The Wanarn Painters of Place and Time: Old Age Travels in the Tjukurrpa

by David Brooks, Darren Jorgensen

This exquisite art book contains the precious story and transformative work of celebrated Aboriginal artists now living in an aged care facility in Australia's Ngaanyatjarra country, a remote and isolated community that is the center of their abundant world among ancient 'Dreamings.' An understanding of these paintings remains obscure, because they are made by people experiencing the end of their lives, detached from the anxieties of everyday life, but the vibrancy of each image is startling. David Brooks, an anthropologist, and Darren Jorgensen, an art historian, have both worked for many years with these people from the Ngaanyatjarra lands. They offer this artwork as a record of the remarkable power of imaginative belonging and knowing. Resembling extraterrestrial photographs, these bright galactic shapes rise from darkness, allude to cosmological truths, and are full of mystery. The mystery of these paintings lies in the fact that they can grip us with only the slightest of marks on the canvas, with only a gesture to the infinite knowledge they represent. This is the first of its kind in Australian Aboriginal art books: a collection dedicated to end of life vision and imagination. [Subject: Art, Aboriginal Studies, Australian Studies, Anthropology, Gerontology]

Genres: Art

122 pages, Paperback

Published November 19, 2015

About the author

David Brooks has published several collections of poetry, short fiction and essays, and four novels, The House of Balthus (1995), The Fern Tattoo (2007), The Umbrella Club (2009) and The Conversation (2012). His work has been highly acclaimed, widely translated and anthologised, and shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, New South Wales Premier’s, Adelaide Festival and many other awards. In 2011 he published The Sons of Clovis: Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette, and a secret history of Australian poetry. He teaches Australian literature at the University of Sydney, is co-editor of the journal Southerly, lives in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, and spends a small part of each year in a village on the sea coast of Slovenia.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name.

Reviews

[Lauredhel]

Very interesting discussion of the interaction of old age, tremor, failing vision with the production of art; and of the knowledge of tjukurrpa and the glimpses art provides into that enormous world. However I confess to having a bit of a side-eye at the jargon-laden, European-philosophy-infused aspects of the discussion, which are opaque to everyone but those heavily tertiary educated in Western art history. I believe that this knowledge and conversation should be more accessible, especially to those whose culture it is about in the first place.