ernabella walka, saying that they were too kitsch. There is much else that I could write about here about the colonialism of colour. According to Winifred Hilliard crocheting was introduced through the missionaries at Warburton 'way back'. Pers comm. 284

Alison Carroll and her late mother Tjuwilya Windlass, Nungalka and her daughters, all have different Walka. Nyukana and her late (birth) sister Walulya (other women said) had more similar work. The colours used together are also an individual expression - Nyukana uses, in non-Aboriginal terms, 'subtle' colours and blue and black. Dora's blue and white batiks are a way of asserting her Christianity on one level.

After reading the preceding chapters it may well be clear that batik, marks made with wax on cloth, that resist the series of dyes in which it is immersed, are strongly correlated with the way in which women think about their country, the importance of the succession of colours through which it passes. Winifred Hilliard's intuition, that batik would suit the Emabella craft worker weIwas right. It is the process as well as the product, that made batik a success in Ernabella and created a demand for Ernabella artists to teach others their skill, at Fregon, Amata, Pipalyatjara, and then at Utopia for example (of Green 1998).

Batik, 'drawing' with molten wax flowing through a canting onto fabric. It involves continual movement of the drawing hand to prevent the wax dripping. The material is then dyed. More wax marks can be added and the fabric dyed again, in a contrasting hue. Three dyes are usually the maximum the Ernabella artists use on any one piece. The wax stiffened cloth might be left screwed up in a ball on the floor somewhere for days, weeks, but after dying, washing, ironing smooth it comes out airight in the end (Dudley 1997). When the wax is washed out at the end of the process, the layers of traces left by the wax at various times, times represented by the dye colours, are revealed. It should now be easy to understand why this process connected with Anangu's conceptions about country. It is more like drawing in the sand. Paper, canvas and fabric are thought of as like skins or surfaces of people and of the Iand, as I have explored in the section on clothes. The raised wax dye resist marks like cicatrices, the deliberately raised scars on skin marking events.

Batik was able to articulate these processes of transformation through colour as temporality, in an even more sophisticated way, from an Aboriginal point of

285

view, than the new pigments had done in the Ernabella WaIka 39 . The cracked texture of the wax, women deliberately use to create dense patinations of two or more dye colours (Cf Bennett 1998). The marks left by the successive dyes showing different layers of colour and pattern. In terms of the way the artists think about country, these can show two or more different times at once, obscuring or revealing in the way that dense areas of dotting in Western Desert acrylic paintings begun, co-incidentally, like the Ernabella batiks, in the early 1970's. There is a direct correlation here between the land, the traces it accumulates that rain (or fire) obliterate as well as that rain being the event that will bring transformation of the land to green growth, inuntji, and its successive sheets of flowers and all that this means practically and emotionally. Small children presently know this concept; Field notes Sept. 1999 L.'s daughters and grandchildren are all hanging around in the craftroom where she is working on a batik. Little Q., drawing with crayons wrote 'PUKATJA'40, each letter a different colour, then overstriped the whole sheet in red orange yellow and green. In 1988 screen printing on fabric was introduced to the Emabella artists through the artists residency of Kerry Martin. A fashion in non-Aboriginal print making for colours bleeding into one another across a design is one that resonated with the parameters of colour in country and has been used since. Thus one design, Nykana Baker's Puti Thush for example, the artists has been able to produce in black and blue (a colour combination she favours), and in red, green and yellow colours that fade into one another across the design. The 'Ngurajara' rvisions of home'41 print made from small designs by various artists was screen printed in this way to produce fabrics with colour that vibrates; mauve on scarlet (fig.58) for example. These were made up elsewhere into dresses which women bought with enthusiasm, whilst the black based tan and yellow print was popular with white women. In August 1997 Edna Rupert and tnawintji Kumana, produced

Many of Nyukana's batiks patterns are based on the marks made by women's feet as they dance nganpinyi, on the sand. How the start of batik affected the way the Walka was produced is something to be explored further., but not here. 4° Pukatja is the name of a dreaming that passes through the site of Emabella, and was proposed by Aangu as an alternative name to Ernabella. 1 This print is collaborative made up from Walka designed by many individuals during a workshop. One of the designs is a conventional i.e. elevational picture of a windlass and was pointed out to me many times by women. It was drawn by a man, Pepai Carroll. 286

screen printed Walka in yellow fading into magenta at a time when the country in which lnawintji and her family were camped was covered in magenta, pink and yellow flowers.

