12 Results

This brings us back to the Notice at the Nyirripi Store and begs the following question.
Has anyone bothered to ask the locals if they want the Police to shoot their dogs?
No? I thought not.

Erica Izett: “Success, especially too much success, always conceals within it dangers. In the case of Desert Mob, for example, its very success hails it as a prime event for the commercial sector to identify the cream of the crop…[which] has made it easier for unscrupulous dealers to profit without due recompense from the enormous work of the arts centres to nurture artists.”

This is “Stripe“, who ended up with Gloria Morales, an animal carer that works at the Warlukurlangu Artists cooperative in Yuendumu – a remote community about 300 kilometres north-west 0f Alice Springs.

Ceciia Alfonso told me that “I take my dog Maliki to work every day – and I’m glad that the artists do as well. The only days that I leave Maliki at home is when he has a bad dose of the farts – they are truly horrible.”

The Night Parrot is relatively small, prefers to shuffle about close to the ground (like it’s closest taxonomic cousin the aptly-named Ground Parrot, Pezoporus wallicus), is nomadic across a vast area and with exceedingly cryptic plumage, it has never been n easy bird to tick off on your list. There are only a few specimens in museum collections – and most of those were collected from a small part of northern south Australia many years ago. The last confirmed sighting of the Night Parrot was in 1912 and for the last 100 years the Night Parrot has widely been considered to be extinct and it wasn’t until the 1970′s that a series of unconfirmed reports of sightings started to emerge. In 1989 eccentric millionaire Dick Smith offered a $50,000 reward for proof of the current existence of the Night Parrot.

AMRRIC is covering a wider field now in that we are trying to help out with not only facilitating vets into communities but also to help the local Shires with legislation, trying to increase awareness at the Federal government level of the problems with animal management nationally and we are also trying to increase education of the community.

Like many other aspects of life in Aboriginal communities the dogs there are far more visible in Aboriginal communities where there are few fences and the dogs can all be seen in public, whereas in the suburbs of Palmerston and Darwin the dogs are all behind fences and locked inside houses and you just don’t see them.

To me the call of the Yinkardakurdaku sounds like water flowing out of a narrow-necked bottle, a beautiful succession of fluid sounds ending in an almost joyous, crazy climax.

The focus of “Ilgarijiri – things belonging to the sky” is a collaborative project between artists associated with the Wajarri Yamatji region and radio astronomers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), based in Perth, Western Australia.

If you are in Alice Springs this weekend you can do a lot worse than go along to the Aralauen Arts Centre and catch the Desert Mob show that will be opening there Sunday – you might be lucky and see one of Nungarrayi’s paintings in the exhibition.