Ernabella

Australia’s oldest First Nations art centre, Ernabella Arts, has been a wellspring of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara creativity since 1948. The story of Ernabella Arts is one led and driven by the remarkable work of generations of women. Located at the eastern end of the Musgrave Ranges in the far northwest of South Australia, Pukatja community is largely made up of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people. Pukatja (or Ernabella as it was then known) was the first permanent settlement on the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APY Lands), a region now dotted with well-known art centres. The Presbyterian Board of Missions established the Ernabella Mission at Pukatja in 1937, and a women’s ‘craft room’ was formed in 1948. The earliest artists created hand-loomed woven fabrics and hand-pulled and knotted floor rugs featuring a distinctive curvilinear design, which became known as the ‘Ernabella walka’ or anapalayaku walka (Ernabella’s design). Many artists working throughout the APY Lands today were born or educated at the Ernabella Mission. The history of women artists in the Central and Western Desert art movements is often overlooked in favour of narratives that focus on the men’s painting that emerged from the township of Papunya in 1971.

Ingenuity, innovation and interculturality

The first contemporary works of art created at Ernabella were products of the artists’ bold ingenuity and intercultural innovation. Adapting a spindle used traditionally to spin hairstring, [1] the artists repurposed excess raw fleece from the mission’s sheep station to create handspun wool, which they then transformed into textiles.

[1] Hairstring was used for ceremony, to make Manguri (head rings) and for carrying wira (shallow wooden dishes) on the head by women, and hair belts for carrying game and tools by men

Opinions differ over the origins of the Ernabella walka. Some have made connections to milpatjunanyi, the Pitjantjatjara storytelling practice of using sticks and leaves to draw in the sand, whereas others see its origins in decorative designs based on flowers, leaves and the Pukatja landscape first developed in the drawings of children at the Ernabella school in the 1940s and 1950s. What is clear is that the early Ernabella artists deliberately avoided depictions of sacred ancestral law in their works or art.

The use of the Ernabella walka dominated the art-making of Ernabella artists into the early 2000s, across diverse media, including batik from the 1970s, printmaking from the 1980s and ceramics since the 1990s. As senior artist Alison Milyika Carroll describes:

Ernabella Arts started as ‘craft room’ in 1948 in the Ernabella Creek. We started weaving, spinning, and making things from the wool from the Ernabella sheep station. For a long time, we had one manager and our craft room grew into an art centre. However, even before this, we had milpatjunanyi. This is Aṉangu culture, where Pitjantjatjara women have been telling stories to their children and to other women, accompanied by singing and drawing in the sand. This was our first ‘art form’. In Ernabella, this is where it started for us, milpatjunanyi, then wool, spinning and weaving, and we slowly started doing new things like batik and then paintings. [2]

The focus on what was seen as ‘decorative’ as opposed to ‘sacred’ meant that the women’s work was regarded as derivative ‘craft’ and lacked ritual power or knowledge, rather than being seen as ‘art’. Despite these perceptions, for the artists, the Ernabella walka remains a meaningful expression of Country and culture. Even today, the value placed on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art is often linked to the notion that it represents sacred, spiritual or mystical knowledge, which is inaccessible to the non-First Nations viewer. There are many diverse and meaningful ways that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists around the country express themselves. For some artists (including those in Ernabella working today) this is through a depiction of Tjukurpa (ancestral creation stories); for others their work might depict aspects of culture or lived experience that does not relate to sacred ancestral law.

[2] Alison Milyika Carroll, artist statement, SIXTY: The Journal of Australian Ceramics 60th Anniversary 1962–2022, Australian Design Centre touring exhibition, https://australiandesigncentre.com/ sixty/alison-milyika-carroll/

Kunmanara (Nyukana) Baker

Kunmanara (Nyukana) Baker (1943–2016) was a lifelong Ernabella artist. She joined the ‘craft room’ at the age of fifteen in 1958 and spent her entire working life as a practising artist, likely one of the first Aboriginal women to do so. I first learnt the Ernabella design as a schoolgirl, by telling stories in the sand – milpatjunanyi, the storytelling game. I have always made the Ernabella design and my own design has changed only a little bit over the years, and yes, each artist has got her own design. [3]

She was born in Pukatja in 1943, her family having travelled to the mission in the late 1930s at the time of its establishment. Her mother was originally from Irrunytju (Wingellina) in Western Australia and her father from Kanpi in the western APY Lands. Kunmanara (Nyukana) Baker was an innovative and highly technically skilled artist who practised and experimented across diverse media. She travelled interstate and overseas to learn new techniques and refine her skills, including to study batik in Indonesia and Japan.