The silk painting initiative for young women who found batik 'too much trouble', begun with Jenny Dudley Emabella, a previous arts co-ordinator, as the catalyst, has foundered because there is apparently no market at all for the finished articles. Again this seems to be due to the colour combinations used in the large Walka based designs. that' . . .along with much of the art of central Australia . . . works that shimmer and vibrate, that create an illusion of movement', writes Morphy of other Central Desert art (Morphy 1998 315). However, many of the young women who began their craft room careers with the silk painting are now making batiks, but using similar spatial layouts to the silk painting. The naphthalene dyes used for batik cannot mimic the fluorescent pinks and oranges of the silk painting (not the metallic guta used to outline the design), because the fabric deepens in tone with each dye.

Conclusion Although the Ernabellaku Walka is so important to Aangu, it has never been a commercial success in the way of batik or other Western Desert painting on canvas. It has continued to be misunderstood. The cards and the rugs were classed by the outside world as church bazaar goods.42 The Walka '....was still not seen to be 'Aboriginal'; the colours were not considered to be the right ones and no bark painting was produced!' (Hilliard 1998;27). The Walka was created after, and as a result of, contact with Europeans in particular circumstances. These were settlement at a place where there was always water, because of the bore, and food. The Pitjantjatjara who composed most of the population had settled in country that was not theirs. Does the 42 There were a few individuals who were entranced by the work but it still failed to find favour in the markets and institutions that could have provided support. For example none of the major state art institutions had deemed the rugs worthy of collection during their years of production although they are now anxious to remedy this. Ex-mission staff were relied upon to find rugs for the fiftieth show. These were items acquired either as presents when they left the Mission or goods that they could afford to buy themselves. Since they were paid modest salaries, the best pieces are elsewhere.

287

Walka contain the story of that migration in from the west transformed transmogrified. Is it perhaps about spatial experience about relation to country? Many of the early drawings made by Aangu in 1933 and 1940 represented ritual knowledge. This kind of information, collected and photographed by white people (the many photographs of children and young women holding up their work for the cameras of Mission staff, the idea of display) , seems to have been deliberately suppressed in art work made for the outside world by Aangu during those early years, certainly since 1940 (fig.44). The children's drawings became, as I have shown, more and more stylised. The bright colours and the overdotting of lines also seemed to become too powerful and dangerous in its effect. Some of these drawings made in the 1950s in clear bright gouaches by teenage boys that came to light in the Ernabella Arts collection, disappeared in 1998. Were the Emabella Walka in part a deliberate obfuscation of Western Desert mark making, an evolved concealment from the matey Mission staff so fluent in Pitjantjatjara? The evidence suggests that they were. Among other Western Desert groups, the Pitjantjatjara are notorious for their fierceness in protecting the Law (Aboriginal Law) and this includes those Northern Pitjantjatjara who stayed around their own lands in the Peterson ranges, the place that became Areyonga and its later outstation, Docker River. Pitjantjatjara men were successful in having an ethnography containing an account of their secret business withdrawn from publication. Later they were influential in changing the representations of the Papunya and Yuendemu acrylic painters depiction of dreaming tracks which they shared, in paintings for the market (Johnson 1997).

Ritual knowledge is not concealed within the Walka, although they are certainly symbolic. They are emblematic of Emabella and Fregon and also of the individual women who create them. The Walka has not stood still but evolved over the years, but there are several, for an outsider, complex and constant generating principles. All Walka have some elements of these principles, and some are in this light 'better' examples than others; this is not intended as an evaluation of those Walka, just an illustration of my partial understanding. One of these is the presence of water and wind, not only as transforming elements of country generated by the Wariampi, other Ancestors and the 288

