Desert lake: art, science and stories from Paruku.

Veth, Peter

Desert lake: art, science and stories from Paruku

Steve Morton, Mandy Martin, Kim Mahood and John Carty (eds) 2013

CSIRO Publishing, Canberra, 312pp, ISBN 9780643106284 (hbk)

This volume represents a brilliant fusion of Traditional Knowledge, origin narratives, Western science and contemporary art. It is based on 'deep-time' complex human-landscape relationships from a highly significant lake system known as Paruku in the south-east Kimberley region. Known on cartographic charts as Lake Gregory, it is the only co-ordinated drainage system that flows from the east Kimberley into the expansive linear dune fields of the Great Sandy Desert. The lake was once a mega-lake, many times its current size, reflecting massive monsoonal rains more akin to central Indonesia than the present Kimberley desert edge. It hosted an enhanced aquatic and avian fauna and was likely a highly attractive lake for early settlers--being surrounded by savannah woodlands and grasses with grazing terrestrial fauna. Indeed, it was at such major water bodies that peoples transitioned into the desert hunter-gatherer adaptations we think of today as the ethnographic norm. They persisted in an increasingly arid landscape--with lakes as a chain of connection to previous pluvial states.

I first came to Paruku 34 years ago and recall the nascent wiltjas (bough shelters) with small groups of largely elderly people who were re-settling their desert homelands from townships like Halls Creek, having been edged off pastoral regimes due to the new awards. They were re-connecting to old camping places, Dreaming sites and a range of totemic 'runs', rather than being wrapped around the rhythms of mustering and the earlier cattle drives of the nearby Canning Stock Route. They now had green-fields for (re)connection and establishment of community (such as Mulan).

Jump ahead almost 30 years and as the last part of the ARC Canning Stock Route 'Rock Art and Jukurrpa Project' we are collaborating with Professor Jim Bowler, a new generation of senior Traditional Owners, and other colleagues in tracking the Two Dogs Dreaming, human occupation patterns and acrylic iconography from Tjurabalan native title holders--all in the sands and exposures of Parnkupirti Creek. With Mike Smith, Jo McDonald, Alan Williams and some 20 traditional custodians and (it felt like) hundreds of visiting school children, we worked back through the unyielding lake muds to locate early artefacts which have been dated to between 45,000 to 50,000 years ago. This was a time period when the energy from floodwaters was very high; large cobbles were pushed across the landscape during flood events and it appears early assemblages of flaked silcrete artefacts were polished and sub-rounded to then lie exposed for millennia in brachiating creeklines fringing the lake.

This lavish CSIRO publication profiles community voices, art productions and intersections with science over some 300 pages. The four editors comprise a leading arid zone ecologist, two artists of natural-cultural systems and the deserts, and an anthropologist of Indigenous art. The book is divided into three chronological parts; (a) Deep Time, (b) Recent Times and (c) The Future. There are ten chapters embedded within these parts and they deal with the stratigraphy of archaeology and geomorphology, the historical connections and layered memories of custodians and the lake, its fluctuating freshwater ecology, and the painting of new landscapes of encounter and enterprise --not the least of which is the Indigenous Protected Area regime.

For me, one of the most satisfying hybrid expressions is represented by the exceptionally large acrylic canvases the women and Kim Mahood have developed to map the lake through its multiple and pulsing phases of more than 50,000 years of documented human occupation. These totemic and historic maps accommodate changing architectures of the lake, as cast by geomorphologists, with flexible skeins of changing settlement, mobility and Dreaming tracks. Compositions in pigment and oil on linen of the lake-edge muds, grasses and stark gums by Mandy Martin glide in to typically aerial and expansive portraits of fire, water, peoples' camps and introduced stock by custodians. They are counterpointed by novel juxtapositions by Megan Boxer, Launa Yoomarie and Daisy Kungah of houses, the church and caravans; archaeologists at Sturt Creek; and Shirley Yoomarie's Working with scientists, 2011. This last work features the lake with water birds, flesh-water fish on its edge, and nets being set in the shoal alkaline waters to capture and study the freshwater fauna.

Grasses are abundant around Paruku and a dazzling array of sculptures of goannas and other animals appear in the volume; wire, yarn and bottles are used to produce stunning pieces; coolamon baskets are made from raffia and bustard feathers; and flowers, vases and nests derive from myriad materials available on the outskirts of the community. There is a cornucopia of art forms and expressions here where only 30 years ago only mulga boughs were lined up to keep the cold desert winds off these returning desert peoples.

Perhaps most intriguing is the way kartia (European) identity is crafted in this volume by custodians as they make sense of varying origin narratives, worldviews, and new creative media and art reproduction (not the least this volume). It is perhaps telling that in a section on the men's painting of Parnkupirti Creek (The Two Dingo Dreaming), Hanson Pye says (p.220):

   You can see the part here, you can see what
   Jim Bowler was saying. You can see the layer,
   how old that layer is. Before that, the dingoes
   had to carry the song to the hill. They went in
   to the cave and never returned and turned in
   to those two hills. You can see the white one
   is on the left side, the black dingo is the older
   one, on this side, the right side ... Lennard's
   father he got lots of white hair; my father,
   dark hair, because that's the dingo.

I was left wondering about the intricacies of the agency a 'new', non-denominational generation of artists, scientists and Indigenous Protected Area supporters brought to this small desert-edge community which had started to reassemble itself on the lake's edge when I was 20. This volume raises these and allied questions subtly, artfully and with a sense of respect.

Reviewed by Peter Veth, The University of Western Australia <peter.veth@uwa.edu.au>