Before The Town Got Big - Spinifex Hill Artists

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Introduction Lynda Dorrington, Executive Director FORM

Before the Town Got Big Mags Webster

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Bright Lights and Burning Embers Hamish Morgan

Foreword Hon. Brendon Grylls MLA, Minister for Regional Development; Lands 10

Invisible Histories Elisha Buttler

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Acknowledgments

Images: 1. Irene Coffin 2. Noel Garlett 3. Lilly Wilson 4. Willarra Barker 5. Topsy Bamba 6. Biddy Thomas 7. Joyce Kelly 8. Anne Sibosado 9. Max George 10. Maggie Ginger 11. Albert Pianta

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12. Narlene Waddaman 13. Mollie Woodman 14. William (Nyapuru) Gardiner 15. Lesley Jean Kelly 16. Josie McPhee 17. Valda Sesar 18. Maggie Green 19. John Kuiper 20. Esther Quintal 21. Topsy Bali 22. Winnie Sampi 23. Nancy Judiamiah

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Lynda Dorrington Executive Director FORM

Before The Town Got Big celebrates two years of artistic practice by the Spinifex Hill Artists. This is an important exhibition, not only for Spinifex Hill Artists but for Hedland and the wider Pilbara community. The exhibition and publication open

the window to a Hedland many of us never knew existed or had simply forgotten.

Working with art mentors, writers and an anthropologist – all of whom are known and trusted in the community – the artists have, over many months, collected and shared their memories.

Each painting, drawing and story is like a section of a map charting the history of what makes a town, home.

Only when each section is pieced together do we see just how much Spinifex Hill Artists bring to their community – from intimate perspectives of a rich regional history to a dedicated artistic practice.

Hedland before the town got big images Top left: The old jetty Bottom left: The Esplanade, with the old Esplanade Hotel Top right: Old jetty repairs Bottom right: The old Port Hedland Picture Gardens

The Spinifex Hill Artists also offer us a new way of participating in, and learning about, Aboriginal culture. Together with FORM they are shaping their future as a distinctive art centre: one which balances professional artistic skills development with authentic cultural engagement.

Here, for the first time, the Spinifex Hill Artists are telling their stories, telling us about their history of Hedland. I encourage you to take the time to explore this publication and the exhibition. Read their stories, look at their paintings and where possible meet the artists and support their future development as an art centre. The Spinifex Hill Artists have a lot to talk about and even more to teach us.

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Hon. Brendon Grylls MLA, Minister for Regional Development; Lands

Image: Hedland before the town got big: The old post office and bakery on Wedge Street in Port Hedland.

Before The Town Got Big is about many things.

It is about the Spinifex Hill Artists and their dedication to telling us the stories of this place we call Hedland through their art. It is about the importance of creative expression in shaping and retaining the character of towns, cities and communities. And it is about the invisible rope that binds the past, present and future and the ways we can look to our past to build a stronger future heritage.

The Royalties for Regions Pilbara Cities blueprint encompasses a similar vision – one which will create communities that people are proud to be a part of. The blueprint imagines the Pilbara as a place to bring up families. As a place with high-calibre education and health options. And as a place that grows from its strong resources heritage to offer a broader spectrum of career opportunities.

These visions can be made stronger through the qualities of the places they belong to. They include In the Pilbara these points are particularly resonant. our experiences of and stories about the Pilbara; Because it is so rich in natural resources the Pilbara the layers of history and personality hidden throughout the landscape and inside the minds is commonly acknowledged as the backbone of our of the people who have grown up here, or economy. Perhaps less well known is the Pilbara’s moved through here. rich cultural and social mix: encapsulated within a sweeping, sunbaked natural environment is a An exhibition like Before The Town Got Big offers diverse and rapidly expanding set of communities one way of tapping into these stories by peeling back and cultures. the layers. Telling their stories is vitally important to As with any place, diverse, expanding communities the Spinifex Hill Artists and their families because it reiterates their contribution to the Pilbara and what have needs: things like transport infrastructure, schools, health services. But they also have a vision, makes it so special. They do this through painting because art is like a shared language – the finer or a collection of visions, for their community. details may not be immediately understandable but A vision that sees an attractive, welcoming, the vision and the substance is. desirable place. A vision that articulates just why a community is unique. A vision that enables a The Spinifex Hill Artists’ vision for their Pilbara community to sustain its people, its industries, and may not be exactly the same as yours or mine its dreams for the benefit and enjoyment of future but there are commonalities. We all want to generations.

A vision that does not simply transform a town into a city, but into a home.

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show off the region’s talents and highlight its distinctiveness. We want to welcome people here, and feel welcomed in return. Essentially, we want to give something back to the region which has given so much to us.

Image (far left): Maggie Ginger, In Town, 54 x 126cm, 2010.

Image (left): Maggie Ginger, Waterways, 47 x 123cm, 2010.

I never grew up here — I only came here for schooling in the 60s — town was just a Causeway then — you had to wait for the tide to cross from Port to South. I’ve really enjoyed hearing all the different stories about the town and how we’ve grown over the years.

Winnie Sampi

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Elisha Buttler

There are plenty of stories, we could go on for days, if you would bring a map, I could show you how all these stories connect… Joyce Kelly

There is a small church on the coastal outback plains of the Pilbara, North Western Australia. This church is in a place called South Hedland – as the name suggests, it lies south of another place called Port Hedland. South Hedland is not a fancy town, on the surface at least. It is surrounded by flat, semi-desert plains, a smattering of small gum trees and Spinifex. And this small church is not fancy either: there is no grand belltower, no impressive frescos. But neither the church nor the town are what they seem. This town may be separated from its portside neighbour by space and by name, but once upon a time the Port and the South were one and the same, separated not by a ribbon of grey road but by tidal waters and fishing spots.

And inside the church, a group of industrious, inspired artists called Spinifex Hill Artists has spent the last 12 months painting this very town – the Port and the South – ‘before it got big’. When it was known for its abundance of crabs and turtles and tropical mangroves, rather than mines and snow white salt piles whose starkness causes you to squint.

The Before The Town Got Big project is about ‘once upon a times’.

It is a story – not one with a neat beginning and a middle and an end, each running smoothly from one another – but a story told from all angles, all viewpoints. And it is a story which sifts through the visible layers of the Hedland we see today to reveal something much more intricate underneath.

It is, primarily, a story told through paintings. These paintings, by members of Spinifex Hill Artists are at first glance, rich and joyful.

