CELEBRATED
Aboriginal artist Nyakul Dawson, a traditional healer who grew up
living nomadically in the desert with his parents, is feared to have
perished on a remote track after an apparent car breakdown 325km east
of Kalgoorlie.
The Pitjantjatjara artist, 69,
and relative Jarman Woods, 45, had not been seen on their sprawling
Pitjantjatjara lands for more than a week when a station hand found
what was believed to be their vehicle and Dawson's body on Dog Fence
Road last Friday.
Searchers later that night found the body of another man, thought to be Mr Woods, about 3.5km south of the vehicle.
The bodies have been flown to Perth for identification and autopsies.
News of the tragic finds spread quickly through the communities of
the Pitjantjatjara lands - covering 12,000sqkm - and was met with
grief, disbelief and confusion by some.
The beige Land Cruiser was found on a dirt road parallel to a newer one, community members told The Australian.
Air searches began when community members told police that the pair
had failed to arrive at the Tjuntjuntjarra community 650km north of
Kalgoorlie as expected.
Hetty Perkins, curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art
at the Art Gallery of NSW, said that Dawson's work bought people from
his Ngaanyatjarra area to national attention. She described him as a
man of immense wit and wisdom and a master craftsman.
She said Dawson's work, which hangs in the National Gallery of
Victoria, helped make him "an incredible ambassador for Australia and
indigenous people, he was really at ease in the international milieu of
dignitaries".
Some of Dawson's work depicts the places he went as a boy with his
mother and father in the western desert region of central Australia.
A traditional healer, Dawson is known among the Irrunytju people as a highly-respected law man and traditional healer.
Dawson's biography on the Agathon Gallery website tells how he lived
in the desert with his extended family where he learnt about the
country, the tjukurpa of cultural law associated with it, and how to
survive in the desert.
"Working beside his grandfather, he began to train as an ngangkari
when he was still a boy. He learnt to use traditional tools and
techniques, combined with spiritual knowledge and tjukurpa. He used
mapanpa (sharp stone blades) to find splinters in the flesh and removed
sickness by sucking out bad blood, touching, kneading and massaging the
body," the biography states.
He worked with prospectors and his memories of this time include the
"terrible smell of the fallout from the nuclear testing at Maralinga"
and being removed from his country to the mission at Warburton by
Native Patrol Officers in the 1950s.
Selected contents from Tribal, vol. 11, no. 2 (Winter 2006):
