water drawings: red, yellow and blue
RAIN SONGS IN ALICE SPRINGS
The subject of Ruark Lewis's works Water Drawings: Red, Yellow and Blue-the Arrernte and Loritja 'rain songs' have brought about, maintained, and celebrated rain and rain ancestors of the Central Desert Dreaming down through the ages. The subject matter is also the translations of these oral traditions, first by Carl Strehlow, the early Lutheran missionary from Hermannsburg in Central Australia, and later his son Ted, the linguist, patrol officer, academic and meticulous ethnographer of the desert ceremonial traditions.
Water Drawings: Red, Yellow and Blue is part of a broader collaborative project by Lewis and Paul Carter titled Raft. lt includes a book titled Depth of Translation: The Book of Raft, which I found extremely interesting in terms of its prose though less accessible than the art itself.
The spoken and sung words of the rain songs were transformed into a written Arrernte and Loritja orthography and in turn translated into German and English texts by Carl and Ted Strehlow respectively. Many can be accessed through Ted's authoritative tome Songs of Central Australia. The paintings are accompanied by Carter's 'soundscape' of the Strehlows' heroic and tragic death-march down the Finke River, where an ailing Carl was to die in a vain attempt to get to the railhead at Oodnadatta. lt was perhaps a 'man-making' initiatory adventure for Ted. He retold the saga in Journey to Horseshoe Bend, a novel rich in its portrayal of the Arrernte people's totemic landscape of Dreaming ancestors and Ted 's own negotiation of European and Indigenous religious traditions. Lewis has taken the translations and transformed them into a series of crayon works that are, like desert art