Guide to Teaching about Aboriginal Religion through Art
Jack Egan, E.
This work, created in 2015, is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commercial 4.0 International License:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Welcome
This Guide was originally written for a workshop presented at the Recreate: Teaching RE through the Arts Conference held in Brisbane in April 2015. The conference was run by the Dialogue Australasia Network (DAN). DAN has 300 members, largely from Independent and Catholic schools and educational bodies in Australia and New Zealand, and is committed to fostering and promoting critical and creative approaches to teaching religion and philosophy in schools. That being its genesis, this Guide is created under a Creative Commons License, which means it is not copyrighted like a book. The author really wants you to use it, in whole or in part, and adapt it for your local area, provided your purposes are educational, good-willed and not-for-profit. Check the website above for how to respect the license.
The author, Jack Egan, is not Aboriginal but has been interested in Aboriginal Australia since he was a young rouseabout and shearer in outback Qld and NSW with Aboriginal workmates and overseer. Since that time he has known that there are very distinctive things going on in Aboriginal worlds. After a dormant period, Jack has re-cultivated that interest in recent years, inspired by his partner Cath Bowdler, who has considerable knowledge of Aboriginal art and has lived in the Northern territory for close to 20 years. In 2006, she completed a PhD on contemporary art from the Roper River region. Since that time, Cath has taught about Aboriginal art at university level and is currently the inaugural director of the Godinmayin Yijard Rivers Arts and Culture Centre in Katherine. This Centre is very much a Reconciliation project. It has come to fruition due to the efforts of long-term residents of the Katherine region, of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultures, working to create a single centre in which all groups can share and celebrate their cultures together. Its website is:
http://www.gyracc.org.au[1]
Since following Cath to Katherine three years ago, Jack has worked casually for the Godinmayin Yijard Rivers Arts and Culture Centre including establishing its Indigenous employment program. In addition, Jack has been training Aboriginal adults in Vocational Education and Training (VET) certificates in Katherine and in remote Top End communities. He is currently teaching senior RE at St Joseph’s College, a K-12 Catholic school in Katherine, NT. 30% of the 300 students at St Joseph’s are Aboriginal. In an earlier stint of teaching in Canberra at Merici College, a Diocesan 7-12 girl’s school, Jack taught RE and Philosophy and was the school’s Aboriginal contact teacher/mentor for thirty Indigenous students and facilitator of Merici’s Reconciliation Action Group.
On the side, Jack is urging the Katherine Town Council to develop a Reconciliation Action Plan. He is also creating an education kit linking the Australian Curriculum to the Yubulyawan Dreaming Project website. This site presents the extensive knowledge of Yidumduma Bill Harney, an elder of the Wardaman tribe whose country stretches from Katherine to the Victoria River. In May 2012, Jack’s article on Aboriginal religion, What was God doing for 45,000 years? was published in Dialogue Australasia.
Why are we doing this? We have reached the point in history when we need to move from cultural awareness to cultural competence. In achieving that competence in reading Aboriginal culture, our task is to understand Aboriginal religion so we can teach about it well. A good way to this competence is through art – it’s a rich way to illustrate the fundamentals. So, now we have two big topics – religion and art. Daunting to cover in a short time, but let’s see how we go …
Just a qualifier: This guide does not cover Torres Strait Islander spirituality. It is very much based around the author’s experience of Aboriginal culture and contacts, most recently in the Katherine region of Australia’s Top End where he currently lives. He urges others to build on or adapt what is here with their own experience, contacts and regional focus.
I welcome you to contact me:
How this guide is organized
The key ideas are explained in order and each is illustrated through hyperlinks to publicly available web pages as far as possible. There are a small number of resources which it is recommended the user of this guide purchase online, as they are not freely available on the web. See the end of the guide for details.
The superscripts at the right-hand end of each hyperlink are not footnotes. They are just a means by which facilitators taking groups through this guide in a workshop situation can identify web pages they have pre-downloaded. This guards against workshops being held up by slow internet connections.
