AustLit

'Between 2012 and 2019 Elizabeth Marrkilyi Ellis, Inge Kral and Jennifer Green worked together to make an enduring record of endangered verbal arts in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands communities of Western Australia. They filmed traditional Ngaanyatjarra tjinytjatjunku or mirlpa (telling stories while drawing in the sand) with women and girls. They then loaded up some iPads with a drawing app and filmed younger women using this new technology to draw with as they told stories about everyday life in their desert communities.

'The sixteen iPad stories are presented in i-Tjuma: Ngaanyatjarra stories from the Western Desert of Central Australia and readers can view the films with a linked QR codes. The stories burst with colour and originality, blending tradition and innovation and providing a unique window on the storytelling arts of an ancient culture.

'Story writers: Joella Butler; Katrina Giles; Bethany Cooke; Claudine Butler; Phillipa Butler; Kresna Cameron; Delisha Reid; Donisha Yunkett; Trisha Lewis; Susan Reid'(Publication summary) 

 'It is important for us to read our own stories and to keep the tradition of our language for our future generations.' — Dereck Harris, Chairman, Ngaanyatjarra Council

'In the Time of their Lives is a wonderful book that honours the extraordinary heritage and historical trajectory of Western Desert (Ngaanyatjarra) speech, the importance of speech and the management of its varieties with a complexity and insight we have rarely seen in print. With a blend of interviews in translation, close examples of speech, first person testimony, photographs, film clips and historical material, Kral and Ellis have brought attention to the changing sensory world of Yarnangu, of sight sound and bodily experience as central to Ngaanyatjarra sociality and personhood. It is rare, indeed, to have such respectful research flow from the intimate and personal perspective of a committed member and active participant in Ngaanyatjarra life.' — Fred Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology, New York University. (Publication summary)

'Wanarn Painters of Place and Time: Old Age Travels in the Tjukurrpa does indeed take us into the world of older Ngaanyatjarra painters – born into a time and place that is fast disappearing – who are spending their last days in the Kungkarrangkalpa Aged Care Facility at Wanarn in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in the Western Desert. Beautifully written and illustrated with colour plates of the paintings, this book weaves together social history, anthropology and art history. Through painting, the authors David Brooks, an anthropologist, and Darren Jorgensen, an art historian, take us into the historical circumstances that have formed the Ngaanyatjarra identity. The book describes the establishment of the Wanarn Painters program from Warakurna Arts by Eunice Porter, who was one of the directors of Warakurna Art, and others. The Wanarn painters are in their final stage of life, much of their strength and short-term memory has gone, and while this comes through in the way they paint, their long-term memory and links to Tjukurrpa (the Western Desert term for the Dreaming) remain strong because of their regular links to family, ceremony, song and dance.'