Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Day 5 - Ancient Aboriginal culture and art


Wallace Rock Aboriginal community
 
 
This is Leah is sitting beside a grinding stone that is 400-500 years old. (way older than any European artifacts or buildings)
 
Leah took us 'walkabout' up a small pretty gorge where her people have been going to collect food and swim in the waterholes for thousands of years. She talked to us about the old ways of collecting food, and hunting. She passed around some tools, music sticks, wooden carrying bowls and pictures of animals and plants which are used for food. She told us how for her people, hunting kangaroo is men's business and when she visited South Australia and saw women killing a kangaroo, it really scared her. This brought home the fact that there are many different Aboriginal cultures, languages and practices in Australia. Aboriginal culture is very diverse. Leah told us about the traditional ways of living, and the modern ways, eg. her eldest sons live away from her to attend school in Alice Springs as she wants them to have a good education, but she worries when they come home during school holidays as she knows that one day soon the men will come to take the boys away for their initiation ceremony which can take two or three months, and she cannot stop it from happening. The girls also have an initiation. I won't go in to details about what she told us but I was struck by the deeply held respect and fear for the traditional ways as well as the love of Country and the melding of our modern white ways into this ancient culture. It is an intricate balancing act which is often difficult.

These hand paintings are around 1,000 years old! They mean that you are welcome to enter this area. If you see paintings of spears or shields, you must go away as it means the area is for men's business only and women cannot enter. If they do, they will die.

Concentric circles carved into rock mean a waterhole and meeting place. They are a sign to others that there is water there even if you must dig below the ground to find it. A very important message to leave for other people in the dry country.

After our walk, we were treated to morning tea, and a dot painting workshop. We were given a laminated piece of paper with numerous symbols and their meanings and a bookmark sized piece of canvas upon which to paint while a video about the origin of dot painting at Wallace Rock was played. There was a white artist who was instrumental in starting the dot painting movement.

I have not painted since high school and I really enjoyed the process. I found it quite meditative and relaxing. My bookmark tells the story of walking the Larapinta Trail from waterhole to waterhole through green spinifex dotted hillsides.

There was a wide variety of artistic skills within our tour group, some not so good and others quite beautiful such as these:


While we were there, we met an artist called Glenice who was working on an amazing dot painting of thousands of ants in swirling lines as if viewed from above. It was quite beautiful and dramatic and very intricate. She had previously completed another ant painting which had 28,000 ants and was sold to someone in New York for $12,000!
 
Wallace Rock is a 'dry community' which means there is no alcohol allowed. They seem to be quite organised at managing their lifestyle in a way which is healthier for them and their children. The art centre is a major part of that process.
 
After lunch at Wallace Rock, we had one final visit to a waterhole at Simpsons Gap before Annabelle delivered us back to our hotels and the white world in Alice Springs.
 
Later that evening we all met for dinner at a local bar. Annabelle joined us. There was much laughter and chatting and hugging and photo-taking, and plans were hatched for future travels and meetings on the other side of the world. All agreed that the tour had been wonderful, due in part to a great group of people and a wonderful tour guide, Annabelle and her stories about the places she took us to, added greatly to the value of the whole experience.
 
And there was some 'tribal dancing'! Footloose!

 


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