Christian God, but about Emabella as a permanent 'water hole'. 'In wiping out the dread of drought for the Pitjantjatjara people, the Mission is justifying its existence' wrote Hilliard in 1968. The permanent water supplies enabled by bore technology driven by a windmill or windlass mark settlements in the desert. Their installation enables communities to exist, as I discussed in Section Two. Anangu of that first Emabella generation named children after the windlass whilst the children themselves made drawings of it. Hilliard mentions that the Ernabella Walka were painted onto car doors by Aflangu and stuck on the walls of Ernabella patient's wards in Alice Springs hospftal by their relatives. Walka do not now appear on cars, but are used in graffiti proclaiming a person's Ernabella identity. Rather than walka on cars, Anangu have a sticker (fig. 59) which proclaims in black writing 'Godanya Mukala' /Love God around a coloured figure of red, yellow, blue, green and black 'blades' whose shape is reminiscent of an Ernabellaku Walka. I do not know when this symbol appeared nor who designed it. The other kind of water, fresh water from the sky that is collected in large rainwater tanks within communities are, in Ernabella carefully painted in large colourful Walka (fig 60). The water tank on the rocky hillock above the store has each section between its ribs painted a different colour, red ochre, pale yellow, pale blue pale pink. The sections have some marks placed in them; some are names, some walka with the creator's name beside it.

When choosing images to go on the new Ernabella Arts Inc. web site, young women wanted photographs of the Ernabella creek in spate. Photographs of the flowing creek were continually pointed out to me in books, whenever we were in the craftroom or an office somewhere with such facilities, by women who obviously felt passionate about such images. The idea of whirling motion, of the windlass revolving as the wind blows (after still windless weather lasting several days water tanks may run dry) and sucking up the water from beneath the earth, of car wheels providing motion, moving through country as I explored in Section Three, are linked also to the spindle. All facilitate the keeping and renewal of the social ties between people which are so important. All whirl around a fixed centre. 289

Walka are composed of forms that are transformed through translations, glide reflections, rotations and reflections (cf Washburn and Crowe 1988). These are given spatiality, that is the vocation of three dimensions, through the colours used. The Walka have been constrained and adapted by their makers to the format or support on which they are designed, from tiny square and rectangular cards, which have continued down the years, to long burlap hangings, large hardboards and scarves (fig 55 and 56). Squares, especially as silk scarves, have been a common support. I will examine two Walka painted on a square format, created thirty years apart by two unrelated artists, to demonstrate these 'generating principles' I claim. The first is by Tjikalyi's late sister Patjiparan, featured in Hilliards 1968 book. The second is by Edna Rupert in acrylic on stretched canvas painted in 1997. One of the common rules in organising the space in a Walka, batik or 'dot painting' (elsewhere in Central Australia, e.g. Kathleen Petyarre) is the cross on the diagonal. This was always a common trait in Walka. 43 In Edna Rupert's Walka the four 'arms' (or two arms in terms of the spindle) of the design are rotated. The cardinal points are of primary importance in spatial orientation and also wind direction. Rotation is to do with the wind, the windmill, reflection to do with water, drinking, seeing a reflection, of one's selfl country. In Patjiparan's Walka there is one diagonal 'arm' just as the spindle has at the first spinning, but this diagonal is a wavy line and is clearly a rainbow (snake), moving outwards from the centre. It is red /yellow /green /blue. These central colours vibrate together and interact to give an impression of light. Her design too is rotated, or a handed reflection. The outer part of the design painted green and dotted with black, has green /blue /red lines snaking across it, a combination that might be dry land, blue water, green land. I do not know the precise date of its execution it was probably made after big rains. Patjiparan's Walka has at its centre a small circle, something which many Waika designed as a cross or one diagonal share. Edna Rupert has a movement-neutral shape in the centre of hers, filled with blue and white 'wavy' edged shapes. The outer design has one 'dry' arm and another 'wet' arm, of blue outlined in red /yellow /green. The black Hitliard pers comm. 290

lines inside the main outer shapes create movement within them. The saturated colours of the 'wet' arm appear to come forward of the 'dry' one.

I am suggesting then, that the Walka is also 'about' water and its link to the Rainbow serpent and the Christian God. The women who work in the craft room, now the Art Centre mostly eschew the old religion, or at least actively taking part in ceremonies. Field notes April 1997 Church Inma at Fregon There is a good deal of repetition in the songs The Christian cross is "puu" (wood/tree). P. calls me over to sit with him and says "that's my wife and my grandson (baby). I ask him what the refrain is Tjikij kapi. ..7Lord give me water, give me fife he says. He sings 2 or 3 songs during the course of the evening. In the last hour and a half, things get lively. More and more people get up and go to the lighted area to sing. Mrs. T. starts to jog around the ground in her trainers and tracksuit and shouts 'Jesus loves you - even the petrol sniffers' People start to fall down like felled trees. They raise their arms and then often after some encouragement from others, totter and drop. Others attempt to catch them. For the Pintupi the acrylic paintings are transformations of (traditional) designs (body, cave, tool) and remain both indexical and iconic representations of the dreaming events' 989;172). Pintupi resistance is 'not as signs separated from reality but as the constitutive forms of the dreaming itself' (ibid 185). In a fortunate co-incidence for the Pintupi therefore, Pintupi resistance to European domination is in fact an 'accommodation to European interest in authenticity' (ibid 192). For Pitjantjatjara IYankunytjatjara artists their Walka is too a transformation of 'traditional' mark-making, and this transformation was achieved via the potential that Anangu saw in the new pigments, that represented, were like, colours in the land, and which, as Hilliard repeatedly pointed out, they already knew (Hilliard 1968).

