Seeds & Sovereignty: Seasons & Songlines

Sun 23 Jun 2024

Native plants provide nourishment, healing and the raw materials to create functional and ceremonial objects, shelter and tools for hunting. Their seasonal occurrence has tremendous ecological and theological importance in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. Lessons embedded into cultural stories, ceremony, art, dance and Songlines — refined over millennia of caring for Country — contain information critical to the safe use and sustainable collection of natural resources.

‘Seasons & Songlines’ is the third of four blogs that celebrate the interconnected relationships between plants, people and Country in ‘Seeds and Sovereignty’ at the Gallery of Modern Art until 18 August 2024.

Seasons & Songlines

A fusion of Law and ecology that connects people across vast regions of the continent, Songlines are the journey paths along which a creator ancestors travelled to bring Country into being.^[1] Expressed in songs, dances, rituals, and art they are containers of essential knowledge of the world, including, amongst a multitude of lessons, plant foods and medicine and their seasonal rhythms.

Minnie Pwerle Awelye Atnwengerrp 2000

In the dazzling and celebratory Awelye Atnwengerrp (Women’s ceremony from the Atnwengerrp) 2000 (illustrated), Utopia artist Minnie Pwerle brings to life the Dreaming stories of the increasingly rare bush melon, found only in Atnwengerrp. Here, melon shapes are intertwined with patterns that represent the Awelye designs painted on women’s upper bodies during Atnwengerrp ceremonies that honour bush food. Kunmanara Williamson and Mrs Burton’s Punu 2011 (illustrated) depicts the ultukunpa or kaliny-kalinypa (Honey Grevillea) Tjukurpa from their Country near Irrunytju in Western Australia; the meandering leaves and branches mimic and overlay ancestral journey lines solidifying the significance of this delicacy.

Kunmanara Williamson & Wawiriya Burton Punu 2011

Among a suite of prints depicting important food plants from diverse regions of the country, Torres Strait Islander artists Solomon Booth (illustrated) and Matilda Nona each represent the interconnectedness of plants within the rhythms of seasonal signs and ritual practice. Cape York artists Sonya Creek and Mavis Ngallametta (illustrated) both work with natural pigments in energetic works that revel in the landscape and the botanical food and medicine within it. These are complemented by Hermannsburg potter Rona Rubuntja’s 2009 ‘Bush tucker’ series of decorated pots (illustrated), which demonstrate the ongoing importance of these regional native foods. For these artists,

these are not just foods: they are bound up in stories of creation, in kinship, and in multiple layers of personal and collective memory . . . bushfoods are an inseparable part of themselves.^[2]

Solomon Booth Coconut palm 2010

Mavis Ngallametta Pamp (Swamp) 2009

Rona Rubuntja Lupa (wattle seed) 2009

Sophia Nampitjimpa Sambono (Jingili) is Associate Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, QAGOMA
This text is adapted from an essay first published in QAGOMA’s Members’ magazine, Artlines

Seeds and Sovereignty
2 March – 18 August 2024
Gallery 3.5, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA)

Endnotes

1. ^ Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe, Country: Future Fire, Future Farming, ed. Margo Neale, Thames & Hudson Australia, Vic., 2021, p.86.
   
2. ^ P Yates, ‘The Bush Foods industry …’, Dialogue, vol.28, no.2, 2009, pp.49–50, in Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, Allen & Unwin, NSW, 2011, p.129.