‘Transformative’: How a remote WA town, population 20, inspired Bangarra’s new show

This story is part of the April 19 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

It is just after dawn and we are surrounded by the peace and overwhelming natural beauty of the coastal Kimberley region of north-western Australia. We’ve just taken a short 4WD trip through the pale, grass-strewn dunes – sacred land where initiation ceremonies guiding young boys through to manhood still take place. We emerge onto a vast rock shelf that overlooks a tidal estuary, also home to a set of ancient footprints, a series of child-sized markings in the rock alongside those of their elders, memories worn in by centuries of use by Aboriginal tribes who walked this path to the sea. There is not a soul to be seen, yet it’s teeming with life – birds feeding and warbling, the regular splash of fish. Through the dunes, the empty, pristine beach stretches as far as the eye can see, the turquoise water home to bountiful sea life, jellyfish and the odd croc.

Soon the day will steam up and the oppressive humidity will close in, but for now the weather is idyllic, the atmosphere heightened by the sense we are the last – or the first – people on Earth.

We are on the lands of the Bard/Bardi Jawi people of Lombadina, and local Goolarrgon Bard man and artist Darrell Sibosado is quietly discussing his country, its history and its significance to his people with his old friend and colleague Frances Rings, choreographer and artistic director of the Sydney-based national Indigenous performing arts company, Bangarra Dance Theatre.

The day begins with the dawn and quietens with the setting of the sun or the cacophonous arrival of an electrical storm.

The feeling of remoteness and isolation is no illusion. The population of Lombadina numbers a mere 20. It was nothing short of an epic journey for this Sydneysider to travel here, as far away from home as you can get within the mainland: a five-hour flight to Perth, a two-and-a-half hour flight to Broome and a three-hour, 4WD trip north to Lombadina and the Dampier Peninsula on a recently sealed, single-lane highway, experiencing a dramatic thunderstorm along the way.

Today the community works with, and lives from, the land: fishing, crabbing, harvesting bush tucker to supplement whatever the general store in neighbouring Djarindjin has to offer. Time has a different rhythm here. The day begins with the dawn and quietens with the setting of the sun or the cacophonous arrival of an electrical storm. In many ways, life in Lombadina is largely the same as the 59-year-old Sibosado remembers from his childhood, when his family moved from Port Hedland back to his father’s community in the early 1970s. Back then, however, life was controlled by the Catholic Church – which still owns part of the land today, a strong point of contention. Sibosado’s overriding memory is of nuns adorned in habits, despite the 40-degree heat; of the bell that tolled regularly demanding you drop whatever you were doing and pray; of being forbidden to speak your own language.

We are here with the permission of the local community at the behest of Rings and a small creative team from Bangarra. Photographer James Brickwood and I are the first media ever invited to accompany Bangarra on an on-country visit, the crucial first step that precedes any new show. The crew has been observing the customs, culture, lore and everyday life of this remote community and its connections with the land; stories and observations that will ultimately feed into and inform the stage production Illume, choreographed by Rings in collaboration with Sibosado, himself a sought-after visual artist. Come June, the show will have its world premiere at the Sydney Opera House, 5300 kilometres and a world away.

Miles of aisles

“What is this place to you?” It is a question Goolarrgon man and local leader “Bundy” (Brendan) Chaquebor asks Bangarra’s creative team as they wade knee-deep through the mangroves, spears in hand, in search of mud crabs. “It’s a mangrove”, “the sea”, “the ocean” are various responses. The group had been discussing tropical cyclone Zelia, which had torn through the Pilbara, crossing the coast east of Port Hedland days earlier, leaving the roads flooded and trucks with crucial supplies unable to get through. Aisle after aisle of supermarket shelves in Broome lie bare of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy, coffee and bread, alarming many. Not in Lombadina. “For us, this mangrove is our shopping centre. If that road’s closed we’ll come here, we don’t need anything else. We can always get water, and an abundant supply of food,” Chaquebor says.

He goes on to show the group how to hunt mud crab – a spear thrust down a hole that returns a dull noise indicates there’s nothing there; a high-pitched sound lets you know you’re hitting shell. He teaches the group that mangrove wood gives the best flavour when building a fire to cook the crab, oysters, pipis and cockles the women have dug up; what tide will allow you to walk far out on mud flats left rich with shellfish; how to train your eye to hone in on the dunes so they slowly reveal the concealed mission huts the community lived in for decades, and the middens, proof of occupation extending back thousands of years.

