Resilience through art as education

Gija people are strong and resilient despite many things that have happened to us. We have been on Gija land since our ancestors created the country and everything in it, but there have been major impacts. First, white settlement and the killing times; second, building the cattle industry with white people; third, being kicked off the stations and forced to settle in Warmun.

Our Old People started two-way learning and established the Ngalangangpum School (1979) for Gija young people. They created one of the most significant art movements in Australia and established Warmun Art Centre (1998) to strengthen culture, education and economic opportunities for future generations.

This project will show how Gija people maintained autonomy and resilience despite these challenges. We will describe the history of the Art Centre within Gija traditions of resilience and activism. We will collect histories of objects made for teaching from late 1970s to now, record the Old People’s contribution to education at Warmun, and document how establishing the Art Centre kept people strong. We will use the Community Collection to draw out the memories of the Old People, record these, adding to the Collection’s archives and using these to build new education products for Gija youth, school and university programs, curators, historians and others. We will share our work with art centres through ANKA (Arnhem Northern, Kimberley Aboriginal Artists Corporation).

Important Old People who established the Art Centre, and made works for Ngalangangpum School programs have passed away, but many remain strong in the Centre. They were instrumental in extending two-way education to a partnership with the Grimwade Centre, University of Melbourne, following conservation of the Community Collection after the 2011 flood that destroyed Warmun. 

This project will locate the history of Warmun Art Centre within the Gija tradition of self-determination and advocacy. It will collect the histories of the artworks, and of the Old People’s contribution to the Art Centre. It will document what it was about establishing the Art Centre that made people feel good. A major outcome will be activation of the collection as a relevant resource with Gija people being able to take control of Gija resources and develop them in ways that will support contemporary community needs.

This project has five programs:

1. Understand how making the objects in the 1970s and 1980s focussed education and intergenerational knowledge development at a time of immense disruption for Gija people with threats to knowledge and wellbeing.

2. Ensure accurate and up-to-date storage, documentation and cataloguing for effective use of the Collection into the future.

3. Create a Collections Policy, with professional guidelines for the collection, developed by the Art Centre Board with rules for acquisition, access, use, and management systems.

4. Most importantly, document (oral recording and transcription), Elders’ memories about establishing the Collection, Ngalangangpum School and the Art Centre, to understand generational shifts in context for creating art and building resilience

5. Work with younger Gija people to create new content for use in research and education.