Since the group first began ‘officially’ painting as a mentored cluster in 2008, each artist has fast developed their own aesthetic sensibility; from Lesley Jean Kelly’s spacious, pebble-like circular forms, to Esther Quintal’s pops of liquorice allsorts colour. Yet as a group they do share some visual commonalities – paintings tend to be distinctly bright, gregarious and pattern oriented.

Underneath the carefully composed layers of acrylic however lies another, more significant commonality: a pressing desire to use painting as language which describes their lives, their histories, and their close and complex relationship with country.

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Image (top left): Hedland before the town got big: Morgan Street Image (bottom left): Artwork.

Image by Paul Parin Image (bottom right): Winnie Sampi, in the studio at the Aboriginal Fellowship Church in South Hedland.

Image by Paul Parin

Spinifex Hill Artists are not alone in this desire; nor are they in their selection of art as their chosen language. Using artistic expression (often painting) to bridge the gap between Aboriginal Australian life and culture and European Australian life and culture has proven generally successful. Art is immediately engaging, even if not immediately decipherable. It is intriguing; it pulls the viewer in, like Alice in Wonderland. It prompts people to talk, ask questions, to share.

For many Aboriginal artists the relationship between painting and country is even more intimate. For these artists, like Spinifex Hill Artist Max George, painting is like skin – an essential membrane connecting person and country. As Max says: ‘The beauty comes out from the heart. It’s not the world out there that worries me, it’s painting. Painting all day I go to sleep with a beautiful image. Trying to put the paint brush in motion to make that rock, that curve of the kangaroo’s back, that’s what matters ... Take it from the heart and you will never lose it – that’s why I keep on painting.’

It is sentiments like these which emphasise the vital role of art and creative expression in any place, but especially so in Aboriginal and other regional communities which can struggle to maintain cultural identity in the face of shifting economic and social constructs. Creative expression and the production of cultural material – painting, writing, photography, film, public art – offers tangible confirmation of identity and history. Basically, why a person or community is unique; what they have to offer the world, how they are distinct and special.

These things are as important to living as more practical things like hospitals and schools. Can you imagine if every place in the world looked exactly the same, felt exactly the same? If every place was devoid of variety and character – its history, its stories, its personalities rendered invisible?

For Spinifex Hill Artists this desire to make the invisible visible is a driving force, because the Hedland and Pilbara they see is vastly different to the one many of us see.

And what they see – the good and the bad – has potential to completely change the identity of this region.

One of the particularly interesting things to come to the surface through Before the Town Got Big was the realisation that, in many ways the town was actually bigger before it ‘got big’. Hearing the artists talk about Hedland and surrounds causes it swell to much richer, densely layered proportions. The Hedland the Spinifex Hill Artists remember is laced with a multitude of cherished fishing holes, camping grounds, picnic spots, 11

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natural swimming pools and social hubs that are hidden away now. By all accounts water was once at the heart of Hedland life. Artist Anne Sibosado remembers, ‘We shared everything, we lived off the sea,’ adding thoughtfully, ‘living by the water sometimes feels like you’re living on the water.’

So while they have lived in and around Hedland for a long time, they have often struggled to assert their right to belong. Irene remembers, ‘they reckon we are aliens, my family, we got no land.’

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*All artist quotes sourced from conversations recorded by Hamish Morgan or Helen Ansell.

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Thus projects like this one are especially important because they offer Hedland Aboriginal people a While the Spinifex Hill Artists’ temporary workshop chance to tell their own stories and to describe is located in South Hedland, and most of the artists Hedland country in their own terms. The resulting now live in this part of town, their paintings and exhibition and catalogue shows this in multiple their stories are overwhelmingly situated in the ways: through the paintings, which have been Port area. Where the water is, where tides flow, created with the guidance of art mentors Helen where the turtles hatch and the crabs scuttle. The Ansell and Sara Barnes; through the artists’ divide that comes through now – Port Hedland and experiences and memories of the places they loved; South Hedland as two separate entities – did not through many conversations and cups of tea with exist then. There were incredible racial segregation anthropologist Hamish Morgan; and through laws and outright racism, but in some ways things a process of mapping these special places and were simpler then. Artist Irene Coffin comments on important memories with the aim of making the society today: ‘People are too busy to stop and say rich and colourful layers of Hedland visible again. hello to someone!’

The process of mapping is really just beginning.

Hedland was once ‘bigger’ in other ways too, This group of artists, brought together through through the invisible lines that connected (and FORM’s Let’s Get Started! arts workshop program, still do) people and places, all the way from Gibb has started something big. Piece by piece, layer by River in the Kimberley down to Leonora in the layer, the artists are reclaiming the Pilbara they Goldfields. Many of the Spinifex Hill Artists have know and love — starting with, but not ending come to Hedland from somewhere else. Indeed, in, Hedland. Imagine one sprawling, detailed many of the paintings in the exhibition depict map depicting all the special spots in the Pilbara, locales outside of Hedland, such as Max George’s big and little. Everyone, from artists to miners to Mt Stewart Station, Maggie Green’s fishing spots tourists, pencilling in their lines and connections at her childhood Myroodah Station, and William and names. Making the invisible visible again.

(Nyapuru) Gardiner’s depictions of the Kimberley.

This ‘coming from somewhere else’ has been problematic, as it was for the many Aboriginal Australians displaced from their home country after European settlement (in particular from the 1930s to the 1950s). This was when many of the Spinifex Hill Artists and their families came to Hedland.

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Image (below): Lesley Jean Kelly, Camping Area, 64 x 131cm, 2010.

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‘You know how you say ‘caravan park’, our grandmother used to say ‘camping area’.

It was on Wilson Street.’

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Image (left): Willarra Barker, Seven Sisters, 30 x 60cm, 2010.

Image (below): John Kuiper, Djork Djork, 90 x 54cm, 2010.

‘This is the story based on a star constellation.

They were naughty sisters banished to the stars.’

‘Three sisters made too much noise whilst travelling through ‘quiet’ country and splashed around in a pool there, so the spirit at the water hole ‘Mi Mi’, took ‘em.’

When we were small, it happened almost every night, we’d spread a big canvas, and all the kids would come from the streets and we’d have a sing-along every night, and storytelling. My grandmother played the piano accordion, my dad had the guitar, then we had the spoons, there would also be singing. We’d have all the little ones sitting with their pillows, as the singing would go on they would just go to sleep, I was one of them that feel asleep!

When we were lying down, looking at the constellations, they even told us about that, going back to their culture, because we moved away from Beagle Bay, they’d say you know what used to happen when people travelled at night, and we didn’t know what happened because we were moving into temporary times, they’d say we’d look at the stars and go in this direction and that direction, they followed the constellations. That’s when we started to become aware of our culture.