The Emabella Walka as a style is not as simple as it may have appeared, and is based on colour and tactility. The new media - colours - were used to represent the world more effectively than was possible before, just like the car. They also articulate concern for water sources, because their communities are based upon the availabilty of these. The Walka are almost like a prayer. They are directed outwards at achieving a consequence.

In the desert, water is life, and so is colour. 291

Section 5. Conclusion. In this thesis I have shown the crucial importance of colours in structuring the interwoven areas of bodily, spatial, emotional and social experience, and hence to processes of remembering and transmission.

I have attempted to show colour as a material, historical and concrete reality and not as an idealised symbol for something beyond it. There are symbolic meanings to be sure - or rather iconic meaning since colours are often employed to represent things that they are like - but these have not been my primary concern. Instead I have, following the data collected I the field, sought to show colours as social agents.

In Section One, I argued that colour is not purely a visual sensation, as western cultures construct it, but is also experienced through other senses. I explored the state of research regarding universal constraints of both colour and the other senses. I argued, following Howes, and the research data into synaesthesia, that 'sensations' are not meaningless. Colour in particular, we experience as 'out in the world', when in fact it is formed in our perceptual interpretation. Nonetheless the two, the social world and our 'internal' understanding of it are mutually constitutive. The research on remembering indicates that memories too are constructed like this, via the dynamic of consciousness.

I also argued that there are constraints in the way human beings experience colour, possibly due to wavelength variation, and that this constrains the ways that colours are used symbolically. The data in the following sections reinforces this; blue is recessive and cool, red is attractive, dangerous, green is connected with coolness and moisture.

In Section Two I showed that for Anangu, colours are related to events and what follows on from those events. Sacred sites are contrasting to the rest of country. Bush foods too are identified in this way too. 292

I have shown how colour is linked to odour in the way that greenness is linked to 'bush medicine'. Also how colour is tactile through the shininess of fat, with its potentialities for carrying and deepening colour, as well as, like water being a basic requisite of life. The four named coloured substances, used in the past for paint are all transformed substances, they are the result (of consequential action) not the potential. This makes them doubly powerful as social agents. I have shown in Section 2 and Section 3.2 particularly, that the superficial aspect of colour, as a thin skin, thought of in western contexts as a pejorative one, is what makes colours important and effective, to Aboriginal people. The transformation of skins, the surface of the land and the surface of human bodies, are in a state of colour flux. I argued that colour as flux are Ancestral transformations, and that the changing colours of the land and sky, the miles and miles of wild flowers, the sunsets, are thought of as contemporary evidence of Ancestral agency. Rain, and bush fires, particularly those started by lightning, also form part of such evidence and are the events from which consequences develop. I suggested that Aangu are not therefore constructing time as cyclical, series A but as event based, series B. This is also manifested in the ripening and cooking series of (Dreaming) bush foods. Recent neurological theory, as I discussed in Section One also hypothesises that colours, qualia, somehow flag the present.

My research indicates that colour cognition is independent of language and that colour terms are articulating both idealised statements about what a person should, or expects to see. Also that colour terms, both pre-contact and acquired may be articulating contrast rather than focal hues.

A colour is interpreted as related to those around it, the greyish donkey 'maru' /dark in contrast to white donkeys, piranpa /pale or reddish honey ants as maw compared to yellow honey ants, classed as piranpa. On the other hand certain things are classed as a culturally determined colour, the blue of water holes, the green of bush medicines, the yellow of honey ant workers. How do these two kinds of classifications work together.

