© K Roussos, 2023 This is a guest post by artist, curator and barrister-at-law Koulla Roussos* I watched “Barbie” the other night. I took my mother, sister, nephews and a 5 year-old niece and two friends, and left the cinema with a brain in toxic shock convulsing with mixed messages. It has taken a few [...]
It was late November 2010, one of those red-hot November days that only the Western Desert can turn on. Over six hundred people travelled for days from far and wide to bury young Jampijinpa at the small town of Nyirripi, a four-and-a-half hour dusty drive west from Alice Springs on rough dirt roads.
Everyone has others one is obligated to (has to care for) and others who care for one. No man or woman is an Island. ‘Skin’ classification guides the nature and intensity of relationships. A feature of the system that appeals to many ‘westerners’ is “mother in law avoidance” In former stricter times it was absolutely forbidden for one’s mother-in-law to be addressed or to be in the same room. It still happens that someone might wait outside a shop because “there is no room”.
One fella came up to me at the end of the second day and said the comedy that came out of the commentators trying to keep up with whose who on the field was “better than Roy and HG!!” The starting point in any footy commentary is to get a good team sheet in numerical order. The challenge out bush is that there are often three players wearing the same number, several players with no number and some players with no guernsey at all. That’s when you have to get creative and write the player’s name next to “red boots”; “barefoot”; “topknot”; “big tummy” etc.
All those ratfucks understood was strength and fear and the simple joy of driving their enemies before them. There was no schadenfreude in seeing Bjelke-Petersen humiliated before the Fitzgerald Inquiry when he was unable to explain what was meant by the doctrine of the separation of powers, because all it did was hammer home the truth that we'd been comprehensively arse-raped by a man with the ethics of a starving sewer rat, and the political instincts of a sabre-toothed baboon with a really scorching methamphetamine addiction.
Now after the Catholic church has spent over a century stripping us of everything they could get their thieving hands on including our culture and our children, they have managed to find themselves another role to play. To add insult to injury they now present themselves to the world as the preservers and keepers of Tiwi culture.
The workshop allowed for clarification of the rather confusing overlap of three bird names, karrkkanj, ngalmirlangmirlang and wunwunbu. Karrkkanj, it turns out, is a term for the Black Kite but can also be applied to two other raptor species, the Peregrine Falcon and the Brown Falcon.
Maypal is a complete part of Yolngu diet and it is free from the sea—celebrated in songs, dance and stories, integral to their world. In fact, maypal is an utterly fundamental part of the Yolngu world: Bentley James
"Sovereignty became treaty, treaty became reconciliation and reconciliation became nothing. … We will dig a hole and bury it. It will be a protest but I also hope that it can represent a new start for Aboriginal people”: Galarrwuy Yunupingu, 2006
For van Roden, growing up within a Pentecostal Christian family, biblical verses and ideas were imprinted at a young age. “The spanking paddle, a manifestation of scriptural text, held within it the promise of keeping one’s children on the straight and narrow, a tool to guide them through the follies of youth; to temper the demonstrations of original sin. Disobedience of parents was rebellion against God and this scriptural inscribed spanking paddle would play its part in the righteous life.”