‘One sister was transformed into a large rock, which is still visible today in the pool, one sister was made blind and the third sister must now look after her. They were all punished for their disobedience.’

Image (right): John Kuiper, Croc, 40 x 33cm, 2010.

Joyce Kelly

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Image (opposite): Robert Champion, Sunset, 48 x 51cm, 2010.

Image (above): Robert Champion, Waterholes and Spinifex, 24 x 24cm, 2010.

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Image (right): Valda Sesar, Land and Sea (detail), 33 x 43cm, 2010.

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Image: Esther Quintal, Saint Cecilia’s Church – Port Hedland, 60 x 44cm, 2010.

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‘This where I went to school and had my first Holy Communion. I went here up to Grade 6. I used to be the best marble player in school and used to get into trouble there. I also did the cleaning of the candle stick holders with Brasso, polishing the pews and dusting the church when I was about 10. The old church use to be in Edgar Street – where the arcade is now – it’s knocked down now, nothing’s sacred.’

And the Catholic Church up there, the monks, they were German anyway, I can’t remember their name, when they came there they had troubles with the Aboriginal names. It was like what’s your last name, I don’t know it was an Aboriginal name, what’s your name, we might give you, oh he walked in with a billy-can in his hand, we’ll give you Billycan. So where does that give you an opportunity later in life when you want to trace your family back, you get back to a Billycan and its like, ohh stops there. It’s rather strange… what they’ve done there: they have destroyed any connection you might have. You know the paper trail stops right there. Unless you actually go there and door-knock, ask around, you’re never going to make a connection. Most of us don’t have the opportunity to travel there and door-knock see it first hand, for years people stay in limbo.

Albert Pianta

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Finucane Island was our hunting ground, we had a road coming out. The ground there was like white, so the old people called it ‘White Coarse’, we’d go out that way for hunting. We used to go out as far as Boodarie Station. In the late 60’s they sent me and Lesley (Jean Kelly) off to Stella Maria College in Geraldton.

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Joyce Kelly

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In the early days we never had the Spoilbank, that’s just man made because they did all the dredging. That’s all the dirt from the bottom of the sea, water used to cover all that, our reefs used to be very healthy. We used to have all sorts of black sausages on the reef, we had little monkey fish – we’d throw a line down into the holes and we’d just catch a monkey fish, they’re like a blow fish, but more ugly!

They’re poisonous, it was just for fun. They probably have another name but we used to call them monkey fish, they used to have rocks all around their holes, their holes were quite big, you used to let your line down a fair way.

Oh it was good fun, we used to go spear fishing on the reef, there used to be lots of turtles around. We never used to have blue-ringed octopus, when we wanted bait we’d just go onto the reef and see an octopus and grab it with our hands, all its tentacles would wrap around your hand, you know; just cut its tentacles off for a bait, put it on a hook, go down catch a bream, or a blue-bone or something; but you can’t do it today because of the blue-ringed octopus, we were never afraid of jelly fish, things like that, the blueringed octopus they’ve just come in, we used to have brown octopus on the beach but not blue-rings.

When we were down the beach, the boys would grab an octopus or these grey slug things with spikes and throw them at us and we’d be screaming away, ohh, those boys!

When the tide used to go out it used to leave water in the holes and we’d just go fishing in there, get some nice spotty tail and things like that, go home, ‘Hey mum I caught some fish.’

Esther Quintal

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Image: Winnie Sampi, The Spoilbank, 46 x 77cm, 2010.

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The Spoilbank is good for fishing — I go there with my family.

Winnie Sampi

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Poppy used to go down to the Cemetery Beach here with the young fellas and they would carry on the culture of fishing. They had these drag nets and they used to pull it into the incoming tide. They’d tell us girls to help and I was surprised, because I was little, how big the drag net was, they were going out for miles, out, out they went, ohh I was standing back and in come the catch, and it was bumpers, and all the people from along the street would get their serving of fish from my grandfather. Nana and Pops was always helping people. Pops worked on the wharf, but before that he worked with the Main Roads and then he used to be a stockman as well. My grandfather, you should have seen the man, a short man, but you should have seen the muscles, very strong, he would carry this bale on his back throw it on wagons, we didn’t have flash cars like this in those days.

Image (left): Winnie Sampi, Little Rocks, 30 x 40cm, 2010.

Image (right): Willarra Barker, Baby Turtles Hatching, 61 x 61cm, 2010.

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‘We used to go collecting turtle eggs and eating them. You would have to roll them around to separate the yolk and the egg. I don’t do that any more.’

Joyce Kelly

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I have a great passion for Cemetery Beach on the rocks there, because I used to do a lot of fishing there with my mum, my godmother, uncles, aunties. Everybody used to be a happy family, all go fishing together, boil the billy, kids would just play around and just have a wonderful time, but these days everybody lives separate lives, we just have a different way of living now.

Esther Quintal

Image (left): Esther Quintal, Beautiful Pebbles on the Beach, 73 x 45cm, 2010.

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Image (above): Esther Quintal, Panel from The Maze, 30 x 30cm, 2010.

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Jenny Hardie, Nor’Westers of the Pilbara Breed, 1981, p103.

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Mags Webster

‘What you need to know about the past is that no matter what has happened, it has all worked together to bring you to this very moment. And this is the moment you can choose to make everything new. Right now.’ Anon Before The Town Got Big tells a story not just about Hedland but also about a whole region’s collective consciousness, its cycles of growth and change.

The patterns of the Pilbara’s evolution can be read like a palimpsest, not only through layers of ancient rocks but also through multiple strata of memory, history, perception, and their accompanying metaphors.

In contemplating the individual perspectives of the Spinifex Hill Artists (SHA), we are invited to participate in a shared awareness that these paintings, words and sketches are symbolically overlaid by the mind maps and memories of generations of people, past and present, whose experiences have shaped the identity of this part of Western Australia, and whose endeavours inform the future.

In 1863, Captain Peter Hedland took his ship the Mystery into an indent in the coastline 50km south of the De Grey River mouth, and discovered an almost perfect natural harbour. Hedland subsequently was established as a service port for the burgeoning gold and tin mines inland, and as an important centre for the pastoral industry.

There was also a pearling industry, but by the end of the 19th century it was mining which had

consolidated Hedland’s ascendancy over the other ports along the coast, and mining which has formed the leitmotif of the last century and a half of the town’s existence.

The destinies of the Pilbara’s towns and its people have always been dictated by the fortunes of some of the most remote parts of the region. The area’s vast mineral deposits are not situated conveniently close to the coast but in distant locations. Over the decades, towns have waxed and waned accordingly.