293

Clothing mediates social relationships, but implicates the land - 'country'- in doing so. I have been able to show how the colours of things create links between them across categories. These linkages are powerful and efficient because colours work on so many levels. I have shown emotional, spatial tactile and odiferous aspects, all of which also overlap in their influence. These are, I am sure, only a small slice of the linkages.Colours construct a social connectivity between things, and persons, who also become coloured things. The wearer of clothing in culturally charged colours and texture (shine), is an agent of social and spiritual consequences.

In Section 3.1, I examined the role of cars in contemporary Western Desert social life together with spatial concepts. I showed how Anangu use cars as social bodies, and that to some extent, the outer surface of cars is treated like clothing on the body, even becoming textile, in the replacement of window glass with fabric. I have shown how cars are not only literally the vehicles of social events but are used as coloured architectural elements in camps. The connectivity of people and places that the car facilitates, which is marked on country, ceases when it dies and becomes a coloured modification to the land and a memorial to those connections.

The access to western clothing and other artefacts simultaneously acquired by Aangu led to the development of colour series in art, through use of novel pigments. In Section Four, I traced through the analysis of drawings by children since 1940, and the work of Ernabella artists, the creation of the Ernabella Walka. I have argued that the maligned Emabella Walka is an articulation of a woman's relationship with country created within a set of parameters concerned with water, especially the waampi and its tracks, The colour series used 'tell the story' of what event follows on. I have also suggested that batik is an appealing medium for Aboriginal artists because of these conceptions about country.

Using Gell's theory about contrast in pattern, the notion of least contrast or least difference, as akin to social relations in Marquesan culture, I have argued that colours, which unlike pattern, occur everywhere, could be substituted. Aangu are interested in colours of most contrast, most difference. I argued at the start 294

of this thesis that colours should not be considered just as single hues, but as relational, as this is how they are in the world. Colours can be used to create luminosity, evoke space, construct temporality as well as being humble carriers of habitual distinctions between things, distinguishing colours. The way in which colour are used in a society are an articulation of social processes. With the stress that Aangu and other Aboriginal cultures place on shine, or brilliance, it might be concluded that colour juxtapositions that evoke light are the most valued and reproduced. Chewing mingkulpa, using marijuana and other drugs that are becoming available in the region, as well as the effects of petrol sniffing, may make the experience of colours brighter and more fluorescent. This may be leading to a further desire for maximum saturation in clothes and pigments for the users, who are the young.

I have shown that colour cannot be dismissed but is crucial on many levels not least in explaining the dynamic relationality of things and people.

295

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Appendix

Hunting and Gathering In the past, hunting and gathering was more strictly defined by gender. Women had no access to men's spears and spear throwers and were unable to kill larger game; kangaroos /malu, emu /kalaya, wallaby /waru, euros /kanyala, unless with hunting dogs (White 1972). Men no longer carry or use spears or spear throwers except in ritual contexts. Rifles generally belong to ,

t women

can and do use rifles when they can gain access to them. Hamilton states that for women in Everard park (Mimili) in 1970, kuka /meat - eggs and grubs for example - was the main thing they sought to obtain, vegetable food being an adjunct rather than an alternative (1980b). The account of hunting and gathering given by Hamilton is largely unrecognisable compared to Ernabella today. The main differences are the use of rifles and of cars, without which no one, apparently, can go anywhere (see Section Three), and the demise of rigid separation between the sexes in most aspects of daily life. The latter, the lack of separation of mothers from sons for example, and the short intern of boys at initiation stages, is lamented by older women. Hunting parties for kuka /meat are very often mixed, including husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. Generally though a party seems to be confined to a generational group; one does not often hunt with adult children even if the meat will be partly theirs by later distribution.

Early visitors who met Pitjantjatjara people noted the paucity of their material possessions (Tindale 1972). Women carried their digging sticks, wana and wooden bowls, piti (P) /mimpu (Y), the large deep bowl, and wira (P) Imika(Y) the shallower digging and food carrying dish. Bowls called wira but shaped like kanilpa are often made from car hubcaps and used as balers when digging. The kanipa was the third type of dish, much flatter than the other two, and used to winnow grain and is thus redundant now. Although these tools have been described in very functional ways by commentators (e.g. Brokensha 1979, Bryce 1991) the form of the objects are also metaphorical, that is to say they allude to another thing, usually a part of the body, in their concrete form, without actually being a representation of it. Sheard records a 'riddle'; one woman says to another where's my wirra ?(sic). 'I don't know' says the other and the first 298

woman replies laughingly, 'there it is' pointing at the new moon (Mountford and Sheard 1964;81). The inside of the bowl is called tjuni /stomach. I was given a present of a painted piti when I first came to live on the Lands. The figures on it refer to tjukurpa crossing the site which the artist is powerful in holding. The cross section of the bowl is like a breast and inside it are painted four breasts each filled with different bush foods. Ui the base are four nipples. The breasts are those of the minyma kutjara, one of the tjukurpa who made the site (fig. 24).