Aboriginal Art
Definition
Aboriginal art is art made by Aboriginal people – full stop! Put any other preconceptions aside. Aboriginal art comprises a huge diversity of subjects, forms, and future possibilities. There can be rules about what a particular artist can, and cannot make art about, and particular subjects on which a particular artist will want to focus. However, the style an artist chooses is not rule bound. These are some wildly varying examples from visual art:
http://nga.gov.au/COLLECTIONS/ATSI/[2]
(National Gallery of Australia ATSI collection)
Aboriginal visual art is world-renowned. It is keenly sought by public galleries and private collectors all over the world. The art critic Robert Hughes reckoned this form of Aboriginal art as ‘the last great art movement of the 20th century’ (Citation hard to find though it is often cited). Others share this view as indicated by the title of this recently published anthology by academic, Ian McLean:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Aborigines-Invented-Idea-Contemporary/dp/090995237X[3]
A tour of the diversity of Aboriginal visual art
http://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0012/303105/yalangbara-resource.pdf (East Arnhem Land) [4]
http://papunyatula.com.au/artworks/ (Central Desert) [5]
http://fearns.com.au/4480/76089/work/jackie-giles-mural (Western Desert) [6]
http://www.wagga.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/8473/CC_ed_Kit.pdf (Roper River NT) [7]
http://www.mca.com.au/collection/work/200916/ (Fiona Foley) [8]
http://www.christianthompson.net/#!polari-2014/crsa (Christian Thompson) [9]
http://www.michaelriley.com.au/flyblown-1998/ (Michael Riley) [10]
http://www.kooriweb.org/bell/art.html (Richard Bell) [11]
http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/NIAT07/Detail.cfm?MnuID=4&SubMnuID=1&BioArtistIRN=33432&IRN=149628 (Daniel Boyd Cairns) [12]
This guide draws not only from contemporary visual art, but from many other art forms such as song, dance, ancient rock art, contemporary cartoons, and video; both fiction and documentary.
It is important to understand that though today much Aboriginal art is made to sell to a non-Aboriginal audience, contemporary art is rooted in deep and ancient cultural practice. The three links below show Wiradjuri tree carvings at ceremonial grounds, ceremonial ground art and body-painting respectively. The Arnhem Land Yolgnu boys painted for initiation in the third and fourth links each wear a different painted pattern which is their specific clan design and which they will own for life.
http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/events/exhibitions/2011/carved_trees/docs/3449_carved_trees_guide.pdf[13]
https://www.facebook.com/CryptikMovement/photos/a.166207279484.118344.157642574484/10152552540254485/[14]
http://www.panos.co.uk/preview/00009242.html?p=355[15]
http://www.panos.co.uk/preview/00071653.html?p=6[16]
Aboriginal religion
Religion in the world has many faces. To understand Aboriginal religion, it is, as with Aboriginal art, best to put preconceptions aside.
Like the phantom here – you could be in for some surprises!
http://www.artmonthly.org.au/backissue.asp?issueNumber=254[17]
Let us be clear. Aboriginal religion is a significant religion today. In Australia it is a major religion as argued by Catholic philosopher and public intellectual Max Charlesworth:
… W.E.H. Stanner and other anthropologists such as T.G.H. Strehlow and Ronald and Catherine Berndt have shown that indigenous religions are what one might call serious systems of belief and practice which can be compared with the great 'world religions’, though they are profoundly different from any of the latter. After all, they have withstood the test of time with a vengeance!
http://onlinecatholics.acu.edu.au/issue53/commessay1.html[18]
But what sort of religion is it? Let’s look at the idea of Professor Stephen Prothero that God is Not One. That is the provocative title of his 2010 book.
http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9781863954808/god-not-one-eight-rival-religions-run-world-and-why-their-differences-matter[19]
His idea is that, rather than different religions being different paths up the same mountain, they are different paths up different mountains. Extending Prothero’s idea, each religion can be conceived as having a different transcendent realm at the top of its mountain. The transcendent realm for Christians is heaven, and the path practitioners must take to reach it is loving as Christ loved (John 13:34-35). For Buddhists, the transcendent real is nirvana, and the path is the Eight-fold Path.
In contrast, the transcendent realm of Aboriginal religion is the ancestral world. In the words of leading Australian anthropologist, Howard Morphy, the path for practitioners of this religion is ‘becoming ancestors.’
(Morphy, H. Ancestral Connections. University of Chicago. 1991, p138)
Let us explore this Aboriginal ancestral world.
Dreaming
/ \
Law – Country
These concepts are the core of Aboriginal religion. They are closely connected. The Dreaming brings the Law and Country into existence. The Law tells how to look after Country, which is the land and everything in it. The connections are so close that, in some contexts, ‘Dreaming,’ ‘Law’ and ‘Country’ are used interchangeably.