While some of these settlements – Wittenoom, Goldsworthy, Whim Creek – have dwindled or are no more, others like Hedland have adapted, evolved and survived.

Although a temporal and physical cut-off point is hinted by the words ‘before’ and ‘big’ in the exhibition’s title, in some ways, the persona of Hedland and the surrounding Pilbara has always been larger than life. Since the times of the earliest settlers and the discovery of gold out at Marble Bar, ideas, opportunities, aspirations and economies have always been large-scale in this part of the world.

So too the drawbacks: difficult weather, labour and skill shortages, limited services, and remoteness.

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thrumming with activity and yet re-iterating challenges that successive generations have sought to solve. It seems like a case of ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’. As a book which traces the stories of the first white settlers to the area observes: ‘By the early 1900s, despite the steady mining there had been and the known resources of other minerals… it had become apparent that if the Pilbara’s untapped riches were to be economically mined something would have to be done to combat the extreme isolation the Pilbara region suffered.’

The navigation through these complexities in terms of development, population increase, talent attraction and infrastructure is therefore not a new phenomenon for the Pilbara. Just as the demands of early 20th century expansion had to be resolved by more people, rail, increased port capacity and later, air transport, and then re-negotiated with the discovery of iron ore in the 1960s, so now in the 21st century the proposals around Pilbara cities are grappling with similar issues of infrastructure and social cohesion. Getting bigger has not always equated to getting better, and this is the perennial challenge faced by the communities, planners, and authorities who seek to develop the Pilbara’s settlements into places which not only can service industry but also nurture the personal, lived experiences of the people who live there.

If cities are to be successful embodiments of place and space in a remote region – which because of widespread fly in/fly out work patterns has become synonymous with transience – they have to create a scope for permanence, belonging, home. Crucially for the Pilbara, they have to be fully textured, responsive to all demographics, and not just focus on the 30-something resource worker. In this context, negotiation is a key word: how development (in all its meanings) negotiates with the land, the built form with the natural, contemporary with ancient, mining with non-mining, past with present, generation with generation, people with people.

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The work and the words of the Spinifex Hill Artists in Before The Town Got Big attest to personal negotiations, both physical and emotional, with the concepts of space and belonging, and indeed, with art itself as a medium to express these negotiations. Some of the artists can trace several generations of connection to Hedland, others have lived away from the area for a time and have now come back. Some were raised elsewhere, and through family and political circumstance eventually found their way to Hedland. They are people of different backgrounds, experiences, heritages and memories, who through this arts development group have been working and learning together for nearly two years, and in so doing have articulated their collective identity and negotiated its place in the community.

Because they come from varying backgrounds and life experiences, and because referencing story and land in art can lead practitioners into sensitive demesnes, the Spinifex Hill Artists have needed to establish common ground in terms of relationships, protocols and permissions. Through that process they seem to have created a working environment much like a microcosm of a close-knit community. Artist Irene Coffin used to live in Marble Bar and remembers it as a place where people would look out for each other.

She feels there is a similar dynamic with the SHA group: ‘We look out for each other, we care for each other. We can all come here have a cup of teas, we know each other, we can respect each other. If anyone is missing out on the class, we are wondering how they are, if they’re OK. It’s not interfering, it’s genuine concern for others.’

The artists come together to focus on the ‘doing’ of art, a presentmoment activity. Their commentaries and perspectives, whether accessed from memory or some other source, are expressed in fully contemporary works. They use the wealth of accumulated intelligence and experience – what has brought them to ‘this very moment’ – as a prism through which to interpret the past.

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The recollections and anecdotes gathered for this exhibition allude to moments which cannot be replicated because they are of their specific time: memory puts them in the realm of temporal rather than literal space, just as one can never truly recreate the halcyon days of childhood. But some of the recurring themes – the spirit of family and neighbourhood, of deriving simple pleasures from a fishing trip or a cinema visit – those things have just as much currency now as in yesteryear, and must not be excluded from a modern community.

A well-rounded, holistic embodiment of a place that feels good and real to live will have these authentic elements at its core, and in the case of Hedland, should integrate something of the essence of searching for mud crabs, falling asleep to songs sung outdoors and walking home from the bakery with fresh bread.

This is the key difference between nostalgia and memory. As historian and social critic Christopher Lasch observed: ‘Strictly speaking, nostalgia does not entail the exercise of memory at all, since the past it idealises stands outside time, frozen in unchanging perfection. Memory too may idealise the past, but not in order to condemn the present. It draws hope and comfort from the past in order to enrich the present and to face what comes with good cheer. It sees past, present, and future as continuous.’2

So the opportunity to shape the future must be taken now, in this continuum of the present, taking strands of past narratives to weave the fabric of future narratives so that connection and family, neighbourhood, sharing are not sadly-lamented figments of bygone days but instead form the cornerstones and values of a tangible contemporary environment. As Spinifex Hill Artist Max George remarks:

Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics.

New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1991, p82-3.

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‘You go back to some things that you don’t want repeated again, to forget that, and remember the good…looking at strengths of the past makes you stronger in the future.’

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Scientific research has shown that the human brain uses similar processes and thought patterns to remember the past as it does to imagine the future. So even at a synaptic, cellular level, these two elements are inter-twined. The paintings and sketches of Before The Town Got Big serve to remind us that somewhere, in the symmetry of remembering the past and imagining the future, lie the means to determine the cultural geographies of now.

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Image (left): Lesley Jean Kelly, Footprints on the Ridge, 81 x 127cm, 2010.

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‘My Nanna’s brother and wife use to live over what we called ‘the Ridge’ in Port Hedland. They had four tanks there and it used to be a reserve. My Nanna used to take us all over there to visit the family. They had shops and houses there. We used to take the tracks to go fishing at Muddy Bay.’

This place here (the limestone ridge) I will swear black and blue has Aboriginal art on it. You know who did that, me! I had a little rusty can, and nails with a round head on it, and I sat there and carved a fish, the limestone was soft. I started with the nail to get the outline. Playing on the limestone ridge – we’d cross over and go fishing (in Mud Bay).

Grandma said, don’t go where that art is, so we would play the other side, down near the old well.

Joyce Kelly

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Image (far left): Molly Woodman, Water holes in Summer, 40 x 40cm, 2010.

Image (left): Lilly Wilson, Water hole, 30 x 30cm, 2010.

Image (right): Lilly Wilson, Travelling, 40 x 33cm, 2010.

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Image (top left): Topsy Bamba, Mangroves, 30 x 30cm, 2010.

Image (top centre): Topsy Bamba, Willy Willies, 30 x 30cm, 2010.

Image (top right): Topsy Bamba, Desert Peas, 30 x 30cm, 2010.