From left: Darrell Sibosado, lighting designer Damien Cooper, cultural consultant Audrey (Pippi) Bin Swani and composer Brendon Boney during a Bangarra team meeting.Credit: James Brickwood

“It’s transformative how they view country, respect it and understand it,” says Rings, a Mirning woman from South Australia. “Bundy is so intelligent in cultural ways, an incredible professor of his country. It’s a small but rich, intensely beautiful, dynamic community and I love that they use the resources they have to become empowered today.”

It is these sorts of communities, the stories and knowledge people such as Chaquebor share that explain why Bangarra spends years establishing trust and relationships with the people of places like Lombadina, listening, observing and ultimately sharing through dance theatre their stories of resilience, survival and innovation, giving audiences a glimpse into – and understanding of – another way of life.

Sibosado is the conduit between Rings and Lombadina. The pair first met in the late ’80s at the fledgling NAISDA (National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association) performing arts college in Sydney. For Rings, dance was always her first language, as important as oxygen, and formal training was the obvious next step. For Sibosado, an adventurous, ambitious kid, it was a means of escaping Lombadina and the stifling control of the Catholic Church. Sydney beckoned, and after graduating from NAISDA he lived in the inner city for 30 years, working in the creative arts industry. But in 2015, the pull of home became too strong and he moved back to his family and the still-small community of Lombadina, in many ways just as he remembered it and in others, like a different planet. It is these worlds Rings is intent on exploring in Illume.

Mission days

The Catholic presence in Lombadina dates back to 1892 when Irish-born Matthew Gibney, Perth’s Roman Catholic bishop, purchased a pastoral lease named Lombadina close to the first mission established in the Kimberley at Beagle Bay. Lombadina Mission was set up in 1911 and soon run by the Sisters of St John of God. Life was basic: a convent was built for the nuns and paperbark huts served as a dining hall and a school that opened in 1917.

According to Sibosado, it was about 1935 when the last mob from the bush moved to live on the mission; Aboriginal children from across the Kimberley were brought in to live and be educated at Lombadina, sleeping in dormitories and returning to their families at Christmas, a practice that continued well into the ’70s. Cultural practices and local languages were banned, while tribes from different cultural groups were forced to live side by side.

Following the 1967 referendum and the later homeland movement, a desire for self-determination led certain Aboriginal communities to slowly assume control and leadership of their own people and affairs. The Sibosado family returned to Lombadina in 1972, in the dying days of the mission.

“We moved here to look after my husband Basil’s parents; Darrell was around five,” says Darrell’s mum Caroline Sibosado. A Noongar woman from Port Hedland, Caroline was born at home with two Aboriginal midwives. “Never went to hospital,” she says proudly. Once they were back, Basil was put in charge of the mission’s large herd of cattle while Caroline worked in the mission office. Sibosado and his seven brothers attended the small local school and then, by arrangement with the Catholic Church, left to board in Perth for high school, a system that continues to this day.

The bush church at Lombadina, built in 1932 during the community’s days as a Catholic mission when cultural practices and local languages were banned.Credit: James Brickwood

From the late 1970s, Lombadina became a self- governing community and in the mid-1980s, Caroline and Basil co-founded the Lombadina Aboriginal Corporation. Caroline became its founding CEO, a position she held for 20 years. Now in her mid-80s and still a director, she is a hugely respected local elder, a practising artist who runs the community’s gallery and craft shop.

Today, opinions on the occupation of Lombadina differ. Caroline appreciates the chance for local kids to be educated but acknowledges the ramifications. “They weren’t the same as the stolen generations – they went home for holidays, they only came here for education,” she says. “The kids liked it here, because they knew what was going to happen from day to day. A lot of them stayed [in Lombadina], they married, but then it caused a lot of problems as well – people didn’t have their own family with them all the time. I think it’s caused a lot of alcoholism and all this sort of stuff. Well, that’s happened everywhere …”

‘Going to high school opened my eyes. We’re talking about kids who came from a mission; the only white people they would see were the missionaries.’

Darrell Sibosado

Sibosado sees it differently. “It was total control, backed by the government and the police. They tried to stop us doing our ceremonies, but people just moved further up the hills. I couldn’t wait to get out of here. I’ve never been, ‘Oh well, at least they [educated] us,’ because what they took was way more valuable to me and my people. Because we would have inevitably done something like this anyway.”

Get out he did, and from year 8, Sibosado boarded at St Norbert’s College in Perth before completing his final year in California, through the American Field Service program. “Going to high school opened my eyes. We’re talking about kids who came from a mission; the only white people they would see were the missionaries. But it was safe and comfortable. I wasn’t just some kid being sent off to boarding school in the middle of nowhere; there were already kids I knew from all over the Kimberley.”

