So many paintings,
so many stories.
so many stories.
Stories are always filled with and shaped by other stories. Some smaller, some bigger. Telling stories again, in a new place, or in a new way, calls up other stories; it waves to them, wakes them up. Stories told wander and zip back and forth, around and through, like playful nyi-nyis (zebra finches), appearing, and disappearing, and reappearing from different places, each in their own ways. Across different people’s memories and hearts and imaginations, stories connect up and loop back and mix together, moving through different words and different pictures. We could say that storytellers weave stories into one another, like tjanpi (grass) woven into nyi-nyi nests.4
different, different, Rosalyn’s mother used to say when she painted things that were
the same, and different,
like a row of cowboys in Darwin at festival time,
wearing different, different hats.
the same, and different,
like a row of cowboys in Darwin at festival time,
wearing different, different hats.
Two Women, Margaret Boko 2010
© Margaret Boko and Tangentyere Artists,
courtesy of Tangentyere Artists
courtesy of Tangentyere Artists
Maybe stories are also a bit cheeky, like cowboys, always moving around, to stay alive.
The work we do together is always about making colourful stories with and for life.
Slowly, over several years, Ngunytjuku Mamaku Tjukurpa Kanyini Wanka family story-telling-story-making-story-keeping group, led by Anu,5 made the short, animated film ‘Winimaku ara papa wiimatjaraku’ (2023) with animator Jonathan Daw and Left of Elephant Sound (Jeremy Conlon), to tell the special family story shared in Rosalyn’s mother’s small 2013 canvas ‘Tjulpu & Papa (Hawk and Dog)'.6
The animation is full of people, animals, trees, hills, roads, and houses collaged from other painted stories, playing new roles to tell Winimaku ara papa wiimatjaraku, the story of Harry’s little dog. We’ll get to that. If you don’t already know their origin paintings, their other stories will be invisible.
But if we bring forward the paintings that gave us the parts we needed for the animation movie and look into them through Anu’s words, letting them carry us in close to the colour memories of the talk and action and feeling that Margie painted, we can open up our thinking about making an animation, to see it as involving something more than cutting up pictures and simply reassembling them to make new ones.
Sometimes I feel like she’s talking and saying things.
We think, I always think, what she’s thinking.
She might be looking at me telling the story.
Because we always used to go together and make a little bit of story here or there.
You feel her, like she’s next to us.
Storytelling.
It feels like when I talk about my mum’s stories, I feel really kurunpa wari,7
feel her heart next to me. I feel she’s here.
I feel happy.
When I talk to her about the story, she’s saying we [Anu and Kungka] might finish this one together—‘Keep this one strong.’
I heard her voice on this tjulpu one,
that’s why I always feel she’s here helping us to see the picture.
When I heard her voice, I knew she was with me.
Telling me to be strong for my mother’s and father’s stories.
We think, I always think, what she’s thinking.
She might be looking at me telling the story.
Because we always used to go together and make a little bit of story here or there.
You feel her, like she’s next to us.
Storytelling.
It feels like when I talk about my mum’s stories, I feel really kurunpa wari,7
feel her heart next to me. I feel she’s here.
I feel happy.
When I talk to her about the story, she’s saying we [Anu and Kungka] might finish this one together—‘Keep this one strong.’
I heard her voice on this tjulpu one,
that’s why I always feel she’s here helping us to see the picture.
When I heard her voice, I knew she was with me.
Telling me to be strong for my mother’s and father’s stories.
So now, we are with you and you are here with us; we
are talking to you kungka pulkawarakuringupayi, you really hard-working woman.
are talking to you kungka pulkawarakuringupayi, you really hard-working woman.
Sometimes Rosalyn keeps your photo up on her phone, propped up on the desk looking over what we’re doing. You set a good example of working very hard and feeling good making special things full of memories.
Everyone who has worked on this project has felt you alongside us in their own different way. Sometimes worrying for you, really missing you, but mostly really happy to have been doing this work with your memories, in your memory. We all really care about doing this and about doing it right.
