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Pitjantjatjara musician Frank Yamma once sang about spearmaking as a metaphor for the renewal of cultural practice and the poisonous effect of alcohol on his own life and that of his community.
Let's make more spear
Don't you know yourself?
We are the people of this land
We better hold on
The song Make More Spear, written some years ago by Yamma's father, who is now deceased, made sense then — as it does now.
Aboriginal art covers an extraordinary breadth of lived experiences.
From the autoethnographic self-portrait of Christian Thompson to the ghostly bark of Djirrirra Wunungmurra, that diversity is never more obvious than in the finalists' exhibition of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAAs) held each year in Darwin.
Transgressing artistic frontiers
Frontiers are not solely a historical phenomenon or sites of conflagration and violence entrenched in the past. They exist socially, politically and culturally in the present. But frontiers can be porous. They can be transgressed or simply put aside.
And that is precisely what the overall Telstra Art Award-winning Kulata Tjuta — Wati kulunypa tjukurpa (Many Spears — Young Fella Story) does.
At the same time, Young Fella Story makes a bold statement about skyrocketing incarceration rates — described by Attorney-General George Brandis as "a national tragedy" — and the lifesaving power of Aboriginal culture.
If the artmaking that is flowering in the vast Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara homelands is any sign, the APY Lands are a border zone where tradition and innovation are fluid and concurrent.
Borders and frontiers are much like tectonic fault lines — they can shift over time and sometimes move the earth, delivering sudden jolts and reverberant shocks, altering the lay of the land forever.
One of the 60 NATSIAA finalists, Betty Muffler's Ngankari Ngurra (Healing Country), which won the award for an emerging artist, evokes a frontier and a fault line in blinding white and impenetrable black ochre. Betty's country is healing and replenishing itself after a man-made cataclysm: the British nuclear tests at Maralinga, which abuts the southernmost part of the APY Lands.
The APY Lands may be remote geographically but the art being made in the far north-west of South Australia is increasingly at the centre of the Australian art scene. It's worth repeating here that remoteness is a matter of perception, and it depends on where you imagine the centre to be.
A family affair
This year the three NATSIAA judges, senior artist Regina Wilson, curator Emily McDaniel and gallery director Chris Saines, rewarded the work of several generations of the same family: Pitjantjatjara spear artist Frank Young, his grandson Anwar Young, and his niece, photographer Unrupa Rhonda Dick.
Frank Young is one of the Pitjantjatjara elders leading a spirited revival of spearmaking traditions in his community of Amata, just south of Uluru-Kata Tjuta but inside the South Australian border.
The Kulata Tjuta (Many Spears) project involves all seven Aboriginal-owned art centres operating in the homeland communities of the APY Lands: Amata, Mimili, Nyapari, Indulkana, Kalka, Fregon and Ernabella, the country's oldest.
A maze of 37 spears hang in suspense, their tips pointing to the sky. Behind them a young man — Anwar Young himself, photographed by his cousin Rhonda — stands in a white singlet, emerging from an almost liquid darkness.
Across the photograph, handwritten, is the Wati kulunypa tjukurpa, or young fella story, in Pitjantjatjara. Significantly though, it is not the recitation of a narrative passed down for generations, but a contemporary story for the younger generation which is both cautionary and positive.
"The writing is about telling young people — my grandson is standing behind bars there but he's standing behind culture and that's how people need to be — there, safe," says Frank Young.
At the NATSIAA media preview on Thursday, Frank excused his grandson. Anwar was reluctant to speak to the media, other than to say he was pukulpa (happy).
"He don't talk much — he's not like me," said Frank, who has been making spears for most of his life.
"I've been working with governments, so I talk too much."
Spearmaking a force for good in communities
There is strong evidence that the Kulata Tjuta project and the practice of culture for its own sake has diverted young men away from trouble, substance abuse and the endgame of incarceration.
Since the project was initiated in Amata in 2010 by a group of senior Anangu men, including Frank, spearmaking has enjoyed a resurgence, spreading like wildfire across the APY Lands.
It's not the first time that judges have rewarded the spearmaking revival. Anwar Young was shortlisted for the NATSIAAs in 2016 and was a finalist in the John Fries Award, a prize established by the family of the former Viscopy director for early career visual artists.
Unrupa Rhonda Dick, meanwhile, received the Australia Council's Dreaming Award for emerging Indigenous artists in 2013.
Coincidentally, or perhaps not, she is the granddaughter of another Telstra Art Award winner, the late Kunmanara Minyintirri, who won the award in 2011.
Judging the winner
Thirty-two years since its inception, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards can still surprise, delight and provoke. The judges' decisions aren't universally popular, made as they are by a revolving door of artists, curators and, occasionally, anthropologists and businesspeople.
Ms McDaniel, one of the youngest judges ever, says there wasn't always unanimity in their deliberations.
"There was a push and pull — we had to pitch at times."
But in the end, the three judges agreed wholeheartedly.
"I think we can honestly sit here and say that these are decisions that every one of us owns," says Mr Saines.
"That's the beauty of the Telstra Awards," says Ms McDaniel, "you can have an incredibly senior artist with so many years of knowledge and practice or you could be an emerging, younger artist in a collaboration. It purely comes down to the work."
Whatever awards it garners along the way, Kulata Tjuta is a movement with a clear purpose. In the manufacture of traditional weapons, young men are being taught the skills of their fathers and grandfathers. It bridges the gap between them.
As Frank Young says emphatically: "Our culture is life. Behind bars is no good for young people."
Topics: indigenous-music, photography, installation, aboriginal, aboriginal-language, indigenous-culture, indigenous-protocols, awards-and-prizes, darwin-0800