The artworks
You paint it because you know everything. You know because as a child you walked around in the Country and with your parents and grandparents drank from those rock holes and later were taught the names of the rock holes and their stories. They taught us their knowledge so that we could survive on our own after they had passed on.
Ngumarnu Norma Giles, Warburton, 2008
The Canning Stock Route collection
Below are links to the extensive collection of works that is now known as the Canning Stock Route collection, and a selection of related works that were borrowed or acquired for the exhibition Yiwarra Kuju.
Rather than imposing a stylistic or chronological order on the works, they are grouped here largely according to the stories that they tell: stories of family and Country, Jukurrpa, survival and resilience.
They don't tell the history of the Canning Stock Route, but the story of the Country the road cut across.
Measurements are given as height x width (paintings) or length x width x height (objects). All artworks are from the collection of the National Museum of Australia, unless otherwise acknowledged.
Ngurra
Ngurra, which means both 'Country' and 'home' in Western Desert languages, is integral to understanding the culture and values of desert people. It can refer to a bush shelter, to vast tracts of land, or even to a modern house in a community.
Jukurrpa
The Jukurrpa is sometimes translated as the 'Dreaming' or 'Dreamtime' and exists in desert law as the creation period. During the Jukurrpa, ancestral beings in both human and animal form moved across the desert singing, marrying and fighting - or tricking and helping one another.
Minyipuru Jukurrpa: The Seven Sisters' story
In Aboriginal cultures across Australia, and in other cultures around the world, the Pleiades star cluster is associated with the story of the Seven Sisters. Minyipuru Jukurrpa is the Martu version of this story.
Kumpupirntily: Lake Disappointment
The power of the Jukurrpa, and of the ancestral beings whose actions shaped the world, remains present in the land. These ancestral beings, who often transformed into the landscapes they created, can also affect living people and events.
Conflict
The Canning Stock Route story revolves around water. To colonists, desert water was a commercial resource necessary for a successful stock route. To the people of the desert, these waters were the social, spiritual and economic bases of their existence.
Well 33 to Well 35: The heart of Canning Stock Route country
Kunawarritji (Well 33) features in many of the Jukurrpa stories from the desert. It became one of the main places from which people left the desert, eventually settling in communities as distant as Turkey Creek, Wiluna, Jigalong, Balgo and Bidyadanga.
Ngurra kuju walyja
Walyja means 'family', but in a much wider sense than many non-Aboriginal people may be familiar with. In the Country crossed by the stock route, the experience of kinship and family is shaped by the desert's harsh environment, which required extensive travel and cooperation between distant groups.
Rover's legacy
Rover Thomas is one of Australia's most important artists. One of the first two Indigenous artists to represent Australia at the 1990 Venice Biennale, his paintings sparked a greater appreciation of Aboriginal art, both nationally and internationally.
The last of the Cannings
Dadina Georgina Brown was just six years old when she came in from the desert. When she was found, she was clutching an armful of dingo pups.
Jila Country
Water was not only critical to desert people's physical survival, it was also central to their ceremonial practices and spiritual beliefs. The location of water sources defines Aboriginal people's Country.
The jila men
Of the 200 permanent springs in the jila Country, only about 30 are inhabited by the powerful ancestral beings known as jila or kalpurtu (rainbow serpents). Two of these springs, Kulyayi (Well 42) and Kaningarra (Well 48), became stock route wells.
Paruku and Tjurabalan
Before white settlement, the Paruku (Lake Gregory) and Tjurabalan (Sturt Creek) regions were centres of activity both for ancestral beings and for river, lake and desert people.
Droving time
The Canning Stock Route is the world's longest historic stock route, and it was reputedly Australia's most difficult.
Natawalu: The helicopter story
The people of the Western Desert moved across their land in a rhythm determined by the seasons and by their social and ceremonial duties. The coming of the drovers, however, introduced different kinds of movement and different reasons to move.
The moving desert
Throughout the twentieth century, social, cross-cultural and ecological pressures have pulled Aboriginal people from their homelands and pushed them into the settlements that fringed the desert.
Other roads
The Talawana track, which intersects the Canning Stock Route between wells 22 and 23, was surveyed and built by Len Beadell as part of a missile-testing project undertaken by the Commonwealth's Weapons Research Establishment (Woomera) in the early 1960s.
Creating culture
Acrylic paintings are only one part of the Canning Stock Route collection, and one of the most recent expressions of desert people's innovative traditions. Indeed, the National Museum of Australia's recent acquisition of art and material culture is not even the first 'Canning Stock Route collection'.
Majarrka juju
Majarrka juju (song and dance) describes the true story of Wurtuwaya (Yanpiyarti Ned Cox's grandfather) and Wirrali (Mayarn Julia Lawford's grandfather).
The art of Country: Stories still being told
The Canning Stock Route is many things in one: a path through the desert, a place where many different people came together, a region with a history that crosses cultures.
