Groundwork
Ground Work extract
Wednesday March 5, Adelaide
For Janice Lally
Retrieving Country
Government thinks this is empty country; it is not empty country. Jimmy Pike
A year before I was born men went to Ngurrara country
and brought back vocabularies, photographs, field notes
and maps, over a hundred maps - the walls are moving
with their marks travelling over sheets of brown paper.
They drew the mysteries of Spinifex, perentie
and soak holes, and dispersed names scrawled like trees
across the Great Sandy Desert which cartographers
from any angle had imagined a great emptiness.
A canvas recoups this landscape inscribed with over
a thousand sites, so vast it slopes to the floor
besieged by display and explanation. Monitors unfurl
elders cross-legged or crouched mashing art
with the profile of water, precedence of myth
history of waterholes and the prevalence of music,
the rhythm singing the real work with intensity
reddening red quandong ripe, song singing
to paint the painting’s syntax of past present since paint
ties skin to sand to story enmeshed in desert mosaic,
the silhouettes of hare-wallabies and desert bandicoots
not waking from dream into its presence.
Paliyarra the law giver emerged from a whirlpool travelled
to country with sacred objects (paly parra ) and stories,
the pulp and pith of breath and pips of song are folded
and unfolded. Folk art trees row into totemic signs
upending hierarchies of art with Lava Laval spreadeagled,
dead he turned into a snake and returned to jila kurtal,
some say he’s on the pension, but I can see tracks
to his waterhole. On the edge elders cry, others walk the country
and point to songs with sticks, one teaching a child beats a circle blue.
Returning after many years, another walks by water so happy
country is wet that he cries and would sleep on the meniscus,
key witnesses before a table set with black cloth,
‘The Federal Court of Australia’ embossed in gold. Dogs wander,
old women squeeze stones and paint the bloody ooze of ochre
onto kids in readiness for corroboree, a crowd of lawyers
and media watch dancers swirl below a wondrous mackerel sky.
Walking through the Karlijita ranges, I saw the hills moving. Kurtal Song