AustLit

'Like the travel memoirs of writers who have wandered the Songlines of the Australian desert under the guidance of indigenous custodians, Aboriginal desert art offers a window into the lyrical and sacred world of the Dreaming. The paintings of the EarthSong exhibition (Australian Catholic University, 2015) embody excerpts from the song-myth cycles of the Western Desert; using ceremonial iconography to portray the actions of Ancestral Beings at specific sites, they form maps of terrain and title deeds to country. An exploration of several of the exhibition’s paintings affords a sense of the beauty, drama and complexity of the song-myth cycles that underpin and connect all of the paintings in the collection.'  (Publication abstract)

'Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay), a huge salt lake in the Western Desert region of Australia, features extensively in the tjukurrpa (Dreaming) narratives of the Pintupi and Kukatja. In this article, fragments of the public versions of these stories (such as those found in the literature associated with Western Desert art) are compiled and collated to give an overview of how the lake came into being. It proves possible to cluster the individual story fragments around three major themes - snake ancestors, kangaroo hunters, and sexual jealousy. While it is clear that there is no single definitive account of the creation of Wilkinkarra, all three story groups contain references to a fierce bushfire that devastated the land and formed the lake. The article concludes with a discussion of the possible origins of the various narrative elements, and an assessment of the methodology used in the survey.'  (Publication abstract)