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Image (left): Maggie Green, Hills at Myroodah Station (detail), 82 x 99cm, 2010.

Image (above): Maggie Green, Camping with Family, 59 x 88cm, 2010.

‘We go hunting and camp at Myroodah Station.

Behind the hills was good fishing.

Lots of water and fish. My Father, Mother would teach us to catch ‘em and cook ‘em.’

‘My mother and father would take us camping; we cook bush tucker and sit under trees in the shade.’

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Image (bottom left): Topsy Bamba, Rock Hole, 30 x 30cm, 2010.

Image (bottom centre): Topsy Bamba, Trapdoors, 30 x 30cm, 2010.

Image (bottom right): Topsy Bamba, Everlasting, 30 x 30cm, 2010.

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Now we just got to tell stories, tell what we know, what we remember.

Sometimes when I hear sister and cousins telling stories, I say ‘where was I.’ They say you were there, you just don’t remember. Like last week we were all re-telling stories now about our grandfather, it was funny how we were all talking about that. It all started when somebody said, ‘You remember that goat?’ Laughing, and that cousin said, ieee, I just remembered that one goat, and the story just went on and on about the goat. Everyone remembered this one goat. And he was chained, under the clothes line, cause he was our lawn mower. The lawn wasn’t that big, high, but that goat, he’d charge all the kids when they’d run. And our grandfather, he wanted to move the goat under the house, he was pulling and pulling him, he just ended up picking him up and carrying him, the goat carrying on and kicking... funny how a goat starts a story about grandfather.

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Lesley Jean Kelly

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Image (far left): Irene Coffin, Sand Dunes #2, 61 x 61cm, 2010.

Image (below): Irene Coffin, Sand Dunes #1, 61 x 61cm, 2010.

Image (right): Anne Sibosado, Memories of Four Mile, 61 x 76cm, 2010.

MAP REF: B1

We used to go to Four Mile with the kids and go for walks when the tide went out. It was always a safe place. We were together, the kids ran around and splashed in the water, while we were there they couldn’t get into any kind of trouble, just had fun.

Anne Sibosado

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Image: Willarra Barker, Salmon and Crab Dreaming, 30 x 40cm, 2010.

MAP REF: A2

‘We used to go fishing for salmon at Red Bank — where the bridge is between Port and South — we used to catch a lot of salmon there.’

Sunday was the best day, everybody would go to church together, and then we always knew it was a picnic on Sunday, we’d go fishing, the brothers, the uncles would cut down some mangrove branches and build a nice shade for us kids to sit under. The mothers and grandparents would start cooking, it used to be lovely days; those days you used to walk miles to get to your favourite fishing ground, cause as I said there were no motorcars.

Esther Quintal

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Image (left): Willarra Barker, Crab Dreaming (detail), 30 x 40cm, 2010.

‘We use to go crabbing and catch crabs; sometimes we would get crabs on the line.’

Image (right): Anne Sibosado, Sundown #1, 106 x 69cm, 2010.

‘We used to spend a lot of time at the beach, swimming all the time, swimming all day.

We used to get in a lot of trouble for that. But we didn’t know why we had to be home by sundown. The sundown business; got to be home by sundown, but we never new why.

There was an old fence, and we couldn’t be in that part of town after dark [Aboriginal people weren’t allowed in the town after dark].’

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The funny thing about Port Hedland, it’s a strange town, we grew up with the whitefellas who were here, a lot of white people will defend it to the hilt like us. That old limestone ridge, you know between the road and the big BHP plant, it now carries the power poles along the North West Coastal Highway. We used to put rocks over the bigger rock-holes and use the water as we walked up and down the old road.

There were many carvings all the way along the ridge. The gap – the tide used to come in there.

There were mangroves there; people would make nests in the trees and wait for the tide to come in and then fish till the tide went out again.

Just next to the BHP plant they’ve fenced off some of those carvings, but you can’t explore it, only walk along the board walk. We have to make an appointment with the whiteman to go and see our own heritage. Mud Bay on the other side, that was fantastic, some of the best fishing spots, but that’s non-existent anymore. Even the main wharf, jetty, people used to camp there, fish all night, go back in the morning. Now you can’t go there, it’s all locked up. Finucane Island, you used to be able to walk to that at low tide, there was a little water, but you could wade out – try doing that now!

That old swimming pool in from of Marapikurrinya Park, that went years ago. That used to bring all the kids together. The old hospital, now many people have been born here, but the whole thing is gone. Not a bloomin’ thing left. Any significant thing for Aboriginal people is gone – other than that fence corral on the limestone ridge – and you can’t even hardly have a look at that!

Darlot Street, there was a fence, blackfellas couldn’t go into town after 6pm, they were let back in at 6am if they had work…

This used to be the Ackland Street Primary School, near the Tamarind tree. Used to sit in the tree eating tamarinds all bloody day – go home with our mouths all burnt out. Sitting here talking to you I’m starting to realise that there’s nothing left.

All the things I have shown you, there was nothing to get out [of the car] and have a look at; it’s all memories now, nothing solid. I’ve just shown you nothing! It’s all we got – memories.

The problem is we are guinea pigs for the rest of the state. Build it here first, if it doesn’t work, we are stuck with it. Like South Hedland, you go around 14 loops before you get to the end of the street. Confuses everyone, black, white and brindle.

Albert Pianta

Image: Albert Pianta, Old Time Music, 30 x 60cm, 2010.

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Hamish Morgan

To resource the future is to maintain a connection to the past, a past that is not dead or gone, but is constantly revisited, reclaimed and projected into the future through stories, through paintings and sketches, and through the act of not being prepared to forget.

The works gathered in this exhibition show the way that cultures create landmarks, boundaries and signposts; the way cultures survey, map and place-name; the way cultures sketch out and ‘declare their presence’ and thus claim a future.1 The bright lights of this future flash before us, but so do the burning embers of the past, as in Lesley Jean Kelly’s painting The Causeway:

‘There used to be only one narrow road in, and one narrow road out of Port Hedland – the old causeway it was called [the road that now links Port with South Hedland]. The high tide would come in and you couldn’t get out and you couldn’t get in. That tide used to come all the way to Three Mile. Night time was scary, because you had mangroves on both sides. Me and my aunty walked along there at night fishing, worrying for snakes. I was right behind her as she moved along in the mangroves. We used to carry a bag of firewood with us and make a fire there, right in the mangroves. People would come from everywhere when they smelt the things cooking. That all used to be mangroves, before they built Red Bank Bridge, and the salt.’

