Top left: Workshop delegate

1
Top left Workshop delegates spontaneous design,
Corporate man -) 1997 Top Right Illuminating
Aboriginal ancestral design, Warlpiri man
-) Bottom left 'Kabbalist' Amulet design, North
African Man -), anon. Bottom right Workshop
delegate design, CEO Man -) 2000 Net-Walks "Ri
tual provides the main context for learning about
the meaning of art, and shows that the
construction of meaning is an active process.
Some instruction is given to people when they are
seated at the men's ceremonial ground, or when
they are making paintings for commercial purposes
or being shown how to do a painting by a
relative. However, the main context for learning
is through participation in ceremony, where
people learn how to perform songs and dances and
how to do paintings. People observe who produces
which paintings and the context in which they are
used (for example) they learn to do the yellow
ochre dance when it is being performed for a
particular purpose, and they see how a ground
sculpture is used in a particular way. Meaning is
built up over time, and what is learnt in one
context about an object can quickly be applied to
other contexts and objects. It is possible to
learn about paintings as maps by walking around
the landscape it is equally possible to learn of
the significance of particular features of a
painting or a landform by seeing them danced out,
sung about or enacted in some other way.
Aboriginal art is learned behaviour that comes
alive and gains a purpose in the context of the
present. And in this way ancestral experience is
incorporated in present experience while
simultaneously underpinning it." Aboriginal Art,
Howard Morphy Summary of content -) A Wavering
Truth. SNIP PS, You are a fine poet so are your
feet Longfellow's? Peter Beamish, Trinity Bay,
Newfoundland www.oceancontact.com
Net-walks
2

• 'That truth in which all intellect finds rest.'
  Dante.
  
• Fragments to shorten the long.
  
  
• An infant died in Gurka'wuy on Trial Bay, Eastern
  Arnhem Land, in the country of the Gumatj and
  Marrakulu clans. The child's spirit home was in
  its own Mardarrpa clan country 100kms away. -
  The objective of the ritual was to move his
  spirit from Gurka'wuy to Gunmurruytjpi. -To be
  accomplished by calling upon the ancestral
  beings that created the areas bridging the land
  between the two. -Each place associated with
  particular ancestral songs, dances, and
  painting. The form is the 'restored behaviour'
  of ritual, resources upon which people can draw.
  - Participants in this ritual select from
  particular places on the journey and so organise
  them in a sequence to move the 'body' from a to
  b. A dance is then performed from a place, a
  series from another, a painting will be made
  from a third, a ground sculpture from a fourth
  and so on...-Many alternative routes could be
  taken. In the case of the Mardarrpa child the
  choice was between the coastal route or the
  inland route, the latter being chosen. Decisions
  like this are based on multiple factors to whom
  the dead person is related, who offers to take
  part in the ceremony, which groups decide to
  stay away. It is thus an affirmation of
  friendship, also trust since it involves using
  one's own spiritual powers and restricted
  knowledge on behalf of others. For the Mardarrpa
  child the journey began with a dance led by Yama
  Munungurritj that represented the yellow ochre
  ancestors from Yarrwidi Gumatj nearby at
  Gururrga Bay the site of a big yellow ochre
  quarry associated with the child's clan, the
  Mardarrpa. The ancestors were portrayed walking
  along the beach searching for yellow ochre
  deposits. They dragged their digging sticks
  behind them and held sacred woven-string dilly
  bags gripped between their teeth. Every so often
  the dancers would stop and dig the sticks into
  the ground, representing ancestors levering up
  bits of ochre which they tested the quality of
  by rubbing on their own bodies. The highest
  quality ochre happened to be found in front of
  the shade where the child's body lay through
  this enactment the ancestors found the child's
  spirit, which would them commence it's journey.

3

• The dance allowed the anger and pain felt at the
  child's death. The dilly bag gripped tightly in
  the mouth was not simply for collecting the
  ochre it contained the anger and anguish of the
  bereaved. The journey then unfolds itself
  through time space as macrocosm and microcosm,
  implicate and explicate. - A 'key' component was
  provided by the coffin lid. Among the many
  designs that could have been chosen in this case
  it was one that belonged to another clan
  grounded on the journey at a place about half
  way on the spirit's journey the painting
  represents a place on the Gaargarn River where
  the waters flood in the wet season and where a
  fish trap is set up by blocking off the stream,
  it represents in its details the fish trap at
  Gaargarn the diamond patterns signifies the
  raging torrents of the wet season floodwaters
  over the site of the fish trap streamers of
  weeds extend from the limbs of the freshwater
  tortoise and mark patterns on his shell. In
  songs and dances the participants referred to the
  same floodwaters carrying the coffin on its
  downstream journey and onward to the great snake
  who swallowed it and took it to the coast. This
  was the snake whose ribs were used, in turn, to
  make the fish traps in the ancestral past.
  Finally the journey ends at the graveside when
  dancers acting as crocodiles 'buried' the child
  in the crocodile's nest, for it was from the
  crocodile at Gunmurruytjpi that the child's
  conception spirit had come. 'Each element woven
  in a complex way into the whole, yet each
  existing independent of it's context to resonate
  in the minds and memories of those taking part.
  
• For those confused as to the relevance of such a
  contribution in this virtual place may I offer
  off the 'top of my head' the article in The Dance
  of Change 'Moving Upstream from Measurement' H.
  Thomas Johnson. pp 291-298. (A man who IMHO
  moved his own river and so may yet shift a mighty
  nation from another kind of slumber from which
  it is not yet, quite, too late to awaken itself.)
  But you will all and each be the best judges of
  that -) But for those with a disinclination to
  read backwards, sideways and maybe even forwards
  this might make it plainer. " Perhaps Johnson was
  resonating with this point when he said that 97
  percent of what matters couldn't be measured and
  conventional measuring was tampering
  manipulation without genuine understanding. He
  seemed to recognize that many of our deepest
  frustrations come from an inherent sense of the
  natural way of life, lost in the process. Lost
  in the process...Mmmmm.
• With Care,
• Andrew Campbell