[3] Don’t ask for stories: the women from Ernabella and their art, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1999, p 83.

Experimentation and collaboration

The early 2000s was a transitional period for the Ernabella artists. Several men joined the art centre and artists had begun to incorporate Tjukurpa, depictions of ancestral law and stories, into their work. The women had begun to experiment with painting while still maintaining a batik practice.

Ernabella artists had begun working in batik in 1971 when a visiting American artist who had studied in Indonesia introduced them to the technique. In 1975, three artists, Kunmanara (Nyukana) Baker (1943–2016), Yipati Kuyata (1946–1992) and Jillian Davey, attended the Batik Research Institute in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, to develop their skills. Later, other Ernabella artists visited Japan to study batik. On their return the women shared their skills with artists in Pukatja as well as with neighbouring communities.

In 2005 a cross-cultural batik exchange took place during a three-week batik workshop in Ernabella, involving artists from Brahma Tirta Sari Batik studio in Yogyakarta. Artists Agus Ismoyo, Nia Fliam and Dwi Raharjo travelled from Yogyakarta for the workshop, introducing a core group of Ernabella batik artists to batik tjap – a technique of printing repeated, often geometric, motifs on cloth using a stamp-like copper tool, called a tjap, to apply wax to the fabric. The works created in the workshop are some of the earliest examples by Ernabella artists of the depiction of both Tjukurpa and walka on the one cloth.

Creation, produced by senior Ernabella artist Tjunkaya Tapaya, OAM (born 1947), in collaboration with the visiting Indonesian artists, speaks to two creation stories, one Aṉangu and one Javanese. The Javanese story is part of the creation story of Mahabharata, a teaching central to Hindu philosophy. The main characters of this story are Togog, representing mind, Manikmaya, representing spirit, and Semar, representing intuition. The story references to the need to balance these three elements to reach harmony. Visible in the work is a tjap print of the thirteenth-century Kawung design, which incorporates ancient patterns in combination with a repeated geometric motif with parallel rows of ellipses and intersecting curved lines.

The Aṉangu story in the work is visible across multiple layers of waxing and dyeing. A tjap print of footprints and iconography, representing women carrying digging sticks, signals this as a women’s story about travel and movement across Country. Overlaid on these designs are batik tulis, fluid mark-making created using the tjanting tool. These figurative depictions clearly represent the Kutungu Tjukurpa. This Tjurkupa tells of a mother named Kutungu, who while travelling with her many children on foot over a long distance, gathered large amounts of kampuṟarpa or bush tomatoes. The figure of Kutungu is visible in the work, carrying the kampuṟarpa in a piti, a shallow dish, on her head.

Ernabella Arts Today

More than seventy years after its establishment, Ernabella Arts continues as a hub of artistic innovation. Men and women, senior and emerging, now work across painting and ceramics, incorporating both their walka and Tjukurpa in their works of art. Artists engage in constant and considered artistic renewal, exploring new materials and often drawing on history in the creation of contemporary works. Senior women purposely maintain artistic practice and cultural knowledge across generations through collaborative women’s projects.

Tjunkaya Tapaya, OAM

Tjunkaya Tapaya, OAM, is a senior artist whose career spans more than five decades and seven mediums, including a celebrated batik practice. Her 2005 collaborative works Creation (p. 87) and Paarpakani (Take flight) are examples of this. In recent years Tapaya’s focus has been on working across painting and ceramics to depict Tjukurpa, particularly the Kungkarangkalpa Tjukurpa (Seven Sisters creation story), of which she is custodian. The Tjukurpa tells of seven frightened sisters traversing the landscape to evade the lustful pursuit of a man named Nyiru. Care for one another and knowledge of Country allow the women to eventually escape into the night sky, where they become immortalised as the Pleiades star cluster.

Born at a significant site on the songline, Tapaya came to Pukatja as a newborn with her parents. She was educated at the Ernabella Mission school, becoming a prolific and gifted Pitjantjatjara writer and a committed artist. A body of ceramic work exhibited in Tarnanthi 2020: Open Hands draws on her extensive knowledge of the Kungkarangkalpa Tjukurpa and incorporates Pitjantjatjara language to provide traditional plant knowledge for use in men’s and women’s tool making. The eight ceramics forms – six vessels and two wira (bowl) shaped objects – demonstrate a bold and decisive use of line. The parallel curved lines used to connect the dominant compositional shapes are a form of mark-making that can be linked to the traditional practice of milpatjunanyi and, by degrees, to both Ernabella walka and Tapaya’s batik practice. The burnt-like appearance of the surface of some vessels (created through the application of iron oxide) creates a finish that references the Aṉangu method of pokerwork or pyrography.