Perhaps now as you drive along the Old Causeway you may imagine a fire burning in the dark and salty mangroves, the smell of crabs and fish cooking, a little girl worrying for snakes but safe with her aunty, perhaps this memory, this trace of another narrative – another Port Hedland – will mark out future journeys between South and Port Hedland. Perhaps your points of orientation to place will not only be the ever changing salt pile next to Red Bank Bridge or the 1970s futuristic water tank of South Hedland, or the fantastic industrial creation that is the BHP Billiton plant, but memories and sketches like Lesley’s. There is a human story of presence and belonging that runs alongside, and perhaps counter to, intense processes of industrialisation and growth that characterise modern day Hedland.

Yet, in a town with such high visibility – Hedland is the centre of ‘the boom’, 34 per cent of the world’s sea going iron ore comes from the Pilbara, and every second person is dressed in ‘high vis gear’ – narratives built around belonging, shared experience and memory can often get lost in the midst of such luminescent expansion and activity.

Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History.

London: Faber and Faber, 1987, pxxi.

1

Stephen Kinnane, Shadow Lines.

Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2003.

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These narratives of belonging gathered in this exhibition are the ‘shadow lines’2 of Hedland ‘before it got big’. A past full of memories of fishing, walking the reefs and mangroves that once fringed the port, of lying down on a piece of canvas while the old people told stories and ‘sang’ everyone to sleep. But these memories are also about Hedland’s present and future as a place of significance, not only to global trade but to local people as well. The past, as it were, shadows the future, follows it with every move, fleshes it out and gives it human depth.

To keep telling stories about place and belonging with any depth is not always easy, it requires a great deal of work and commitment, sometimes against the odds, and sometimes with grief. Irene Coffin explains this: ‘Really we got no belonging. The whitefellas stopped it. We went to school, we were never allowed to talk about Aboriginal culture, the words – none of the things we knew to be true were allowed.

One day my cousin – she’s passed away poor thing – the teacher said, ‘what’s the name of this bird?’ She put her hand straight up, all excited, and said ‘ngumarri’, well she nearly got the cane for that. These things that we knew were true, they were tellin’ us they weren’t true. What do you expect?’

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Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Trans. B. Massumi, London: The Athlone Press, 1987, p108.

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Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. Trans.

M. Jolas, Boston: Boston University Press, 1964, p12.

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It is not easy to tell this, to keep telling this story over and over again to a dominant culture that often doesn’t hear or that actively wants to forget. Forgetting too requires work, and commitment, it just doesn’t happen; people turn a blind eye, they chose what to hear, what to understand, what to see: erasure is an active process rather than a passive one. But stories like Irene’s are told all over Aboriginal Australia, in communities, in cities and in towns like Hedland. Each time the story is told it makes a claim on the present, it makes you sit down, listen, understand. It shows that people can’t forget, they can’t forget the past that has shaped the future in told and untold ways. This is something that the philosopher Deleuze captures well when he says the act of ‘memory is the necessity of renewal’3; in other words, to represent is to keep experience, identity and belonging vital and alive.

The Spinifex Hill Artists have created art(e)facts about place, belonging and identity in Hedland and the Pilbara not because they reference a forgotten ‘hey day’ or murky past but because they outline contemporary realities and sketch out future possibilities. Before The Town Got Big is a collective act of ‘remembering forward’ to use Paul Carter’s useful phrase, tracing the future while fleshing out the past.

James Epstein, ‘Spatial practices/ democratic vistas’, Social History 24 (3), (1999): 294-310, p297.

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Maps, tracks and short cuts: space into place This exhibition also demonstrates how the topographies of place create different vistas, vantage points and outlooks and show how we literally ‘cover the universe with drawings we have lived’.4 And what evocative drawings they are, suggesting tides and rhythms, quoting place names and experiences, and referencing both the past and the future through the mixing of colours, the evocation of patterns, and the capturing of light.

These paintings and sketches show a material and pragmatic process of making space into place; of transforming and imbuing physical places with metaphysical meanings such as belonging, identity and home. The paintings suggest the way ‘the trajectories of space and place are themselves storied, narratives of lived activity and practice’. 5 The artists re-make and re-present the lived experience of place, they make it manifest in the vibrant colours and rhythms of the canvas, and in their own way, such an evocation of memory, place and belonging makes a collective intervention into the past, present and future of Hedland.

An intervention that imagines as well as designs alternative ways of thinking and doing.

In this way, the works gathered here are not only visually stunning snatches of landscape, pattern and memory, they are also representations of alternative methods of mapping Hedland. They are like, if you will, town plans or design briefs. These paintings and sketches inscribe social order and reality, they map out relationships between elements and space, they show points of access and orientation, they show how all things within a space are connected and detailed; by doing so they point towards new forms of seeing and understanding.

Anne Sibosado’s Walking to School is a memory map of Port Hedland and gestures to feelings of community belonging and connectedness. The gridlike pattern of old Port Hedland streets is given over to more organic and creative forms of spatialisation and organisation: the tracks and short cuts of childhood and the little adventures and well-worn paths of exploration seem to suggest social space as the place of childhood freedom and play, as a place of encounter, presence and intense activity. The ‘geometrically defined’ space of ‘urban planning is transformed’ into a lived and active space by her walking.6 Anne explains her work: ‘When I was growing up we were a little community of our neighbours, Aboriginal people. We lived in the houses there, where the school was, about ½ mile or something from there. We lived in Kingsmill Street. We used to use all the short cuts to get to school. We did a lot of walking; sometimes we’d run home, have a drink of water, and then run back again!’

‘You know when you walk along the beach, the tide comes in and washes away the tracks, soldier crabs’ tracks. Next day, with the tide out, they’re back again.’

In a strange way the painting seems to offer an eagle-eye perspective on the intense economic and industrial activity that is currently shaping the Pilbara. Each day we soldier on, we hustle and bustle, fly-in and out, leaving our little track that is washed away by the more eternal forces and movements of the world; our little place in the sun fleeting and momentary. In this manner, these works offer a counter-point to the epic economic narrative that is shaping the Pilbara in particular, and Western Australia more generally. Different economies of presence, community, place and belonging are active in these paintings; economies that might force us to slow, stop and think about place and identity in new and complex ways.

Michel De Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press,1984, p117-118.

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Daniel Vachon, The Serpent, the Word and the Lie of the Land: The Discipline of Living in the Great Sandy Desert. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Toronto, Canada, 2006.

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The next three artists paint and sketch themes outside Hedland. Max George’s work draws upon Her other work draws upon the epic tides that country around Onslow, Maggie Green’s around advance and retreat along the Pilbara coast.

