Pornography Drop-off Point. "This one is at the airstrip and is one of a pair. The other one is at the entrance to Yuendumu near the patronising “Look for People” sign. We inspect the bins daily. So far nothing has been placed in them. Anything we recover from the bins, we will incinerate."
But the thing about the two ladies is that they weren’t two resident botanists! No, they were just two ladies that happened to know a hell of a lot about plants in the region. And of course what is happening now with all this assimilationist push that is going on – the Intervention, Growth Towns, the Shires – you name it – is that a lot of that knowledge is gradually just fading away. Children are spending less and less time out in the bush with their grandmothers and mothers, learning all this. What grows where and when, what can you eat and what can’t you eat.
3 days in the southern Tanami desert in November
I spent most of my 20s at Yuendumu; I feel like I grew into a man there, and I did not do it on my own. Maybe one day I’ll be that old man sitting on a bed, keeping myself company by closing my eyes and recalling these stories.
"Warlpiri people are not slaves, yet many in ‘mainstream’ society persist in claiming some sort of ‘ownership’ of Aborigines. They arrogantly have opinions as to what Aborigines should or shouldn’t do, and believe they have some sort of right in deciding what is best for them. Warlpiri have no power over their destiny. No say in their future. No say in how they should run their lives." Frank Baarda, Yuendumu 2010
Young people, feeling hopeless, began to tell each other to follow their ancestors and kill themselves like Purrukapali. But the real story said something else. The true story was about creation, how our first man died to create the Curlew, from the spirit of our first woman, his wife, and how the moon was created from the spirit of Purrukapali's treacherous brother. This was the real story. How can we sort it out?" he asks. "How can we change the ending of the story?"
I can’t think of a single incident in the past in which the Warlpiri residents of Yuendumu have not respected non-Warlpiri residents’ neutrality in such matters. They respect our right to be kept out of it. This respect is not reciprocated by “mainstream” society, that has the arrogant belief that it is entitled to interfere and dictate to remote Aboriginals how they should live their lives. The Intervention epitomises this arrogance.
This is “Stripe”, who ended up with Gloria Morales, an animal carer that works at the Warlukurlangu Artists cooperative in Yuendumu – a remote community about 300 kilometres north-west 0f Alice Springs. […]
This female Pallid Cuckoo Cacomantis pallidus has been hanging around my front yard for the past week or so and I had the chance to grab a few pix of her this afternoon. She lacks the very distinctive, and often distinctly irritating, call of the male of this species. […]
"In painting, an artist conveys his sense of form, topic, and perspective. A painting may express a clear social position, as with Picasso’s condemnation of the horrors of war in Guernica, or may express the artist’s vision of movement and color, as with “the unquestionably shielded painting of Jackson Pollock": United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the matter of Steven C. White v the City of Sparks, Nebraska.
