The Lajamanu Aboriginal Community (originally named Hooker Creek) is situated on the edge of the Tanami Desert, midway between Alice Springs and Darwin, in the traditional country of the Gurindji people.

PHOTO: Yoris Wilson

The settlement was established in 1949 by the Native Affairs branch of the Federal Government with 25 Warlpiri people trucked there from Yuendumu (a similar Warlpiri settlement founded in 1946). In 1951, totally against their will, a further 150 Warlpiri were trucked to Lajamanu from Yuendumu. Unable to live away from their Dreaming sites, the people all walked back to Yuendumu, a distance of some 400 km. The notion of being removed from close relatives and from sources of spiritual power was anathema to them. Two further resettlements and Aboriginal walkbacks to Yuendumu occurred before the Warlpiri residents were prepared to accept the new community at Hooker Creek.

Lajamanu is now home to some 700 Warlpiri with a strong sense of cultural identity, helped by the settlement’s remoteness and its linguistic stability.

" We do not need museums or books to remind us of our traditions. We are forever renewing and recreating these traditions in our ceremonies…"
Maurice Jupurrula Luther

Warlpiri religion embraces the whole of life – woman and man, plant and animal – all of which would wither without the land. It is important to realise Warlpiri women’s designs differ in mythological content and visual thrust from those of the men, whether used in a ritual context or painted for sale. In Yawalyu (women’s rituals), principles of fertility and growth and activities at a specific locality are stressed, whereas in men’s ceremonies the routes taken by ancestors linking significant places are of primary importance. Women’s kuruwarri (ancestral) designs tend to be curvilinear, circular and formed of smaller separate units in abundant clusters, whereas straight or meandering track lines, lines of sites or ‘song lines’ dominate men’s designs. Although concentric circles are present in both classes of design, the circle is associated with women, the line with men. The dynamic travelling principle is linked with masculine potency, of the hunter free to wander in search of game. As such, travelling paths generally characterise men’s versions of ngapa (water), mala (wallaby) or yarla (bush yam). Women, however, have complementary versions in which the camp or home looms large.

Their art, whatever the medium, expresses the philosophy that people, plants, animals, birds and country are permeated by the supernatural and matter infinitely more important than things or worldly success.

The term Jukurrpa (Dreaming, Dreaming law, ancestral or heroic past) refers to the creative epoch in which Aboriginal men, women and all of nature came to be as they are - eternally interconnected with their totemic ancestors. The concept is not confined to the mythical past but carried forward into the present and future as a living reality. Aborigine might call the place from whence their spirit came or their Dreaming, or refer to their totem as their dreaming, or explain the existence of a social or moral imperative as causally due to the Dreaming. The word is attached to the titles of paintings, or floats as an adjective through descriptions, with one or more of these connotations in mind. The paintings celebrate a philosophy at odds with scientific rationalism, consumerism, greed for possessions and money - ‘white man’s Dreaming’.