Derby and Nyaparu Gardiner’s around the Pilbara The exposed mud, drainage channels, and sand and Kimberley. These three artists, as well as the banks create wonderful concentrations of colour and work of Irene Coffin, highlight the way sociolight. While the ocean, a riotous aquamarine, seems cultural space of Hedland is connected to, and to wait on the horizon, patiently gathering in and draws upon, diverse connections to the Pilbara pouring out, returning and leaving, marking the and other regions. Modern day Hedland is part of rhythms of life and time. Similarly, Winnie Sampi’s an extensive network of economic, social, cultural Soldier Crabs references the tides and suggest everand political relations that tie heterogeneous present cycles and movements: communities together.

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Max George’s sketches are otherworldly and draw upon his experience living and working around Onslow. They talk about personal transformation and philosophical insight. Little snatches of story, written in the artist’s own words, and by his own hand, talk of experiences both in and across time.

Max shows how time is not linear, but moves in cycles of duration, seeming to confirm William Faulkner’s words: ‘The past is never dead, it’s not even past.’ For Max, the past lays the groundwork for future renewal and transformation. And that past and future is held within ‘country,’ in the intimate stories of connection, belonging and identity laid down there. His connection to ‘country’ not so much a matter of representation, but of heart: something he feels, something that is part of him. As in one of his sketches when he writes: ‘Why photograph the country when you can lose the photo and the country is lost. Take it from the heart and you will never lose it. That’s why I keep on painting.’

For Max ‘country is the place to face experience’;7 not so much something to ‘capture’, but on the contrary, something that captivates him in ways beyond representational attainment. Country is a subject, a fellow being, something that acts, rather than a silent object of appropriation and enjoyment.

Country, for Max, is the place where he confronts himself and evokes the fractures of his past and the break-aways of personal transformation.

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Maggie Green also paints country outside Hedland.

Her dense and textured use of paint suggests the layers and depth of memories and experiences held in her childhood home of Myroodah Station, on the Fitzroy River south of Derby. The concentric circles joined by ‘tracks’ reference the interconnected buildings of the homestead, the billabongs full with wet season plenty, the river itself, as well as daily routines of station life as people move between these sites. Each ‘site’ is connected with others by the human labour of inscription embedded there; the tracks and by-ways of activity and human presence literally imprinted into the country, embossed into identity. Maggie explains her painting of Myroodah Station: ‘I was born there, grew up there. There was a creek, billabong. The station is right on the flat. The circles are all the buildings, camps.

My mum, my grandmother, big mob of people: uncles, aunties, my father. We learnt from the bush, mum and dad showed us. We [were] never born in a town, born on the station. We learnt how to cook from Mrs Lanigan, she always used to say, ‘Come on, clean up, do your work girls.’

We got up early morning, make the bed for them, clean up. We‘d go and get all the eggs from the chickens, milk the nanny goat, we grew up on that. Helpin’ Mrs Lanigan, make bread, everything, iron the clothes. Yeah that’s a hard work. They tried to put us to school in Derby but George Lanigan said no, they got to learn to work. I still think about those days. When we think about it we want to go back there. We used to wear hessian flour bags, that was our dress. When it all finish we shift up to Looma.’

Similarly the rhythms of work, stock camps and station life are a key theme for William (Nyaparu) Gardiner. Born in Nyangumarta country he has worked throughout the Pilbara and southern Kimberley. The stock camps and stations were active centres of cultural exchange where Aboriginal people from different language groups forged common experiences, exchanged knowledge and became interconnected. The Pilbara Aboriginal Workers’ Strike was a key phase in this shared history and brought many people from the stations out east into Hedland. Hedland thus became a key place for cultural exchange and activity, something that continues today. Yet Nyaparu’s stories – and he has hundreds evoking his rich and fascinating life – are multi-layered and complex. They speak of survival, ingenuity, ‘workin’ with whitefellas’ as well as how he, and others, have maintained the strength of Aboriginal knowledge, law and customs, sometimes against whitefellas’ intentions: ‘We were given our name through that old man, he was a drover. He passed away in Fitzroy Crossing. He give my father’s name, so we became Gardiners. My dad was sitting down, somebody said, what’s his name, they said I don’t know, so he became a Gardiner.’

Such acts of naming are commonplace in the history between white and Aboriginal Australians. The act of renaming, of naming anew is an attempt to incorporate Aboriginal bodies into new systems of ordering and law. Aboriginal relationships to country and kin, and the social order inscribed in skin names, are seemingly erased by the new acts of naming that associate Aboriginal people with certain whitefellas and with certain stations. But the erasure of original names, classifications and relationships to kin and country is not always successful. People like Nyaparu, through his cultural knowledge, resourcefulness and connectedness to other cultural groups, has been able to negotiate both the fulfilment of traditional obligations as well as the opportunities afforded by working with whitefellas. Indeed, his life story shows not one of loss or erasure, but one of active negotiation of complex and multi-layered experiences, rights and responsibilities. His landscape paintings, rich with the stunning blues and reds of the Pilbara and Kimberley lead the eye into new sites of perception; a visual act that seems to speak of Nyaparu’s own multifaceted and wise perspective on people, country, culture and history.

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Paul Carter, Dark Writing: Geography Performance, Design. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009, pxv.

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For Albert Pianta, issues of perspective – and particularly the sharing of stories and values - are vital for the development of place and community. As he says, ‘unless we talk together and be open about it, and be manly about it I suppose, we will never know what the hell one another is doing, we will never ever know how you feel for instance.’

Finding mutual points of connection is essential to this practice of shared dialogue. Yet, cross-cultural dialogue can only begin when we recognise that different values and beliefs shape conceptions of identity, belonging, place and culture. While world-views and values might be different across cultures, it doesn’t mean they exclude each other, as Albert explains: ‘I have just come out of 15 years in the Education Department, part of my role there was talking about cultural awareness to all the new teachers. With cultural awareness – Aboriginal people are very strong at talking about the values and beliefs that we have – and everybody has it, but because we live with it on a daily basis we then say to other people: open up your mind and think about your values and beliefs and let’s see if the two of them can connect. You know we ask them to think about their own culture, their beliefs. It’s not only in our culture we are talking about it, It’s like, you tell your story of growing up and let’s see if it connects with mine. Let’s see if all the hardship you went through, and I went through, connects. And I can guarantee it at the end of the day we do connect, but I need to open your mind up about it… it’s like we can connect, and we will, if we only open our minds to it and listen to one another. This is the sort of stuff I talk about in my previous jobs.’

Hedland’s cultural and historical places of importance. His sketches open up the chance for interaction. As he says, ‘the funny thing about Port Hedland, it’s a strange town, we grew up with the whitefellas who were here, a lot of white people will defend it to the hilt like us.’

