[MUSIC] I have been talking about a work of art by Emily Kam Kngwarreye and I'm going to turn my attention now to a collaborative work painted in 2009 by twelve women of three different generations who were painting at, Punmu in the East Pilbara of Western Australia. They had only begun to paint three years earlier when the Martumili Artists Cooperative was formed. One thing I want you to think about with this work is something that the Martu artists themselves have said. The painting is the country. The country is the song. The song is the dance. It is all connected. And just remember that the artists are also the land they paint. So all of these things, country, painting, song, dance, and the artists themselves are intimately connected. This particular work, Ngayarta Kujarra, represents the artist's cultural memories of growing up and living in a place where every day they were astonished by the gigantic salt lake, Lake Dora, with its crystalline surface, that was too harsh and sharp too walk upon. Around its surface, in wet seasons, rock holes spilled with water. These were places of living water, believed to have ancestral associations that were known and named in sacred songs of the womens' ceremonies. One of the things about this work is it is holistic, it is seamless. The artists come together over nine days and painted three by five metre canvas the largest one that they ever worked on in forty six degree heat. The thing is they layed in first the whiteness of this salt lake, and then around the edges, they painted and sung the names of the rock holes where different sorts of plants and bush fruits would spring to life in the wet seasons. The amazing thing about this work is that it looks like it's almost like Google earth. I have flown over this site and seen this amazing salt lake, and it encapsulates the visceral nature of this shimmering expanse of whiteness. There are large bands of salt lakes in this area of the Pilbara. Some of them are inhabited by dangerous cannibal spirits. They are a manifestation of ancestral activities in the tjukurpa, the dreaming. And what was amazing as well was that when the artist was speaking about this at a seminar at the Adelaide Festival, one of the people in the audience asked why it was so white. And the artists were mystified, flabbergasted, because as they said at the time, it is white, because that is what it looks like. They have created a platonic form of a place of sanctity that their spirits are immersed in. It is an amazing, holistic masterpiece that actually transports the viewer to this sacred place and also expresses the artists sense of oneness with it. Indigenous people often worked together collaboratively in a ceremonial context or in making paintings for the market. In this case, what happened is that the Martu people had moved back to Punmu after a long period of exile. During the mid-20th century, Martu people moved away from country in response to the intrusion of Europeans in their land. That is, the development of the pastoral and mining industries throughout the Pilbara. And most of them moved into mission stations or onto pastoral stations, where they worked for European overlords, as is the case with Emily Kam Kngwarray. In the early 2000s, the Martu gained title to their ancestral lands and moved back to homeland centres or out stations near where they had grown up. And there was such excitement that occurred when they moved back to Punmu that they had the idea that it would be wonderful to come together and create a work that expressed exactly what moving back to this country meant to all of them. In such a collaborate work, it is customary for senior women to take a leading hand, and in this case, Rosie Williams and Yikartu Bumba, who had earlier created a smaller scale representation of a giant salt lake in memory of Rosie Williams' sister who had passed away at Punmu and was the initiator of the idea of painting a salt lake as a huge expanse of white pigment on canvas. They decided that together they would create the celebration of their newfound return to country. And also, it will be an act of homage to Rosie Williams' sister, who had recently passed away. She was the heart and soul of the art centre. So Rosie Williams made the first mark on the canvas, and that was a dot. And then the other women, the grandmothers, daughters and grandchildren of the senior women came together with their right through kinship associations to also paint this particular place, and were led by the more senior members of their community. The wonderful thing, however, is that in painting the nature, the crystalline structure of the lake, different layerings of white came to the fore. Apparently, large numbers of children watched, and dogs walked all over the canvas they were painting on the ground in extreme heat. When it came to painting the outer edges, the hand of Yucarta Bomba and her characteristic palette is much to the fore, but the artists still were led by those two senior women. When it was all finished, they had a look and discovered that the white had become sullied by dogs and people sitting all over the canvas and children running all over it. And so it was taken to a place to the art centre inside and another artist, actually painted over the white to bring it back to the glistening whiteness, the blinding whiteness of the salt lake. Afterwards, they rolled up the canvas, got into a troupie and laid it out on the surface of Lake Dora and walked on it, on the lake. And it was just as if the surf, the painting was part of the lake and continued beyond the frame. The other thing that happened was that as they had been painting the rock holes, the places of living water around the edge of the canvas, on the stretching edge, the artist wrote, or called out the name of the particular water hole and it was written on the stretching edge. So this is a matte in planar perspective of the lake and the surrounding rock holes. But as with Emily Kam Kngwarray, it is as if the artists are inside the landscape that they are painting. They have walked upon it, felt it's contours through their feet. They know it intimately, it is if they are painting themselves, their own bodies. They are embodied in this place. The emergence of women's art practice in indigenous Australia is the greatest single change in the past two or three decades of Australian art. Indigenous women are audacious, fearless in their attack on the canvas, their juxtapositions of colours, the intuitive and organic freedom with which they work. Their responses to the landscape, to each other, their shared memories of songs, dances, and foot walking through country from which they were severed for many decades through incursions of Europeans into their landscape, fIll us all with profound awe. The work that they are making stands comparison with any work that is being made by contemporary artists in the world today. It stands up strong and is not overpowered. [MUSIC]