We started this article with your voice coming out from a black screen, telling the ‘Tjulpu & Papa’ story. Just your voice, no colour, like someone listening with their eyes closed. It’s the first story you made with Kungka, in Mparntwe (Alice Springs), about ten years ago, to keep for family. Now this is the first time anyone anywhere has been able to listen to your voice just like that.
You sold a lot of your paintings at exhibitions and markets and to visitors to the art centre. They are special and rare. People in Alice Springs and people from far away loved them. They bought them and put them on the walls of their houses. Maybe in their bedrooms, or kitchens, or offices, or hallways. Some were bought by gallery collections and might spend their time living in cool storerooms now. All these places are far away from the stories in the paintings.
It’s like the people who bought them are keeping pages from your family’s photo album as stories for their own lives. They can look at them whenever they like. What do they see when they are looking at them? What do they wonder about? Do they recognise people and places? Do they laugh like you did when you talked story? Do they see themselves in the stories?
Making this new computer story here now is a way for your family and other people to be able to see some of the paintings anytime too, and to sit down with Anu’s stories about them. Anu also tells good stories about you telling her stories, teasing her as you went along. When people take in all the things that we’re pulling together here, they might make new connections in their own minds and then see the paintings and hold the stories differently and carefully too.
For people who don’t understand your language, we can say here that in that recording at the start, you’re telling a story you painted on a little square canvas, about when that tjulpu (eagle) took your great-grandson Harry’s little papa (dog) high up into the sky above #6 House at Little Sisters camp, and then dropped it down onto the ground.
That eagle thought that dog was a rabbit,
and the kids threw rocks at it to make it drop it.
They cared for it after it fell down, with blood on its body from the bird’s claws.
and the kids threw rocks at it to make it drop it.
They cared for it after it fell down, with blood on its body from the bird’s claws.
Papa are family, kungka. Papa tjuta nganampa pamali.
That’s what Rosalyn always tells Lisa.
Aṉangu know well how all kinds of things get taken away from Aṉangu and how you have to fight really hard to get them back. Country. Sometimes dogs. Sometimes kids.
One time, a Friday afternoon, kungka pulkawarakuringupayi had to fight hard to get some of her own grandchildren back from welfare mob, before they disappeared into the weekend when government whitefellas don’t usually answer their phones.
Rosalyn remembers telling her mother not long after she first started painting at Tangentyere Artists, to try to do something new: to paint all her memories.
Sometimes she tells me story, ‘Oh I finished this one, finished that.’
I always ask her, ‘What story’s this one?’
‘Oh, I can’t tell you. You have to remember what I like and what I don’t like!’
I always ask her, ‘What story’s this one?’
‘Oh, I can’t tell you. You have to remember what I like and what I don’t like!’
One day she was doing dot painting, I was having a joke with my mum.
‘You always do dot painting Mum.’
Sometimes white people don’t understand dot painting. Some are from long way, overseas.
Some white people knows Aboriginal [things] because they grow up in Aboriginal [places].
‘You always do dot painting Mum.’
Sometimes white people don’t understand dot painting. Some are from long way, overseas.
Some white people knows Aboriginal [things] because they grow up in Aboriginal [places].
Some white people go, ‘Oh what’s this? I don’t know what dot painting means.’
I asked my mum, ‘Can’t you change Mum?
Do little bit painting for houses and people and cars.
You can’t [don’t have to] do dot painting every time, you know.’
She was starting to do dot painting with soakage
and bush medicine,8
and she asked me, ‘Can I change?’
‘It’s up to you. You can change.’
I asked my mum, ‘Can’t you change Mum?
Do little bit painting for houses and people and cars.
You can’t [don’t have to] do dot painting every time, you know.’
She was starting to do dot painting with soakage
and bush medicine,8
and she asked me, ‘Can I change?’
‘It’s up to you. You can change.’
And she started to paint cars and trees and yellow flowers and kampurarpa.9
Like the remembered moments they recall, most of Rosalyn’s mother’s story paintings were unique renditions, capturing scenes from the flow of life, refiguring the action of lived experience into image.
