Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, National Museum of Australia

One of the most sacred Aboriginal creation stories is finally, and controversially, being taken to a national audience.

Ngamaru Bidu, Kumpaya Girgirba and Ngalangka Nola Taylor at Parnngurr Rockhole. Picture: Colin Murty

After a solid morning of painting in the shed at Parnngurr, Martumili art convener Carly Day offers to take painters Kumpaya Girgirba, Ngamaru Bidu and Ngalangka Nola Taylor for a drive. There is a short discussion in Martu before they tell Day they want to go to Yulpu, a shady freshwater soak. It lies near a deep red escarpment where Bidu and Girgirba remember being chased long ago by Aboriginal trackers who were rounding up desert people for the government.

The soak is about an hour’s bumpy drive along a narrow sandy track from Parnggurr, a tiny community that swells to 100 and shrinks to a handful of residents when they head out bush or to the nearest town of Newman, 370km away. The women travel in one car with Day while another follows behind with the men — the National Museum of Australia’s director Mat Trinca, The Australian’s photographer Colin Murty and the pilot, who has only seen this country from a cockpit and is curious.

The scrub is low with occasional trees along the way; at one stop, the women pull flowers from a yellow grevillea and hand them out, instructing the visitors to put the flowers, or wama, in their mouths and suck the nectar.

Taylor, Bidu, Girgirba and National Museum of Australia director Mathew Trinca. Picture: Colin Murty

At Yulpu, Bidu and Girgirba walk together in the long grass and point out the escarpment where they once fled. The younger Taylor — whose strong command of English means she often acts as interpreter for the others — is reluctant to have her photograph taken here because this is not country in which she grew up.

Back in the car, the women decide to move on to Parnngurr Rockhole, another freshwater spot with orange and red-hued hills where government officials came to take photographs of nomadic Aboriginal families in the 1950s and 60s. The trio of artists gives permission to be photographed here. “This place is in the painting,” announces Girgirba, referring to the monumental work titled Yarrkalpa — Hunting Ground that they, with five other Martu women, created for the National Museum’s forthcoming exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters.

As they pose on the rocks, Girgirba starts to describe how the women divided the painting into sections. “We all sat down and said, ‘You do this and I do this’,” she says.

In one corner of the painting is a series of seven spherical forms. They are the Seven Sisters, or Minyipuru, the mythical spirits the women see in the night sky whenever they roll out swags and sleep out. Stargazers around the world would call the clusters the Pleiades and Orion constellations, but these are not names Bidu, Taylor or Girgirba would use. They have a different name — and a constellation of stories to match — about the seven spirit beings that were pursued by a lustful man, Yurla, across the creation landscape.

“Soaring together across the night sky, chased relentlessly by the priapic old man, the Minyipuru leave their traces everywhere,” writes essayist Kim Mahood in the Songlines catalogue. “As the Minyipuru dance, run and fly across the Martu landscape, zigzagging from waterhole to rock hole, fleeing Yurla, sometimes outwitting him, sometimes falling victim to him, they map the waterholes and mark the country, creating landmarks and enacting ­ceremonies weaving a picaresque tale that is menacing and hilarious, cheeky, violent, transcendent — and above all memorable.”

As female custodians, the three Martu women live in intimate proximity — physical and spiritual — to their part of the Seven Sisters songline. With others, the women have patiently explained how the Minyipuru spirits set out eastward from Roebourne, near the West Australian coast, and travelled for hundreds of kilometres, leaving a trail of rocks, waterholes and other features in the land. After reaching their final Martu placename at Pangkapini, the sisters moved on through different country with other languages to become part of someone else’s Dreaming, or Tjukurpa. “Seven Sisters is not just one songline — they travelled all around Australia,” Girgirba and Taylor explain.

Girgirba painting in the shed at Parnngurr. Picture: Colin Murty

Accordingly, the museum exhibition contains stories from traditional custodians of the Seven Sisters Tjukurpa across the lands of the Anangu, Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra peoples.

