Warlpiri Women’s Dance Camps
Yawulyu (Warlpiri women’s ceremony) is taught across generations, ‘on-country’ and through story, song and dance. Warlpiri Grandmothers, women and girls are actively reviving, restoring and maintaining the timeless wisdom of their cultural mythologies. This is a long term, relationship-based cultural health and wellbeing project, empowering women of all ages.
“This work of Art is a visual, patchwork map, journeying through Jukurrpa and generations of sharing knowledge. It tells the story of women meeting for the dance camps. The idea behind the painting is to show that everyone was gathering for the knowledge of old ways and tradition was being handed down.”
The Work
My role on this project evolved over the ten years, from 2010-2020. I began as a logistic coordinator supporting up to 100 women and girls camping on-country for ceremony. I was also the dance camp videographer, mentoring teenagers to develop their media skills. I produced and edited video content and interviews with senior women that sustained the long term funding of this project.
About 5 years in, I hit a stumbling block, unsure of my role and the complex dynamics of working two-ways. I became acutely aware of my own European cultural void. I wondered where my cultural elders were and I realised I was not connected to my own European cultural stories. I knew intuitively this placed a limit on how much I could really understand in the intercultural domain. Soon after, I met Dr Glenda Cloughley, Jungian Psychoanalyst, poet and composer in Canberra and Dr Craig San Roque, Jungian Cultural Psychologist, writer and theatre director in Alice Springs. Both were internationally recognised senior leaders in European cultural mythology, psychology, cultural development and the arts.
So, from 2014, I began a long-term initiation into my own cultural lineage as I listened and watched my cultural elders in this domain. We not only read the stories together, we performed them in song, movement and place and in the company of community. I began to understand the resonance between my own European regenerative mythologies and the Aboriginal cultural mythologies held within the Jukurrpa (dreaming). With my own cultural understanding more intact, the nature of my intercultural work in the Warlpiri dance camps also changed.
Noel Pearson
“The Songlines of Central Australia are also the heritage of non-indigenous Australians. [Songlines are]…the illicd and the Odyssey of Australia. These mythic stories are Australia’s Book of Genesis”
National Museum of Australia, Songlines Exhibition, Tracking the Seven Sisters, 2018
With a teaching degree, our strong relationships developed over many years, my growing understanding of Warlpiri yawulyu and my own experience of being mentored by my cultural elders, I began collaborating with senior women to develop explicit teaching and learning processes that support transmission of knowledge. We produced an in depth journal of personal stories and connections which was published and shared within the Warlpiri community. Warlpiri women and girls were keen to share their dancing and singing to the broader public, one of the few all women dancing groups. I worked with them to creatively produce the songs, dances and storytelling for public audiences at festivals and theatre performances in Tennant Creek, Katherine and Alice Springs. Touring and sharing the work with the public was a highlight for all of us!
I continue my relationships with Warlpiri women today, even though I do not work on this project anymore. This long-term intercultural and intergenerational project has been foundational in my life. Witnessing another culture and learning more deeply about my own was a genuine two-way exchange, which is why I firmly believe we must continue to embrace the resonance between cultures. I am grateful for the gift of experiencing the healing power of ceremony and wisdom stories, for the individual, the collective and for Country.