Sibosado with his mum Caroline Sibosado, also an artist, inside his bush shed, where he makes LED sculptural installations and prints.Credit: James Brickwood

It was through NAISDA that Sibosado began witnessing Aboriginal cultural pride and activism. He met and became lifelong friends with the influential Page brothers: Bangarra’s founding artistic director Stephen, younger brother and dancer Russell, and older brother and composer David, who would all go on to become seminal members of Bangarra, helping create the stories the company would become known for here and abroad – stories that gave audiences precious insight into both the richness and trauma of Indigenous history and culture, urban and remote. Tragically, and after hugely successful and impactful careers, both Russell and David would go on to take their own lives. Today, their legacy continues to inspire.

Other future leaders and friends who emerged from that time include artistic director Carole Johnson, performer Ronne Arnold, artists Tracey Moffatt and Michael Riley (a mentor of Sibosado’s), Bob Maza and Jimmy Chi (whose stage musical Bran Nue Dae, set in Broome, would go on to become a hit film).

“Coming off the mission, our parents had been caught up in that thing of ‘Don’t speak your language, leave your culture behind,’ but reaching Sydney and meeting all those people who were pushing back against that, I really gravitated towards them,” Sibosado says.

He stayed in Sydney, working in high-profile jobs with the then Australia Council for the Arts, Film Australia, the emerging Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative and Koori Radio, focusing on supporting young Indigenous musicians and artists. He loved it, embracing city life. Then, in 2013, his father Basil died and slowly but surely, everything changed.

Creative spark

It was in 2022, when Frances Rings was sitting quietly by herself on Broome’s Cable Beach, that the idea of creating a new production celebrating the community of Lombadina began to emerge. She was in Western Australia with Bangarra, taking her production SandSong back to the Kimberley. At the time she was preparing to take the reins from Stephen Page, Bangarra’s charismatic and influential leader for more than 30 years. Keen to move the company in a new direction, Rings was interested in collaborating with other artists, bringing in new voices and stories to share with her dancers and audiences. Her mind kept going back to Sibosado, by now a successful artist in his own right, and his remote community of Lombadina, celebrated for its self-empowerment, economic and cultural innovation. “I approached Darrell back then, a few years ago, and he said he’d think about it,” Rings recalls. “Six months later he got back to me and said, ‘Let’s have a yarn.’ It’s been a long time coming but that’s the way it works with mob.”

‘Each time you go you’re slowly building that relationship, conversation and trust, because we never assume that.’

Frances Rings

Indeed, the cultural and creative process that goes into each and every Bangarra production takes years to evolve, from the early conversations so instrumental in setting up a relationship, to building the in-person trust with elders and the entire community, the discussions and guidance of the local cultural consultants who work with every new show, and the on-country visits themselves.

Rings first visited Lombadina last November to sit with the community and explain what Bangarra is, the collaborative way it works, how it uses its platform and, most importantly, to seek permission to share stories.

“Each time you go you’re slowly building that relationship, conversation and trust, because we never assume that,” she says. “For me [Bangarra’s shows] are always about people, place and land, and Lombadina has the past, that history, elders who have a lived experience of caring for country, culture, language, customs, lore. But it has also experienced the shifting government policies, of really challenging experiences that have impacted on them. That resilience and the way that community has found its own identity in this current climate … I found that really inspiring.”

“For me [Bangarra’s shows] are always about people, place and land, and Lombadina has the past, that history, elders who have a lived experience of caring for country, culture, language, customs, lore,” says Rings.Credit: James Brickwood

An emerging leader himself, Sibosado was drawn back to a home that had reclaimed its identity after decades of control and was proudly balancing traditional and contemporary life, determined to make its own way without government handouts or influence. He credits his parents with laying the foundations of self-determination back in the late ’70s.

“Both Dad and Mum were quite visionary, they established Lombadina [as we know it today], they were always working and gave us that drive that took away the doubt [from low self-belief] that other people had been busy trying to shove on to blackfellas,” Sibosado says. The pair, and indeed all the family, are also artists – Basil was a carver, Caroline a printmaker and the brothers boast sculpture, printmaking, master carving and painting among them. They also all have “day jobs”: one is a mechanic, another a fitter and turner, while three, including Sibosado, work in the local tourism industry.

“It flew in the face of a lot of the expectation of Aboriginal people; you just had to take control of your own affairs and make your own living,” Sibosado says. “We still get project funding here and there but other than that, we establish our own businesses to pay our own people, create jobs. Our people want to be living on their country, but they also need to make a living.”