Grinding stones tjiwa are still owned by old women or more likely improvised from what is lying about, by younger women.

The wana has been replaced by the metal crowbar /Kurupa, made from metal rods imported for use in bore machinery, and have one tip beaten flat (Bryce 1992). and shovel /tjapila. The wooden bowls are replaced by metal billy cans or any plastic container that comes to hand. Crowbars and shovels and tomahawks (small handled axe) are prized items and again to some extent inalienable. But they maybe given - especially crowbars - as 'presents'. Wana crowbars are not just phallic symbols (Munn 1971) but phallic objects that belong to women (I agree with Hamilton 1980a). Since such emphasis is part of women's secret ceremony I cannot dwell on it here.

299

Glossary

General Apu (Y)

rock

lnuntji

fresh plant growth, blossom (of shrubs and trees)

'Kala wiru'

lovely colour

Pu runpa

like

Ngampu

egg

Likara

bark of tree, piece of.

Mina (P)

water

Minymaku

belonging to women

Minyma (P)

woman

Muntu

unripe, green

Ngalpi (P)

leaf, feather

Ipi

breast

Kapi (Y)

water

Ku!un(PA)

young, little

Kungka

girl (P) woman (Y)

Kuru

ripe

Pampa

old woman

Palya

alright, well, O.K., good, suitable

Piritipalawa

flower from English pretty flower

Pull (P)

rock

Tjilpi

old person or old man

Tjukutjuku (P)

a little, tiny

Tjunpa (p)

ash

Tjuta

lots, many

Wana

digging stick

Wati

initiated man

Wi ltj a

shade structure, wurlie

Yuu

windbreak of any material

Directions Wati pitja Ma pitja

go across go away I outwards 300

Ngalya Waku



Tjam Pu

forehead right, right handed

Ngapari ngapari Katu Unngu Uil (PA) Ulparira Alinytjara Kakarara Wilurara

left

straight on left and right 1)

above, 2) high

1)

inside 2) under

1)

open country 2)outside

south north east west

Animals Alkarka

meat ants

Ka!aya

emu (not classed as bird)

Kaltuka

biting ant, orange and black

Kanpi

emu fat

Kanya!a

euro/rock kangaroo

Kuniya

python, carpet snake

Kuyi

small snake or worm

Liru (P)

snake (dangerous)

Lukupupu

ant lion

Maku

witchetty grub

Mala

hare wallaby

Malu

kangaroo

Minga

ants (tiny black ones)

Mingkiri

mouse

Mulku

bush pussycat (not native cat)

Muturka

fat from kangaroo and euro, especially the tail.

Ngapngi

frog

Ngapa[i

sweet terp on red river gum

Ngiaka

perentie lizard

Nyiti

fat from perentie lizard, goanna and other lizards.

Papa

dog

Papa Inura

dingo 301

Pinta Pinta

brightly patterned butterflies

Ptkatali

scorpion

Punpurt (PA)

fly

Tjala

honey ant

Tjai

small inedible lizard often represented in punu

Tjilkamaa

echidna 'porcupine'

Tjinka (see milapali)

goanna

Upupily(pa)

tadpole

Wanka

itchy grub

Waru

black footed rock wallaby

Watu

wombat

Wanatjitji

centipede

Wipiya

emu feathers

Womi (Y)

snake

Birds (tjulpu) Kuka

meat

Ikarka

western bower bird

Itatura

kite

Ngaamara

mallee fowl

Nyu-nyu

zebra finch

Kaanka

crow

Kakalaya

major mitchell cockatoo( white cockatoo with pink striped crest and pink underwings)

Killykillykari

green budgerigar (k)

Kipaa

bush turkey (k)

Kirkin (PA)

hawks

Kurkur (PA)

boobook owl

Panpanpalala

bell bird known for its song

Patilpa

ring-necked parrot

Pinpal-pinpa) (PA)

white-plumed honey eater.

