This is a delayed post due to being out of range for a thousand or so kms. Note to self and others: Optus is Useless up here.
On Thursday and Friday last week (12-13 May) I had a last-minute, serendipitous opportunity to visit Yuendumu, an Aboriginal community 300km northwest of Alice Springs in the middle of the Tanami desert. It’s a tiny place with only a few streets this way and that, yet it’s one of the largest remote communities in central Australia. If you look closely in the picture above you can see the lights of the streets just beginning to stand out against the dusk (if you need a hand it’s the row of lights in the centre third of the frame, between the hills and the line of dust left behind by a passing road train).
Where to begin… My host while in Yuendumu was Teghan, who I met through Katie in Alice. Teghan works at the local community radio station 8PAW. The radio station brings together the musics and stories of the three surrounding language groups: Pintubi, Anmatjere and Warlpiri. The station facilitates festivals, local radio shows, public announcements, employment opportunities… It’s incredible what the place does. It has a recording studio and a film studio. From an initial, outsider’s perspective, 8PAW seems to act as the voice of the community, spreading messages and music and aspects of culture not only to the community centre in Yuendumu but also to surrounding communities and even the remote homeland outstations, where Aboriginal people are returning to live a more traditional way of life.*
I’ve had a fascination (fixation really) with Yuendumu since I bought a replacement glasses case from the gift shop at Monash university, which is decorated with Aboriginal art from Yuendumu. On the inside is a name I’ve been rolling around my mouth and mispronouncing for months now – Warlukurlangu. Warlukurlangu Arts Centre is located in Yuendumu and I managed to track down the name of the artist whose artwork decorates my glasses case, but unfortunately he has passed away since he painted that artwork. The word Warlukurlangu itself translates to ‘belonging to the fire’ in Warlpiri.
Now, I’ve heard that it’s offensive for tourists to claim they have a spiritual experience in response to certain aspects of aboriginal culture and dreaming but with a concept as evocative as ‘belonging to the fire’ it’s hard to not let your imagination run absolutely wild. What is the fire? Is it the fire of the creative spark? Of creative genius? Or of the impermanence of human experience? What do the Warlpiri people make of the phenomenon of creativity? The questions are endless. The arts centre is huge in relation to the size of Yuendumu, and holds an unexpectedly large collection of Aboriginal art from the surrounding region. My favourite contemporary aboriginal art are those paintings of the night sky. A friend told me that some aboriginal cultures conceive celestial shapes as the negative space in between groups of stars, rather than as the lines between individual stars as Western constellations go. This way of thinking (or seeing) may be a reflection of Australia’s position on the globe where the Milky Way is largely visible, and also given that light pollution is only really a recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of things and is confined to cities and towns. Or it could be because, ontologically, various central Aboriginal cultures conceive patterns as not drawn between points but as the continuous lines that can be drawn in the negative spaces aroundpoints… So much baseless speculation is probably not productive nor appropriate to voice on such a public platform as this. Yet I do it in the hope that perhaps someone can answer my questions.
Sunbell the van broke down many many times on the way home – luckily we managed to get towed back to Alice by a passing friend of Josh and Teghan. The upside of this little misadventure was that we got to see the desert sunset again.
Gratitude to Cassidy for getting me there, and Teghan and Josh for having me, for your warmth and willingness to share, and for showing me all the ins and outs of 8PAW. Yuendumu has indeed forged a little space for itself in my imagination…

*This is a potentially huge tangent that I’ll refrain from exploring here – basically the government is reluctant to fund the gradual return of Aboriginal people to outstations (read – country) because they deem these outstations to be a ‘lifestyle choice,’ a concept made popular by Tone Abet during his Prime Ministership. Despite a lack of federal funding for these outstations there are people in Yuendumu working towards making these outstations as successful and sustainable as possible.