Kwatja Etathaka / Living Water

Artists working at lltja Ntjarra (Many Hands) studio in Mparntwe/Alice Springs command one of our major landscape traditions: the Hermansburg watercolour school of Central Australia. The brilliant Western Aranda artist Albert Namatjira and his kin began the school in the late 1930s and encoded the Western landscape sublime with an overlaid map of significant sites, living waters and ancestral storylines. The subtle overlay is sometimes described as a re-claiming or re-appropriation of stolen country.

For the exhibition Kwatja Etathaka/Living Water the artists summon their resonant landscape tradition to create decisive contemporary installations: dramatic watercolours on metal sit beside delicate botanical miniatures and etherial watercolours rendered and baked into glass. The glassworks combine the elemental concepts of regeneration – water and fire.

Kwatja Etathaka/Living Water signals a crisis threatening the foundations of the sublime landscape and its ecology. Across the Western Desert Aboriginal people use the term ‘living water’ to describe water sources, including rock holes and soakage waters that are fed by underground springs. The path of these springs was created by the ancestral beings. Living waters, principally the artesian or ground water systems, are dropping and often contaminated. In most remote communities like the former Lutheran Mission of Hermansburg/Ntaria some 100 kilometres west of Mparntwe, tap water is dirty, smelly and bad tasting and compromises health and hygiene.

In a series of ground-breaking exhibitions and place-making works, the artists have conceptualised the equity gap and gaps in the rights of traditional owners. In 1976 when Federal Parliament passed the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, the legislation failed to include water rights. Aquifers are now a front-line in Northern Australia’s extraction wars.

Painting in watercolour over large metal signs, senior artists Selma Coultard and Vanessa Inkamala, who created the Living Water title, call-out for safe drinking water for remote communities. Selma Coulthard’s position is steadfast: “In ‘Reclaim Our Water’ I have painted the area between Urrampinyi (Tempe Downs) and Running Waters. Rightful Traditional Owners of water sources are sometimes pushed out of their own traditional land. The Coulthard family for instance are traditional owners of this land and water. My family has always looked after the land and its water, I go back five generations. It’s important that we maintain control over our water sources.”