The Dingo’s Noctuary
These Lumachrome glass prints have their genesis in my relationship with two Australian tribal groups – the Bpangerang people, from whom I am descended, and the Warlpiri people, who cared for me over the twenty years I spent tracing my family’s heavily concealed Aboriginal lineage. They are created using a new method derived from archaic photography practices – lumen printing, cliché-verre, chemigram – combined with elements of drawing and painting. Their materials, drawn from Country itself, include cadavers, ochres, sticks, and grass. Exposed in natural light over many hours, these images honour native animals and birds killed on our roads. In making these Lumachrome glass prints, I am consciously engaging in a collaboration with Country.
Two questions drive this work. The first is how someone raised in white culture can reconcile herself with a lost Aboriginal heritage. It is not possible for someone like me to become a ceremony woman or a law woman – not possible to become an Aboriginal woman in any significant cultural sense. The best I can hope for is to learn to honour the dead, as a cultural woman might – alone, without speaking for any tribe or culture, by following the example of strong law women who have helped me. And, as this is a far, perhaps impossible, goal, it makes sense to begin by practising with animals and birds.