At the end of each painting day at the art centre, Rosalyn’s mother used to talk to her family about what she was working on (and tell other stories of the day). Through this sharing and from her own lived experience of many of the stories her mother painted, Rosalyn knows most of the stories told in her
mother’s canvases.
mother’s canvases.
Some stories, I don’t know. Some I know.
Of the painted stories she does know, Rosalyn also knows small stories sitting within them, and their connections with other stories. A painting might be just a part of a bigger story.
Rosalyn also remembers her mother telling her that
you can’t see or do anything in blackness,
but as the day breaks and fills with colour,
it’s like a rainbow is spilling to the earth,
like honey
or rain.
On Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays you were always painting. Kungka pulkawarakuringupayi working really hard making paintings holding special memories to sell to make money for family.
When we think about you painting, we remember you sitting in the big new Tangengtyere Artists studio, at your table near the big back door, with your other artist friends like Sally and Grace and Betty, and some others, and some others again who have now also passed away.
Everyone working away at their own tables in that huge studio, and your good friend Sia helping to prepare canvases and mix paints. All your friends remember you telling stories. They remember your cheeky spirit, your laughter ringing out. Always remembering stories, and always
sharing stories.
sharing stories.
You and your daughters and Lisa used to sit down together to tell painting stories at a house in Eastside, or at CAAMA,10 looking at printed paper copies of Tangentyere Artists art centre’s digital photographs of them, or sometimes looking at canvases themselves, borrowed from friends around town who had bought them and loaned them back to us for making story recordings.
CAAMA: This is me and Elizabeth, my daughter, talking on
radio about my painting, Margaret Boko 2014
radio about my painting, Margaret Boko 2014
© Margaret Boko and Tangentyere Artists, courtesy of Tangentyere Artists
You had so many funny stories. You even told sad stories in light ways. Always in loving ways. We recorded in Luritja and in English. Sometimes a mix of both. You decided when each story recording was finished. We have more than one recording for some stories.
Rosalyn says you
couldn’t stop telling stories.11
Sometimes she [my mum] goes to Darwin, for exhibition.
One of his [her] grandsons: ‘When you go, in the airplane, what you see when you go up and look down? What you see flying like a bird in the aeroplane?
When you go up, you might see Little Sister.’
One of his [her] grandsons: ‘When you go, in the airplane, what you see when you go up and look down? What you see flying like a bird in the aeroplane?
When you go up, you might see Little Sister.’
One day I told my mum,
‘You might draw picture, so he can remember.’
‘You know when you go to Darwin or Adelaide, make little picture. Remember something.’
‘You might draw picture, so he can remember.’
‘You know when you go to Darwin or Adelaide, make little picture. Remember something.’
Houses, trees, flowers, cars, little flowers, different gum trees.
Families, friends.
They all come from different [places].
Families, friends.
They all come from different [places].
More desert things.
She likes desert things in her pictures.
Like mixing colour; like her country.
Grew up in another country.
In his [her] memory.
She likes desert things in her pictures.
Like mixing colour; like her country.
Grew up in another country.
In his [her] memory.
So, we’re working together and making things like this computer story now, to keep those stories being told for many people to see and hear.
Your memories always sparkled with life. When you talked about your paintings, it was easy to see the people and dogs and cars and prams and birds and taps and trees and clouds and plastic bags and children in the paintings all moving, full of energy and full of their own stories.
That’s where the idea of animating your ‘Tjulpu & Papa’ story painting started, a long time ago. (Before Lisa’s daughter Ankumbi was born, and before you lost your daughter, Rosalyn’s sister, same name.)
‘Tjulpu & Papa’ is a true and loving story, like all your stories. People dealing with trouble together, caring for family, being and feeling happy together, in the beginning and in the end.
Someone bought that little painting we’ve been talking about, but we have this picture of it to show people who have come here how it all started.
Tjulpu & Papa (Hawk and Dog), Margaret Boko 2013
© Margaret Boko and Tangentyere Artists, courtesy of Tangentyere Artists
