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The story deals with women harassed by men. However the painting’s subject is centred on the ascension of the women to the rank of stars. Their metamorphosis sublimes their deed to deliberately refuse the status of a permanent victim and act in consequence … In these paintings, there are neither stars nor women.

At the time I came to the conclusion that the ‘cooling-off place’ had been designed by the same architect that had designed Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay. The several strands of barbed-wire at the top of the chain-wire mesh fence, the padlocked chain on the gate and the spotlights surrounding the Spartan building are reminiscent of TV images I had seen during the time that David Hicks was receiving similar consular assistance from the Australian Government as Julian Assange is currently receiving.

UPDATED – Now with added Gerry Wood! That’s not all! Just next to this rubbish dump there is an open sewerage pond where the raw sewage is pumped out straight of the houses. It is just very rough and ready – a hole in the ground surrounded by a chain-mesh fence. Pure raw sewage. The tip is about 2 or 3 minutes drive from the community. Kids walk back and forth. Dogs can get into the sewage ponds and then they go back to the community. It is a disgrace.

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.

But the thing about the two ladies is that they weren’t two resident botanists! No, they were just two ladies that happened to know a hell of a lot about plants in the region. And of course what is happening now with all this assimilationist push that is going on – the Intervention, Growth Towns, the Shires – you name it – is that a lot of that knowledge is gradually just fading away. Children are spending less and less time out in the bush with their grandmothers and mothers, learning all this. What grows where and when, what can you eat and what can’t you eat.

“Warlpiri people are not slaves, yet many in ‘mainstream’ society persist in claiming some sort of ‘ownership’ of Aborigines. They arrogantly have opinions as to what Aborigines should or shouldn’t do, and believe they have some sort of right in deciding what is best for them. Warlpiri have no power over their destiny. No say in their future. No say in how they should run their lives.” Frank Baarda, Yuendumu 2010

I can’t think of a single incident in the past in which the Warlpiri residents of Yuendumu have not respected non-Warlpiri residents’ neutrality in such matters. They respect our right to be kept out of it. This respect is not reciprocated by “mainstream” society, that has the arrogant belief that it is entitled to interfere and dictate to remote Aboriginals how they should live their lives. The Intervention epitomises this arrogance.

Now based in the regional centre of Tennant Creek Lex and Joe were instrumental in the establishment and continuing development of the Winanjjikari Music Centre that has grown to become one of Australia’s leading Indigenous music studios in the country. And it is from that studio that the latest Tableland Drifters, “Land Down Under” album has come.

My dad spent so much time out bush and we barely saw him when we were growing up. He was always out on a community. And you know now when I go to the most remote little community place all kinds of people come up to me and say “Oh Kumanjayi sorry for your dad”. Just yesterday at the Art Fair here in Darwin someone said to me…and my Dad died ten years ago… an older woman came up to me “Oh I’m sorry for your father that Kumanjayi”…it is an immense honour and incredibly humbling when people talk to me about my father as they do.