Today, Lombadina runs three industries: an emerging eco-tourism business that offers powered campsites, facilities and on-country tours, while a municipal crew looks after local services; civil construction and earthworks (the community owns and leases out machinery for roadworks and other projects); and the arts.

Towards the end of his time in Sydney, Sibosado had begun sculpting and printmaking whenever he could, until one day it became all-consuming. “It started becoming more urgent, something I couldn’t ignore, but I didn’t get the opportunity until I got here. It was right place, right time,” he says. Moving home was transformative. “Dad had just passed away a couple of years before and I’d come home for the funeral and thought, ‘Why am I bothering here in the city, I don’t use anything of it any more, I’ll go home and do what I do, here.’ ”

Sibosado in his shed preparing mother-of-pearl shell for ceremonial etching.Credit: James Beickwood

Sibosado engraves ceremonial symbols on mother-of-pearl shells that he fills with ochre to create riji – pubic plates, tied on with female hair belts, worn by men during ceremonies and initiations. The knowledge is passed down through his male line.“Mother-of-pearl is how lore and culture is transmitted to us. The rainbow serpent sheds its scales on the full moon, then we go and collect those scales [the mother-of-pearl]; that’s how the story is passed to us, through the shells,” he says.

Sibosado’s own career has taken off since moving home. He has expanded his practice of pearl-shell engraving into large-scale, neon LED sculptural installations and printmaking, abstract references to the engravings of turtles, whales or sharks. He exhibited in last year’s Biennale of Sydney, is having a solo show at N.Smith Gallery and will take part in this year’s Sydney Contemporary; he’s also been shown at the National Gallery of Australia, state galleries and overseas.

The Lombadina gallery sells artefacts and artworks, art that was being created anyway, traditionally and for ceremonies, but now with a commercial side Sibosado hopes to expand. He also works with the Kimberley Arts Network helping to promote the arts in the region, develops and coordinates arts projects in local schools and contributes to local exhibitions. He is teaching the next generation of young boys to make riji, hoping to embolden them not to be afraid of the ceremonial and sacred aspect of it; he works with them in the community’s bush shed, while the women and girls create artworks and jewellery with shells at the craft centre. “We have an obligation not to let it die,” he says.

It is here that Bangarra, and Illume, comes in. Sibosado is working closely with the creative team of set, lighting and costume designers, composer Brendon Boney and Rings, to bring the essence of Lombadina to life: a new, large-scale light installation forming part of the production. Sibosado is overwhelmed by the significance of what Bangarra is doing, the opportunity to share the rhythm and spirit of his country on the Sydney Opera House stage. “It’s a huge, big deal, I’m honoured and I’m glad it’s with Bangarra. You can’t get much better than that.”

Sibosado in his studio etching into mother-of-pearl shell.Credit: James Brickwood

Senses in overdrive

It is the end of a long, hot and enriching day and the team is exhausted. “In the city, you walk around with your eyes half-open but here, you’re taking in a lot more information, all of the time,” Rings says. “I feel like I’m at the beginning again, there’s a whole universe of knowledge that surrounds us and we’ve just been walking around here, being part of that. It’s sort of overwhelming, actually; it’s a lot.”

As the day draws to a close, Rings is still hard at work in the bush kitchen, a communal eating area where locals and the Bangarra crew have gathered to enjoy a final meal together. She moves between chopping salads, manning the barbecue and delivering plate after plate of food to the elders sitting together, yarning. After dinner she’s back at it, sweeping the floor and putting together plates of leftover food to give to the elders. It is humbling to see the respect she quietly displays towards them.

Frances Rings cooking for elders in the bush kitchen.Credit: James Brickwood

Rings has often talked about the fact you don’t just see with your eyes when you’re on country. It is a whole-body experience, and all her senses have been in overdrive, taking it all in before she returns to Sydney and the Bangarra rehearsal room and her 18 dancers to begin weaving her magic, alongside Sibosado and her creative team, to translate it all into this new dance-theatre production that will transport audiences from all around Australia to this tiny, impactful place.

“Our role is to be the truth-tellers of those experiences and Bangarra has always done that,” says Rings. “Between the beauty there’s always the impact and devastating consequences of colonisation, religion, displacement, settlement, government policies – that’s the light and shadow of our experiences. And as artists, that’s part of our role – to share that experience. But sometimes that’s the medicine: we’ve survived this and we may still have some things that need to happen, but when you look to the children hunting, speaking language, spending time with elders, learning Western education, going away to study and coming back, that’s so important.”

Illume opens at the Sydney Opera House on June 4 before touring nationally.

Lifeline: 13 11 14

Jane Albert and James Brickwood visited Lombadina as guests of Bangarra.

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