READ: Songlines project sparks indigenous culture war

It has been a feat to gather stories along a disjointed “line” more than 7000km long, and across an area of 600,000sq km. Says NMA senior indigenous curator Margo Neale: “Collectively, Anangu and Western scholars used their particular skills to track and record the Seven Sisters songlines cartographically, archeologically, ecologically, visually and performatively across three states and deserts.”

Over nearly seven years — two more than originally planned — large numbers of participants have made logistically tough trips to document stories, painting and dancing the Seven Sisters story on their country. It has also been a curatorial journey as fraught with conflict and alleged transgression as the Seven Sisters’ legendary flight from Yurla’s clutches. Rising above community dissent over a sacred story and tackling well-publicised deep divisions over its telling have become part of the challenge.

Back in the Parnngurr painting shed, Taylor hints at the delicate protocols about place, seniority and gender divide, and who can speak for what. She says family members had to be consulted before taking part in the Seven Sisters project. “I had to ask to all my brothers. I told them I wanted to do a good painting,” she says. “We talked about it.”

But when it came time to paint, she says everyone knew what to do. A time-lapse camera installed above the painters’ heads has recorded the steady, dot-by-dot story that materialised on the Yarrkalpa canvas; the footage will be screened in Canberra.

“We know all this,” says Taylor, pointing to a replica of the artwork. Touching her forehead, she says: “We have got it here.”

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The Seven Sisters project was born in Canberra in 2010, when a small group of indigenous elders met art centre managers, museum staff and Australian National University academics to discuss applying for a joint Australian Research Council grant. In her catalogue essay, Neale recounts the moment Anangu elder David Miller leaned across the table. “[He] spoke in hushed but weighty tones: ‘You mob gotta help us … those songlines they been all broken up now … you can help us put them all together again.’ ”

Neale says there was a palpable sense of urgency that Aboriginal young people needed to be able to get important cultural knowledge from somewhere. The elders wanted Western ways of “holding the knowledge” until a future time when they had passed on and the young ones were ready to learn. “This was their mission and it became ours,” she says.

An ARC grant of $800,000 was made, and the Seven Sisters theme settled upon. The term “songlines”, popularised by novelist Bruce Chatwin in his 1987 book of that name, is a cross-cultural term “Aboriginal people now own, big time”, Neale says.

Songlines is described in this project as “a cross-cultural term for the concept of Tjukurpa, altyerre, kujika and so on”, in the languages of about 15 to 20 participating communities across the Central and Western Desert lands. It is partially modelled on the museum’s earlier major exhibition Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route (displayed in the museum’s First Australians Gallery until last April in a smaller form). Considered by many an inspirational model for putting forward the voice and perspective of indigenous Australians, it brought together paintings, video and historical documentary gath­ered during a trek along the 2000km route.

But that show was more about Aboriginal people reclaiming their history on the whiteman’s stock route, says Neale. “This exhibition asks the big questions — What are songlines? Why are they relevant? And how do they relate to Australian history and identity?”

Trinca says a useful way for non-indigenous Australians to think about the songline stories “is to see these alongside the great epic sagas that we know from elsewhere around the world: The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Book of Genesis, the Homeric epics The Iliad, The Odyssey. These are the great human narratives around the world but the songlines, the Seven Sisters songlines, sit alongside those great human stories.”

Wokka Taylor at work at Parnngurr; National Museum of Australia director Mathew Trinca.

Trinca stresses the Seven Sisters project has been instigated and driven by Aboriginal peoples, across Martu country, the APY Lands and Pitjantjatjara country. “It was they who said, ‘We want to save these stories for our kids, for future generations.’ ”

A “curatorium” of elders was formed to lead the project, while “retrieved” cultural material was to be lodged in Ara Irititja, “an online multimedia archive” overseen by a board representing APY Lands communities. Levels of public access to the archive vary depending on the sensitivity of its content.

“A great deal of the motivation for this project was around documenting these stories and ensuring that those materials are held in indigenous-run archives for the future and for the next generation,” says Trinca.

That’s precisely where the project ran into trouble in 2014, when a precursor Songlines show called Alive with the Dreaming was displayed at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide. On the eve of the exhibition, The Australian’s writer Nicolas Rothwell reportedthat “senior men of law all through the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara lands were up in arms” over a failure to consult properly on sensitive secret-sacred business.

