When you first arrive, the doors are shut,
Big white doors, space off limits, nothing
To see here, wrong day, wrong time,
Interior closed to outsiders, go home.She is somewhere in there, you are not.
When you return, a second coming, the passage is clear,
Navigable, free open spaces,
Place open for business, welcome.You enter.
Wandering around, you search for her name,
Carol Maanyatja Golding: part of it easy on the tongue,
Part of itA planet apart, a language away,
Untranslatable, unsayable, other.
Title: Muruntjarra munu Walu, you don’t even try,
Too many consonants, too many vowels:
This journey is for the eye.
And immediately you feel it, you think you can feel it, the powerOf polymer coloured like earth
Placed onto canvas in patterns.
But there it stops. These furrows and dots worth
So much to someone— curlew song? kangaroo tracks? the slow burnOf ancestral campfires?— build to a darkening loss in you,
A hunger, a famine, black spots before the eyes.
Where is the world? You cannot make senseOf her dreaming, her signs, no sense
Of the story within the lines, can surmise
Less than naught in her pointillist design, hitherto
You have rarely felt whiter.
Give me two eyes, a nose and a mouth smiling out of a possible face,
Give me a door, a window, a roof. You want to erase
All that is wrong here, want your heart to feel lighter,Safer, less random, less subject to discomfort, this.
You need something stronger
Than two hundred years, an age or two longer
Than six generations of see how it goes, let me in, let me out, hit and miss.Welcome to country. Take off your shoes, take
What you want, take it, take all of it, it is yours.
And then, when there is none of it left anymore,
Nothing you want, you can take the memory
and breakIt to bits, and bring all the pieces to a Federation Square exhibition
Like this, and take her ticket, and invite her in, both of you nearing extinction.
A background of black. Clusters of dots— orange, yellow, pink, white—
Beneath a lattice of lines. You screw your sight
To a magic-eye hope that a picture you recognise might just pop out
But it won’t. You watch waves of indigo, blue swirl about
And try to imagine a sea in a desert but you can’t. You stand there,
Stupid, and call her name Carol! Maanyatja! Golding! You stare
At the painting, white noise in your head, crying Speak! Speak!
But she doesn’t. You flip the catalogue for clues, some kind of critiqueBut this work is not included. She has a black skin,
You have a black heart, but you can’t seem to join the dots. If some
Kind of inherent relationship exists, a code or secret
To allow you in, a connective thread, no matter how thin,
Linking her land to your own childhood home
(Melway ref. 47, F1), face it, you just cannot see it.
This place is pleasant, Heave away, haul away, isn’t it.
White-washed walls, an-apple-a-day, a surfeitOf everything, for everyone! everyone! Bought from the Crown
At an acre a pound in 1841, the German orchardists cleared the bush
To plant new trees in pleasingly logical rows. You are six years grown,
You have what you need, plus a dog and a bike to push.This suburb has been here forever. Weekdays you learn
To count numbers, read rhymes, you can sing your alphabet
Backwards. Weekends you wander with unconcern,
Piano and tennis and Sunday School, the television setBlack and white. Yes, childhood is all that childhood should be.
And losing yourself among the Koonung Creek edges
And hearing your mother’s voice Jordie! Jordie!
You follow your name, all the way home, back to cold chops and three veg.
You never did see an indigene
— Dad, what does Koonung mean? —
Until you were twenty-one.
She was drunk on a curb in Bruns-
Wick Street, cursing and screaming Please! Please!
And you drove her straight up the road to St V’s
Where she promptly gave birth on the linoleum floor
By the Male Toilet door
Right there and then
In front of the men
Going in, coming out
Her baby came out
A pale brown newborn son.When you rang the next day she’d gone.
There is a place called Walu, way off the Melway,
A waterhole in sand-hills near a large salt lake
Between Warakuma and Papulankutja
(The east Gibson Desert of Western Australia to you).This is where she was born.
Language: Ngaanyatjarra
Skin: Panaka
Year: circa 1930Two ancestral men and a little boy were camping at Walu rock hole.
The men went hunting and left the little boy behind.
The men returned with an emu and pulled out its heart.
The boy was holding the heart and blood spilled onto the rocks.
The boy ran away with the heart and turned into wind.
The blood stained the rocks and can still be seen today.
You fly home over agitated bones, you will sleep
Among doors and windows and rooves,
Recite stories about little girls and big bad wolves
From the spires of a Europe steeped
Within, and the traffic jams up like cattle
In your heart, you are stalled, there is ceremony beneath
The neon and tarmac and ten percent off, small relief
As the centuries start to do battle
And you drive way, way out of your way
To the place where the avenues cross,
The peach trees and pear trees you climbed as a kid are lost
Under lawns, and the people, where are they,
Who is left, who is gone, where have we gone.
Where has history gone.
You look down the wide black road
with the thin white line
And don’t know which bone to move.
You need a song to sing, a chant, a stick to hit
But you can’t, you don’t know where to begin. It
Gets you then, This is longing, This is love,
This is life, This is death,
call it dreaming. Call it design.And you deepen your breathing, endeavour to silence
The mob in your mind, quiet the science
Of statistic, attitude, aptitude, god, everything you have been taught.You empty your head of all thought—
— And slowly, so slowly, the clamour recedes.
And slowly you enter country…
You take the first step to undo your heart,
That you may finish,
that you may finally start.
When at last you arrive, the painting is open,
Wide and open as a poem in a book,
Come in, sit down, have a look.
Your story may not be Ngaanyatjarra clanBut perhaps it is here, part familiar, part other.
And perhaps you will read of a long lonesome
Voyage. Of leaving behind the knowledge of home.
Of seeing the arms of your grandmother’s grandmotherWave, diminish then fade to the white Cornish fog.
And perhaps you will read of the babies and bones
That tell you you are no longer alone.
That your story is one dot of many in time, a moment, prologueOf earth, sky, fingertip, door.
A possible face, even yours.
- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with M Chakraborty and K MacCarter
55: FUTURE MACHINES
with Bella Li
54: NO THEME V
with F Wright and O Sakr
53.0: THE END
with P Brown
52.0: TOIL
with C Jenkins
51.1: UMAMI
with L Davies and Lifted Brow
51.0: TRANSTASMAN
with B Cassidy
50.0: NO THEME IV
with J Tranter
49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH
with M Hall and S Seita
49.0: OBSOLETE
with T Ryan
48.1: CANADA
with K MacCarter and S Rhodes
48.0: CONSTRAINT
with C Wakeling
47.0: COLLABORATION
with L Armand and H Lambert
46.1: MELBOURNE
with M Farrell
46.0: NO THEME III
with F Plunkett
45.0: SILENCE
with J Owen
44.0: GONDWANALAND
with D Motion
43.1: PUMPKIN
with K MacCarter
43.0: MASQUE
with A Vickery
42.0: NO THEME II
with G Ryan
41.1: RATBAGGERY
with D Hose
41.0: TRANSPACIFIC
with J Rowe and M Nardone
40.1: INDONESIA
with K MacCarter
40.0: INTERLOCUTOR
with L Hart
39.1: GIBBERBIRD
with S Gory
39.0: JACKPOT!
with S Wagan Watson
38.0: SYDNEY
with A Lorange
37.1: NEBRASKA
with S Whalen
37.0: NO THEME!
with A Wearne
36.0: ELECTRONICA
with J Jones