So what is Before The Town Got Big all about? In essence I think it is about the everyday activities that make Hedland what it is. These paintings provide narratives and insights into the human process of making home, community and identity. These cultural practices are ones that happen in space. The raw materials of these events and narratives are beaches, mangroves, hills, rock-holes and roads as much as history, experience and memory; the patterns, tides, colours and vistas of the physical ebb and flow, surge and swell into metaphysical formations. Social orders are laid down, signposts created and naming practices written into place. This is something that Carter calls ‘the choreographic basis of place making’.8 Places are made through active processes of direction and performance, through the laying down of movements and drama: an ever present theatre of actuality and possibility in which locals act, gesture and announce their presence and place in the world. Hedland is a place of diverse and intense ‘choreographies:’ there are many actors and dramas unfolding, all of which affect the gestures, actions and ‘voice’ of others. With such diverse histories, visions and priorities, what’s the common ground? How do you create that shared narrative, that place for common themes and visions to reference and draw upon another in order to sketch out a future, draw upon a past, act out a future?

This exhibition has signposted that process. It invites cross-canvas conversations, mutual points of connection and seems to sketch Albert’s in-depth sketches of contemporary and historical Pilbara out future collaborations around place and community making in scenes are part of this work of sharing insight in the hope of Hedland. The artworks are traversed by shared patterns, communal making a point of connection. His sketches are like social artefacts palettes, common stories and collective futures. Such parallel, yet as they document the interaction between people, technology, distinctive, expressions not only announce the capability of art to industrialisation and place. But more than this, they are also an make material intervention into the future, but may very well blueinvitation to create connection in the hope of enabling others to see the print the possibility to act within new social orders and patterns. world in a new light. His sketches seem to begin a conversation, find a point of common connection, create the means to share and protect

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Image (left): Maggie Green, Our Own School at Myroodah Station, 61 x 61cm, 2010.

MAP REF: F2

Image (below): Noel Garlett, Untitled, 30 x 30cm, 2010.

We had our own school there at Myroodah. When welfare come to take the kids away to school – Mr Lanigan he tell ‘em ‘No you don’t take the kids they got them own school and they will learn here’. He was a good man Mr Lanigan.

He never let them take us kids away!

Maggie Green

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Other side of those trees there’s a road you travel on to get to Marble Bar. If you’re driving along and look carefully you can see this rock – it’s called Black Rock – We use to go for a picnic there when we were kids. Mum and Dad used to push Tea Trees all together and push it right out into the deep water to catch all the fish and we would cook them up.

Image (left): William (Nyaparu) Gardiner, Gibb River Road, 86 x 92cm, 2010.

MAP REF: F1

Image (below): Irene Coffin, Millstream Hills, 61 x 61cm, 2010.

MAP REF: A3

Image (right): Irene Coffin, Black Rock (detail), 61 x 92cm, 2010.

Irene Coffin

MAP REF: C3

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One of the things I learnt in life is never to forget what you have been taught. It is within you to what you can do. Art is an expression of my life that I missed out on when I was in my 20’s and 30’s – that was a dream, I was off the rails. Remembering things I know today makes me tired. What’s on the canvas is 47 years of my living life. I was there, I saw that country. And the meaning of putting it on canvas has given me a new lease of life. Every paintbrush stroke takes away the pain of losing relatives and loved ones. The colours of the brush give me back the feeling that people are with me today. It’s like all those people are on my hand as I paint. Makes me think of the things I missed out on. Everything I think about, the pain and problems have become my joy and happiness. You go back to some things that you don’t want repeated again, to forget that, and remember the good. Forgetting is taking away your special gift to never be the same again. Looking at strengths of the past, looking on it, makes you stronger in the future. Can’t just say that was the past mate, forget it.

Image: Max George, A Job Out On The Sea, artline pen on cartridge paper, 51 x 40cm, 2010.

Waking up after being unconscious for a week, I think I lost my whole life. I nearly grabbed the woman who hit me over the head with a golf club [and said] thank you for changing my life. Maybe she shifted something in my brain. Sitting down painting what I missed, the beautiful country.

Max George

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Image (left): Maggie Green, Rain at Myroodah Station, 115 x 118cm, 2010.

Image (left): Maggie Ginger, Seeds, 46 x 50cm, 2010.

MAP REF: F2

‘We get big storms and rain.’

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The story of my life, still here, still going and I’m with a bunch of people I really care about.

Image: Spinifex Hill Artist Irene Coffin as a child.

Photo courtesy of Irene Coffin.

Irene Coffin

It is good to sit down sometimes in the stillness and quiet and watch the sunset – time just seems to pass – the cockatoo calls slowly fading and the kangaroos jumping in the distance thump, thump thump just brings back memories of times when there was not too many cars or people – just you and the bush and the sound of the trees rustling – it makes you wonder where it’s all gone.

Max George

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FORM would like to thank, first and foremost, the Spinifex Hill Artists, an endlessly inspiring group of people. Their talent and commitment sets an example for artists and for others.

Special thanks in particular to artist Anne Sibosado and the Sibosado family for generously letting us reproduce their photos of Hedland ‘before the town got big’, to artist mentors Helen Ansell and Sara Barnes, and to anthropologist Hamish Morgan.

Thank you also to the partners supporting Spinifex Hills Artists, whose contribution has enabled this exhibition and publication: BHP Billiton Iron Ore, LandCorp, Pilbara Development Commission, and the Office of the Arts, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Finally, thank you to the Hedland Aboriginal Church, for providing a temporary home for the Spinifex Hill Artists workshops.

FORM Building a State of Creativity 357 Murray Street Perth Western Australia, 6000

Unless otherwise stated all artworks are acrylic on canvas. Unless otherwise stated all photographs of artwork courtesy of FORM. All artist portraits courtesy of Christine Villanti, Simon Phelps and FORM. All vintage photographs of Port Hedland courtesy of Anne Sibosado and the Sibosado family.

T +61 8 9226 2799 F +61 8 9226 2250 www.form.net.au www.midlandatelier.com www.courthousegallery.com.au www.thepilbaraproject.com

ISBN number 978-0-9808691-2-5

This project was designed and delivered by FORM

© 2010. All rights reserved.

Copyright for all completed works of art, artwork design concepts, and artworks in progress shown in this publication reside with the artists. Copyright for photographic images is held by the individual photographers or FORM.

Written by Elisha Buttler, Hamish Morgan, Mags Webster Edited by Elisha Buttler Graphic design by Amy Moffatt

Copyright for written content resides with the individual authors or FORM. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission from the publishers, FORM.

Printed by Scott Print

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