There is little doubt that the high point of the annual Indigenous festival of art and culture in Darwin this August was not at the Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) where the Telstra NATSIAA (National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award) was attempting to collate and adjudicate the best Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art of the year for the 31st time, but at the Charles Darwin University.
There, the ‘Yirrkala Drawings’ exhibition, which had already delighted Sydney and Brisbane viewers, was on show in the Northern Territory (NT) for the first time. For these crayon drawings on brown paper, which were encouraged by anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt in 1947, had been then shipped off to their research centre in Perth, and all-but forgotten as art. During the development of the exhibition by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, descendants of the artists were consulted about meanings of the works and their display. So by mid-2014 these descendants were ready to give the works themselves a rousing welcome in the NT.
And those Yolngu know how to do ceremony. The ear-shattering, committed ‘performances’ of various appropriate dances brought back memories for me of the great pan-tribal dance festival I experienced on Groote Eylandt in 1985, where the finest performers from groups as far away as Derby and Uluru showed off their skills and culture to their Indigenous peers. In Darwin, they were doing it for the drawings and the ancestors who had made them. As Waka Mununggurr explains in the Yirrkala Drawings catalogue, ‘(in 1947) we were not recognised, but we had these drawings. We have them on the body all the time... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline