Deep Trouble PODCAST with Dr Mark Halloran

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In this episode we are in conversation with Peter Hylands, an accomplished publisher, film producer, writer and conservationist. For many years Peter and his wife Andrea have been engaging viewers and readers around the globe via their new media broadcasting company Creative Cowboy Films. Peter and Andrea make crucial, unique content about art and culture and nature, frequently working with first nations people and in some of the remotest places on earth.

Podcast was recorded in Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia.

Images  from Maasailand are from Creative cowboy films - Film essays of Maasai life. This series of six remarkable films, in which the Maasai describe their culture and the ways in which a rapidly changing world continues to impact their way of life, bring us closer to an extraordinary and semi-nomadic Indigenous world.

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Dr. Djambawa Marawili AM has received Australia’s Red Ochre Award

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"Intimate knowledge of the land, sea and sky and what it contains, the spiritual understanding that the patterns of nature and ancestral beings are laid on this precious land and sea has sustained the Yolŋu people of East Arnhem Land for countless thousands of years". Peter Hylands

In the podcast, we discuss the work of Dr. Djambawa Marawili AM. This week the news arrived that Djambawa has received the Red Ochre Award, the important award described so well by our friends in Buku-Larrnggay Mulka's post is repeated below. Our deep congratulations to Djambawa.

Dr. Djambawa Marawili AM has received the Red Ochre Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cultural Advocacy and Leadership in Creative Australia’s First Nations Arts and Culture Awards in Sydney last night.

That lifetime has too many achievements to list. We wanted to give a snapshot but have had to spread it over two posts. Please have the patience to read on and appreciate a person who has struggled to make our country richer, safer and kinder.‍

Part 1

The last surviving artist of the Barunga Statement in 1988 which prompted PM Hawke to promise a treaty. He burnt Howard’s ten point plan and opposed the intervention but was the only member of the ‘Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council’ to survive three PMs until its demise. He followed his father out of mission exile to establish Bäniyala homeland in the early 1970s to spearhead the Homeland Movement. He continues to develop and sustain this town of more than a hundred people in one of Australia’s most remote places. He initiated the successful sea rights campaign with the Saltwater collection of eighty barks which resulted in the High Court decision known as the Blue Mud Bay case acknowledging Indigenous ownership of the intertidal zone wherever Aboriginal land exists. He liberated the artists of East Arnhem with his innovation of the Buwayak (invisibility) approach to previously limiting conventions. He drove his art centre to pursue the development of young artists with the Young Guns campaign which saw a new generation of artists like Gunybi Ganambarr, Barayuwa Munuŋgurr and Yinimala Gumana. Under his direction Buku-Larrŋgay has been described as Australia’s most successful art centre.

Part 2‍

He came to the Chairmanship of the Top End’s peak art centre body ANKA in 2000 when it was about to be dissolved and has been re-elected in that role by his peers every year since. ANKA is a vigorous influential organisation which is directed completely towards its remote Indigenous artists and has run the Arts Workers Extension Program for over 15 years with hundreds of remote arts workers travelling to arts institutions down South. He has won multiple arts prizes including the top one- First prize in the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2019. He has pursued international cultural diplomacy in Asia, Europe and the Americas including proposing and delivering the biggest US tour of bark paintings ever staged and met the Queen, US presidents and multiple Australian PMs. Most recently he has assisted the Royal Australian Navy to identify and embrace its Indigenous heritage and future.
The amazing part of all of this is that the list above is his side gig. His principal role is and has been for decades that of Djirrikay-senior lawman for his region. This is a 24/7 emotionally and spiritually demanding job which he must live in the same way as the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury. Except ceremony is every day in Arnhem land not just Sundays and there is no wealthy infrastructure supporting him as an institutional church would.
Perhaps not surprising then that he said with characteristic truthfulness and power:

“I do deserve this!”

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The Creative cowboy films documentary about Dr. Djambawa Marawili AM and his work is called Rock of the Fire.

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