Merrepen Arts

I went to the Garma Festival in the winter of 2003. The festival is held in August of every year in Gulkula (in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory) and is an indigenous cultural event. It showcases indigenous issues like health, poverty and the like but is also a celebration of being indigenous and in this world. The site is fairly remote (the nearest airport is Nhulunbuy, a small mining town in NT) but it attracts a motley crowd of academicians, NGOs, artists and casual visitors both from Australia and abroad. The year we went, the festival showcased indigenous art from various regions of the country.

At the festival we met Meng Hoeschle, who at that time ran the Merrepen Arts Centre and were very impressed with her work with the Centre. The Centre's artists, the McTaggart brothers, were also present and did a panel of the collaborative art project at the Festival. Most people associate indigenous art with "dot" paintings, which are not always common - if at all they are synonymous with anything, it is desert paintings. The Daly River region, where the Merrepen Arts Centre is located, is verdant and lush with a fairly plentiful supply of food and the art produced there reflects this and is fairly removed from the "dot" stereotype. Meng showed a short film that was a sweet ode to the region - it was filled with images of billabongs, water lilies, the soft blue of Northern skies and the sound of women singing. Meng had sent me a catalogue which I unfortunately misplaced when I moved and I find there are few images of the Merrepen Centre's paintings on the Net, in particular those that relate to water spirits. The two I located give some idea of the paintings I saw.

Link to a film on basket making from the merrepen plant here.

Geoffrey Bardon's 2004 book (Papunya-A Place Made After the Story), though primarily on desert art remains the best first source on indigenous painting in Australia, for anyone interested.