Book Review
Jennifer Isaacs The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University, 2012
2012 was a marvellous year for the publication of important, richly-illustrated tomes on Aboriginal art—from the serious Larrikitj, the Kerry Stokes Collection of Yolgnu burial poles to the warm-hearted Tjanpi Desert Weavers. But was anything as comprehensive as Jennifer Isaacs’s Tiwi: Art/History/Culture?
What a magnificent effort, the result of an all-too-rare feature of this strange business called Aboriginal art—continuity. Jennifer Isaacs has been involved with Tiwi life and creativity for forty years; and it shows in her range of references, her depth of understanding and, occasionally, her partiality. Having produced the still useful, if populist, Australia’s Living Heritage (1984), Isaacs has been sharing her understanding for a long time. There are not many like her—far too many seek to act as gate-keepers to ‘The Knowledge’; others seek only to profit from their connections to it, however tenuous.
So, who are the Tiwi? An exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2007 translated the name of both the people and the pair of islands north of Darwin (we call them Bathurst and Melville) as, ‘We the only people’. Isaacs does not go quite that far, though she does reveal that, in the rich and still influential Tiwi mythology involving the man who invented death for them, Purukapali, he left the islands for Tipampunumi, the Land of the Dead, aka the Australian mainland, sixty kilometres away! Which does suggest an uncaring isolation in their insular Garden of Eden. She also gives justified space to my old friend, Pedro Wonaeamirri to make a ringing statement of difference between Tiwi and mainland Aborigines. The thirty-eight year old artist and community leader at Milikapiti also worries about the lack of