This holism in Aboriginal worldviews is really important. The very famous Emily Kame Kngwarreye of Utopia in the Central Desert, whenever asked to explain her paintings, would answer,
‘That’s whole lot ….. that’s what I paint, whole lot’.
http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/utopia_the_genius_of_emily_kame_kngwarreye/emily_kame_kngwarreye[20]
(this webpage further explains this holism)
But that, though true, is not an easy way in for teachers or our students. So, to understand the connections, let us unpack one concept at a time.
Dreaming
Fundamentals
Aboriginal religion is fundamentally about connections to country. These connections are deep. They are metaphysical. That is, those links go far beyond anything physical or material. They are spiritual and religious, and for Aboriginal people, deeply emotional. They are unique in the world today – very different from other cultures’ ways of understanding self and country. Aboriginal connections to country are hard, but not impossible for non-Aboriginal people to understand and honour. To understand Aboriginal connections to country, the best place to start is the idea of ‘the Dreaming.’
As the source of creation, in the Dreaming ancestral beings awoke in a formless universe. They came down from the sky, emerged from water or broke through the crust of the earth. They journeyed across the sea and earth giving both form and features. They imprinted their bodies, their tools and their actions onto the ground and encountered other ancestral beings, sometimes battling, sometimes making children together and sometimes interacting in other ways.
This is how the natural environment we know today was created. It bears the signs and criss-crossing tracks of these ancestral beings, who are still as active today as they were at the beginning of time. At the end of their journeys the ancestral beings moved back into the sky, earth or water where they live now and forever. Often, in that process, ancestral beings changed into features we see today such as stars, mountains, rocks, islands, waterholes, plants, animals, birds and insects. Landscapes, seascapes and starscapes are a result of ancestral actions and transformation. This is what Wardaman tribe elder Yidumduma Bill Harney means when he says the Dreaming is in the rock, and the rock paintings are not paintings at all, but the impressions, silhouettes and shadows of the ancestors entering the rocks where they reside today,
‘… the shadow of all the Lightning People went into the walls of rock, and they are there today. We call that Buwarraja [the Dreaming] put them in there. The shadow went in here, these people change to become all the different animal at the same time, become birds, animals, kangaroos and... We call that Buwarraja put them in there right back from the beginning of the Creation. That's where they are now.’
(http://ydproject.com/index.php/lowernav/stories1/[21] (3rd video down: Creation Story 3)
As a time, the Dreaming is a dimension of current reality. It is read through signs in the land, sea and sky. It is place-specific according to the particular routes of the ancestors and the adventures they had at particular sites. However, it is not time-specific. Past, present and future are all here now. In the words of W.E.H Stanner, the humane giant of an anthropologist and public intellectual of the mid 20th century,
‘One cannot ‘fix’ The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen’
(Stanner, W.E.H. The Dreaming and Other Essays, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2010. p. 58)
The Aboriginal universe does not change with time unlike so many other things we think about – like getting older, in which change in our bodies happen irreversibly over time. Aboriginal time is cyclical, marked by birth and death or daily and seasonal cycles.
As the carrier of culture, the Dreaming holds the stories telling of the creation of the country and everything in it. These stories are very often told in songs. The songs and the country crossed in an ancestral journey make a songline.
In Aboriginal worldviews the ancestors continue to play an active role in sustaining what they created. This is analogous to the view common among Christians that God created the universe originally, and continues to play an active role in sustaining it.
As a personal responsibility, Aboriginal people are specially attached to particular Dreamings, that is, connected with certain ancestors and particular stories through the place and time of their birth. That is their totem, their identity. It is important to look after your totem. Emily Kame Kngwarreye painted her yam dreaming, her totem, many times in many different ways.
http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/utopia_the_genius_of_emily_kame_kngwarreye/yam[22]
Use local language for the Dreaming. The first word in the title of this workshop is ‘Tjukurrpa.’ This is a term for the Dreaming used by the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (NPY) peoples of the Central and Western Deserts. Academic Christine Nicholls, writing for a general audience, says the same word with a different spelling is used by,
… the Warlpiri people of the Tanami Desert [who] describe their complex of religious beliefs as the Jukurrpa. Further south-east, the Arrerntic peoples call the word-concept the Altyerrenge or Altyerr (in earlier orthography spelled Altjira and Alcheringa and in other ways, too). The Kija people of the East Kimberley use the term Ngarrankarni (sometimes spelled Ngarrarngkarni); while the Ngarinyin people (previously spelled Ungarinjin, inter alia) people speak of the Ungud (or Wungud). “Dreaming” is called Manguny in Martu Wangka, a Western Desert language spoken in the Pilbara region of Western Australia; and some North-East Arnhem Landers refer to the same core concept as Wongar – to name but a handful.