Tjalpu-tja!pu Tjitjitjarutjaw

black faced wood swallow knock-kneed bush hen*,black and white, flightless

Tjurki

owlet nightjar

Walawuru

wedge-tailed eagle 302

* no record in existing P/V reference books

Plants (puflu- P) Apara (Y)

red river gum



Eucalyptus camaldulensis

Aratja

Eremophila freelingii

lninti

bean tree

Ilbili

tea tree

l ii

wild fig

Ficus platypoda

Ilykuwara

witchetty bush

Acacia kempeana

lrmangka- irmangka

bush medicine

Eremophila longifolia

Itara

bloodwood

Eucalyptus opaca

Kalpari

rat tail

Dysphania kalpari

Kampurar(pa)

bush tomato

Solanum Centrale

Katji (Y)

spear bush

Pandorea doratoxylon

Kulypur (PA) *

wild gooseberry

Solanum ellipticum

Erythrina verspertilio

Kumpul (PA) (kumpu=urine) bush tomato

Solanum centrale

Kupaa

wild plum

Santalum lanceolatum

Kurku (Y)

mulga flat leaved var.

Acacia aneura

(see wanari, wintalyka and minyua)

(variable leaf shape)

Kurku

sweet secretions on above tree

Liru-liru (P)

(snake-snake) pussytails

Malukuru (kangaroo eye)

Sturts desert pea

Clianthus formosus

Malu-munpun (PA)

blue storksbill

Erodium cynorum

Mamawara (Y) (father long) stalked puffball

Podaxis pistillaris

Mangata (Y) (see wayajju) wild peach, quondong

Santalum Acuminatum

Mau-mau (Y) (black-black) pigweed

Portulaca oleracea

(see Wakati) Mingkul(pa)

wild tobacco

Nicotiana Gossei(?) and N.excelsior

(see ukiri, piturpa) Minyua

resin bearing mulga

Acacia aneura

M uur-mu ur(pa) Y?itara

bloodwood

Eucalyptus opaca

Ngalta

desert kurrojong

Brachychiton Gregorii

Ngaun(pa)

prickly wattle

Acacia Victoriae 303

red river gum

Eucalyptus

Parkilypa

Parakeelya

Calandrinia Spp.

Parka- parka

misteltoe

Lysiana spp

Piturpa

wild tabacco

Nicotiana gossei

Piipalya (P)) camaldulensis

Pukara, see WaputJ

Thryptomene maisonneuvii

Punti

(cassia)

Senna artemesiodes

Pua-pua

scented sedge

Rangki-rangki

Cyperus vaginatus? Solamun quadriloculatum

wild gooseberry

Solanum ellipticum

Tjanmata

bush onion

Cyperus bulbosus

Tjanpi

spinifex grass

Triodia irritans

Tjilka

(prickle)

Trichodesma

Tawal-tawal(pa) (see kulypurpa)

zeylanicum Tjila

emu poison bush**)

Tjintu-tjintu (Sun-Sun)

yellow daisy type flower *

Tjulpun-tju!pun(pa)

poached egg daisy

Brunonia

Tjulypurpa

emu bush

Eremophila alternifolia

Tjunta!a

colony wattle

Acacia murrayani

Ukiji

wild tobacco

Nicotiana gossei(?) and

Dubosia Hopwoodii

Australis

(tjulpu=bird)

N. excelsior Unmuta (Y?)

wild cress

Lepidium muelteriferd inandi

Urtjan(pa)

spear bush

Pandorea doratoxylon

Urtjany(pa)

ironwood tree

Acacia estsrophiolata

Wakati see maru-mau

pigweed

Portulaca oleracea

Wanari (P)

mulga flat leaved var.

Acacia aneura (variable leaf shape)

Wang uu

wooly-butt grass

Eragrostis eriopoda 304

Waputi, see puka!a

Thryptomene

maisonneuvii Warikua Itjutifangu

fringe lilly

Thysanotus exiliflorus

Watarka

umbrella bush

Acacia ligulata

Wayanu (P) (see Mangaa) wild peach, quondong

Santalum Acuminatum

Wintalyka

seed of mulga

Acacia aneura

Witita

truffle

Witjinti

corkwood tree

Hakea divaricata

no record in existing reference books (Latz 1996, Goddard 1996, Goddard and Kalotas eds 1995) **

'pituri' in some ethnographic literature

*** Some refs conflate tawal-tawal(pa) with kulypurpa. I was told they are not the same but 'kutjupa'/another

305

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