Arnhem Land sister artists record fragile abundance of Top End wet season in collection of paintings

Rhonda Duncan at a billabong near Urapunga. (ABC Katherine: James Elton)

Crouched by a billabong near the southern edge of Arnhem Land, Margaret Duncan has her whole arm down a crab hole.

“There’s two,” she says.

She pulls out the male crab first, with its big claw. Then the female.

“We could eat it, or we could use it as bait.”

Today, the lucky crabs are put back in the hole.

Margaret’s sister, Rhonda, explains how they learned to hunt ducks here as kids.

“We used to get leaves to hide ourselves and, with a stick, wait for the duck to come up from the water and hit the duck on the head,” she says.

“Sometimes we would wrap ourselves in mud.”

The sisters see food everywhere in this landscape around Urapunga, a remote community in the Top End about 600 kilometres south-east of Darwin.

The wet season, which has just ended, was always a time of plenty for their ancestors.

But feral animals have taken their toll on these ecosystems. Nearby are some deep prints in the mud that suggest a buffalo was here recently. The pigs are bad, too.

“We still remind ourselves, in the paintings that we do, of the good days,” Margaret says.

Walking in two worlds

An exhibition of the sisters’ paintings about their country has just opened in Katherine.

Their intense vibrancy has developed a long way from what was possible when Margaret, who has been painting longer than her younger sister, first learned the skill growing up.

“Our brushes were made from our hair,” she says.

“We went down to the river and collected [rocks] of all different kinds of colours and smash it up and make it into a paste.”

Margaret says her work helps “take away the anger” that comes from the pressure of “living in two worlds”. Aspects of her traditional culture that have been “taken away” can be preserved and celebrated in the paintings.

Rhonda sees the work as a way to lift up other Aboriginal people.

“In these modern days now, Aboriginal people are sort of down, you know? Like there’s no-one to help to revive our culture,” she says.

“That’s why we’re trying to do something better for us.”

Paintings from dreams

Back on country, Rhonda sits for a moment near the water at Roper Bar, a spot on the river popular with anglers.

She says some of her paintings about this place are based on visions that come to her in dreams.

“My grandmother used to come into my dream and show me the picture, and I kept it in my mind,” she says.

“It makes you feel good, thinking about how they used to live a long time ago.”

The ancestors left physical traces too.

Margaret says she is inspired by cave paintings she finds dotted around the area.

“[Their art] has been forgotten. But it’s still there. No matter where you go — which cave, which hill, which country — it’s still there,” Margaret says.

“They tell … a story that they’ve seen, what they saw, when they were alive.”

One of Margaret’s paintings, Las tu Olman en Olgaman, is about the last two ancestors she remembers who “roamed the country”, rather than living in the community.

Her dad used to take them clothes and blankets, but they “weren’t used to that kind of thing”.

Sometime in the late 1970s, someone told her dad they had found bones in the bush that might have been their ancestors’.

In her painting they sit serenely in a cave, surrounded by their dogs, with a billabong nearby.

‘Ups and downs as sisters’

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing between the sisters.

They recall moments of tension when Margaret was first teaching Rhonda how to weave baskets from pandanus.

“Sometimes we have our little ups and downs as sisters,” Margaret says.

“I said to her: ‘Keep going!'”

Rhonda was sometimes frustrated.

“I used to see her and get angry inside,” she says, laughing.

But the sisters have also pulled closer through their work and used it to process grief.

“When [Rhonda] lost her husband, she was lost. But I got her and pulled her back. Stop what you’re doing and come with me.

“It’s hard, but life has to go on. You’ve got to carry your load. And chuck it in the painting.”