Pictures from My Memory: My Story as a Ngaatjatjarra Woman.

Hinkson, Melinda

Pictures from My Memory: My Story as a Ngaatjatjarra Woman. By Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis, introduced and edited by Laurent Dousset. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016, Ebook, AU$34.95.

Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis is one of the great cross-cultural intermediaries of her generation. She is a Ngaatjatjarra woman with strong existential anchorage in her Western desert upbringing as well as enormous confidence, ability, and experience achieved in living and working well beyond that domain. Anthropologists who undertake research in Central Australia may not know Lizzie Ellis but they will certainly know intermediaries with similar life histories, capacities, and outlooks; such persons play vital roles in facilitating the production of anthropological knowledge. It is perhaps surprising then, that we have very few accounts of the lives of such persons. Here, with the interlocutory and editorial support of anthropologist Laurent Dousset, Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis brings elements of her life story to a public readership. That is to say Pictures from my Memory is an autobiography, but its production is mediated by a very particular kind of cross-cultural relationship.

The book is structured chronologically, tracking key periods in Lizzie's life. Lizzie's account, conveyed in the first person, is bookended by an introduction and set of appendices produced by Dousset. The narrative keeps to the first person but moves between two registers: the woman who recounts key events and scenes from across her life and reflects upon changes in her community, and the cross-cultural educator who articulates and describes core Ngaatjatjarra cultural principles. The interplay between these registers is itself an intriguing element of the narrative structure, and there is a sense that Lizzie is on most comfortable ground in the mode of cross-cultural educator. The sharing of intimate, emotionally weighted aspects of her life story is unsurprisingly more challenging. There are numerous places in the text where she undertakes quick segues out of the personal and into the less intense mode of public education.

The first theme that emerges strongly is that of journeying. From an early age, Lizzie recalls the near constant movement of her family between smaller and larger places--moving of their own volition, moved by government, moving in response to opportunities for work, moving to place children in school in the care of missionaries, moving to larger towns to access resources, moving to smaller places to escape fighting and the ravages of alcohol, and moving to dodge police and welfare surveillance. As Lizzie's family travel across and beyond the Rawlinson Ranges and the Ngaatjatjarra lands, through the smaller and larger settlements of Wiluna, Warburton, Docker River they also navigate between situations of relative peace and calm on one hand and stress and turbulence on the other.

Very early on we are introduced to the mission, where Lizzie spent her early school years. A confident and rebellious child, she conveys the tough discipline and fire and brimstone attitude of her religious minders. On the mission, children experienced constraint and hard authority. They were being groomed for integration into the mainstream society through education and personal comportment, but also through the cultivation of 'hobbies' and skills like knitting, driving lessons, and visits to the drive-in. Lizzie's childhood rejection of Christianity and its associated restraints is indexed in highly relatable form--a deep anger at being forced to wear a dress she hated every Saturday, while being aware there were ample supplies of other dresses at hand. Lizzie tells her reader, 'from a very early age I tried to resist... Christianity didn't have a chance with me' (25). Yet she also observes that the mission gave children respite from alcohol-fuelled violence that periodically marred life in the small desert communities. In the mission, children's time was closely regulated.

Lizzie also conveys the childhood pleasure she took in certain cross-cultural friendships. She moves on to train as a nurse and work in Alice Springs hospital. She marries a white school teacher, gives birth to two children, and moves with her new family following by turns her husband's school placements and her own deep need for periodic retreat to the desert. A small but tight-knit social group of desert women married to white men evolves and becomes a source of important emotional support.

Lizzie's life story tracks significant shifts in Aboriginal policy. Key strands of that policy, such as the advent of the outstations movement, are visited here with measured critical gloss. The self-determination period brought a new raft of white advisors to Aboriginal communities, but often these figures knew less than Aboriginal people did of the operation of their own laws. This was a period of intense negotiation with government. Lizzie cuts through the powerful imaginaries circulating around the outstations movement with a no nonsense observation: people stopped going to outstations when the government money stopped.

As she moves into pedagogic mode, Lizzie as cultural translator educates the reader on aspects of Ngaatjatjarra kinship, childbirth, naming practices, initiation, arranged marriage and polygyny, totemism and personality, and relationships between people and dogs. She conveys this knowledge in matter-of-fact but humanized style. She also reveals her deep longing for the desert, especially as an antidote to the pressures of life in Alice Springs and the associated demands from extended kin. There are interesting reflections on the differently organized nature of the desert and town as social spaces, and on distinctions in the way people relate to objects in these differently organized spaces.

The narrative hints that Lizzie's life trajectory as a cross-cultural intermediary evolved out of galvanizing childhood experiences; her early, shocking encounter of herself as an object of fascination on the streets of Perth. 'Growing up', she tells us, 'there were times when I was embarrassed being an Aboriginal person' (111). She transcended this humiliation by developing clever strategies for countering the gaze. The largest and most philosophical of these strategies finds form in Lizzie's lifelong commitment to the work of cross-cultural interpretation. Given the significance of this work in the story of Lizzie's life one can imagine another kind of book, or indeed an additional section that might have been added to this one, that would more directly grapple with the shared space of friendship, knowledge production, and self-realization that hovers on the edges of this story. That is, the space of translation between anthropologists and the close interlocutors with whom we form enduring friendships, so often a mutual space of transformation.

In the opening pages of Pictures from my Memory there is a curious comment on the setting up of this writing project. Lizzie tells the reader that she and Laurent 'both decided the writing should happen in a neutral place'. But France emerges as a place that is anything but neutral. France is the country in which Lizzie and Laurent first met, as participants in an intensive linguistics course, she as language teacher and he as student. France is intimately associated with Lizzie's professional development as a linguist/interpreter, as well as her evolution as an accomplished cosmopolitan woman. Indeed, 'France', the ethnographer's home, seems to index a constellation of distancing and transformative processes that have drawn Lizzie out of the desert, and been vital in the making of this very engaging life story.

Melinda Hinkson

Deakin University

DOI: 10.1002/ocea.5170