The atmospherics of the Seven Sisters research angle “were calculated to raise the hackles of senior men”, he wrote. “There are elaborate paper protocols and safeguards but, in practice, ‘no’ is a word Aboriginal art researchers just don’t understand.”

What had begun “as a dewy research scheme to exalt desert art and knowledge is increasingly being seen in the bush as a mortal threat to traditional law and culture”.

Neale, however, says she and her team have been instructed by the curatorium, whose authority covers every aspect — from places to visit, to trickier issues of which footage, art objects or images would be shown, restricted or not captured at all.

“We just didn’t go where we shouldn’t go,” she says. “This is an integrated exploration of the Seven Sisters songlines — a departure from the usual Western compartmentalised way — and correlates more closely with how desert people know their country.

“Over and over again, it was not (simply) an act of charity that people would say, ‘We want you to share this stuff.’ They were saying, ‘These are the foundational creation stories and if everybody understands the significance to Australia and to them, it will keep them strong.’ ”

Adds Trinca: “Communities have chosen what stories they want to tell in this exhibition, who tells them and how these stories should be represented. Where communities have chosen not to include certain stories, they have not been shared. The National Museum has naturally respected that.”

Neale admits Songlines has been “unquestionably the most challenging show on every front … But if it’s not pioneering and groundbreaking, it wouldn’t be worth doing.”

At the entrance to the exhibition, eight elders including Taylor and brother Muuki Taylor will “virtually” greet visitors and invite them to journey on. “They’ll be saying, ‘This is a big story, and it’s your story, too.’ ”

Museum patrons will move from site to site along the Seven Sister songlines in each of the three countries represented. “They literally walk from west to east in the footsteps of the Seven Sisters, with the sites mapped on to the gallery plinths.” As the sisters flee from the lecherous clutches of Yurla, so does the visitor.

Patrons can enter a 6m-high dome, under which they will be transported to Cave Hill rock, a controversial site where lies the only known rock art representation of the Seven Sisters. After a time-lapsed transit of the Pleiades, “the sisters in all their quirkiness will fly across the dome as they do in the story, swirling and twirling playfully in their bid to escape their male pursuer”, writes Neale.

Alysha Taylor, who works at the East Pilbara Arts Centre in Newman. Picture: Colin Murty

A haunting soundscape will be heard too, featuring senior Martu artist Girgirba. In another twist to her extraordinary story — she led a nomadic existence completely isolated from white Australians until 1963 — Girgirba is heard chanting and singing with New York-based singer Anohni, who toured Australia last year with the band Antony and the Johnsons.

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The epic nature of the Songlines artworks contrasts with the humble surroundings in which some of them were created, such as the remote bush shed at Parnngurr.

Day is bustling round supplying paint and cups of tea. As business manager of Martumili Arts, she runs the co-operative that sells the work of Martu artists at its new East Pilbara Arts Centre in Newman; she also sells work online and at art shows across the country.

She’s gathering up warm clothes for the artists who will make the 3000km journey to Canberra next month for the exhibition opening.

Other museums and art galleries are clamouring to collaborate on projects with Martu artists. In truth, the National Museum’s big, altruistic ambition to bring Aboriginal stories to the public has less immediate impact on Girgirba, Bidu and Taylor than filling a funding gap when art sales slow down.

One of the shed’s most prolific painters, Taylor balances her interpreter and cultural adviser roles with obligations that include sending her grandchildren to boarding school in Melbourne. “It’s a long way but there they go to school every day. If they stay in the community it’s hard.”

When she heads to Canberra, Taylor will repeat to anyone who asks that Martu paintings are just the visual confirmation of songline knowledge stored “up here”, pointing again to her forehead.

Back in his museum director’s office, Trinca says he is looking forward to the reaction when the Seven Sisters story is unleashed on the ­nation, and the world.

“They are the epic sagas of the continent that should be honoured, remembered, understood.”

Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters opens at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra on September 15.