"Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country)" 2022

Betty Muffler

Born 1944, Watarru, South Australia. Pitjantjatjara. Lives and works in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara Country/Indulkana, South Australia. Pronouns: she/her.

 

Maringka Burton

Born 1950, Irrunytju/Wingellina, Western Australia. Pitjantjatjara. Lives and works in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara Country/Indulkana, South Australia. Pronouns: she/her.

 

Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country) 2022

synthetic polymer paint on linen

 

Collection of Bendigo Art Gallery, purchased 2023.

 

Betty Muffler and Maringka Burton are highly respected senior Pitjantjatjara artists and ngangkari—traditional healers who travel alongside doctors and nurses to care for patients across Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country) is a collaborative painting between this aunty and niece duo, and a testimony to the importance of intergenerational knowledge transfer and kinship connections within First Nations’ artistic practice and communities.

 

Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country) maps the topographical contours of the artists’ ancestral lands, waterways, and sacred healing sites. Rendered on a dark ground, a complex entwinement of dots and rhythmical lines enmesh the picture plane, while a constellation of sequential circles emanate a vibratory power and energy.

 

This painting is imbued with the healing frequencies of its makers, while also storying the violent legacies of nuclear colonialism by the British Government on APY lands. Muffler grew up on Ernabella Mission after her family were displaced and directly impacted by the first atomic test, ‘Operation Totem’, at Emu Field. Between 1952 and 1957, a series of 12 clandestine nuclear tests were conducted at Maralinga, Emu Field, and Montebello Islands, so the UK could accelerate its nuclear capabilities in the arms race with the US and the USSR. The radiation caused widespread sickness and death, contaminating communities and surrounding Country, with a nuclear fallout that extended as far as Yuggera and Turrbal Country/Brisbane, Gadigal/Sydney and Tarntanya/Adelaide. It is well documented that radioactive debris becomes enmeshed on a planetary scale within sediment and glacial ice, becoming part of the geologic record as an anthropogenic marker.