BoodjAR

Mangaree | Bathers Beach

My Mob. Your Mob. Same Mob.

by Greg Barr

3D Technical Artist: Zachary Smith

My Mob. Your Mob. Same Mob. invites the viewer to step into the intertwined personal and creative worlds of Greg Barr, Noongar Visual Artist and Musician practicing from the Manjaree-Bather’s Beach Art Precinct, Walyalup-Fremantle. Immerse yourself in the deep love Greg has for his family, his friends, his mob. The gratitude of having his mob all around him. His Dad, Mum, his brothers and his sisters. Including loved ones who have departed this physical realm. Experience the special place they have in his heart and soul. “They’re in my soul, in my heart, in my heart and soul together. … Everyone all together. … I love all the whole family.” And the special pride Greg has in being Uncle to his many nieces and nephews. “I am the Konk. I’m their Uncle. That’s what they call me.” Be enlivened as you enter the emotive and colourful world of Greg’s paintings, filled with fluent brush strokes, tactile layers of medium, and overlaying of textural gesture marks. Be moved by Greg’s rhythmic beats of the didgeridoo, cajón and tapping sticks. Experience his sense of his humour, and his distinct and infectious laugh. Let Greg open your heart and soul, bring a smile and laugh to your face, as you become part of his mob. “My mob’s part of (your) mob. (Your) mob’s part of my mob. Together. Always together.”

Artist Bio

Greg is an award-winning artist of Ballardong Noongar heritage and his family and culture are major inspirations behind his work.  A practising artist since 2009, Greg has participated in numerous exhibitions, notably his solo exhibition The King of the Hearts in 2017  and Deep Winter in 2021. Greg’s work is held in collections including the Art Gallery of  WA, Shire of Dandaragan and City of Melville.

Mangaree | Bathers Beach

Manjaree Miyaldjan

by Turid Calgaret

3D Technical Artist: Joe Simich

Before meeting with the consulting Elders of this project and finding out that Fremantle was the ‘place of tears’, I already had an image in my mind of a woman standing on the shoreline crying and reaching across the water. Manjaree (Bathers Beach) is a significant site to the Noongar people. It was a trading place, a meeting place, where certain laws were practiced for Noongars and after colonisation, it was a whaling station. It was also a point where men were taken from and taken to Wadjemup (Rottnest Island) leaving the women to look across the water along the shorelines of the coast. This piece is my response to this place’s history.

Story: A little girl walks along the shore picking up shells as she goes, all the while she is growing. The woman is made of sand and seaweed from the shores of her boodjar, which reflects her connection to the place where she grew up. Soon she becomes of age and sits to weave a basket with a group of women to put her shells in. She continues to walk along the shore until something happens, prompting her to put the basket down beside her. What she sees saddens her and she begins to cry and reach out across the water, where she remains.

Artist Bio

Turid is a local Whadjuk Noongar yorga, who was raised in the Walyalup area. She has lived in Hilton most of her life and still resides in the area with her family. Turid was originally self-taught but wanted to expand her knowledge and technique she undertook some training. Studying Visual Arts & Contemporary Craft at Kidigo Arthouse in Fremantle and then Visual Art & Craft at the Central Institute of Technology in Perth.

Turid has several public installations as a solo or collaborative artist; has exhibited and sold private works; completed several sand murals for exhibition or corrobboree purposes and has been involved in countless community projects. As an artist, Turid’s main goal is to positively promote Aboriginal culture through art and to explore techniques. Turid is keen to build her own art practice but also enjoys assisting emerging artists.

“I love textures like sand, textured art and prefer using acrylic on canvas. I use art as therapy and as a reconnection to my family, ancestors, country and culture. The Waagal’s image is a representation of these elements in a lot of my work, combined with the earthy colours that I paint with.”

Dwerda Weelardenup | Cantonment Hill

Dwert Djinaniny arm Boodja
(Dingoes watching over Country)

by Sharyn Egan

3D Technical Artist: Elspeth Brooks

A great battle took place in the Walyalup waters about 7000 years ago between the Wagyl and the Yondok (The Rainbow Serpent and a giant lizard). The Yondok was dismembered and his parts scattered around these waterways. The dingoes are the guardians and keep watch to make sure the Yondok doesn’t come back to create disturbances of the nature of this place called Walyalup.

Artist Bio

Sharyn Egan is a Nyoongar woman who began creating art at the age of 37, which lead to her enrolling in a Diploma of Fine Arts at the Claremont School of Art in Perth. She completed this course in 1998 and enrolled in the Associate Degree in Contemporary Aboriginal Art course at Curtin University which she completed in 2000. In 2001 she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts (Arts) from Curtin University. She has also been awarded a Certificate VI in Training and Education in 2011.The themes of Sharyn’s work are informed by the experiences of her life as a Nyoongar woman. Sharyn works in a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture and woven forms using traditional and contemporary fibres. Her woven works include traditionally styled contemporary forms and baskets, as well as sculptural forms often based on flora and fauna that has totemic significance for the Nyoongar people.
Sharyn Egan’s works explore her personal and cultural relationships to Country, to Nyoongar Boodja. They document the relationships between places, people, plants and animals while also reminding us of our role as custodians, to care for the natural world. In her most recent works Sharyn uses natural materials such as the resin from the grass tree, known in Nyoongar as the balga (Xanthorrhoea preissii), embedding Country into each of her paintings.
‘In considering different points of view of the earth, the cosmos and the oceans, we need to recognise our obligation to nurture an awareness of our impact on the earth. In Aboriginal culture, everything is connected and equal – all life comes from the same atoms. Humans are not above nature. We live alongside simultaneous beauty and devastation’. Sharyn Egan, 2020

Dwerda Weelardenup | Cantonment Hill

Dwertawirrinup Dreams
(Place of the Dingo Spirit)

by Harley Richards

3D Technical Artist: Cameron Whiting

This hill is one of the last standing seven hills that were created by the Wagyl (Rainbow Serpent) who took rest in the nearby caves after defeating the Yondok, the ancestral Crocodile from up north. The Dwert (dingo) was told by the Wagyl to watch over the coast and guard the surrounding waters so the Crocodile was never reunited with its tail. The surrounding lands around the ‘kata’ were used for campgrounds and ceremonial purposes, one of them being fire ceremonies and smoke signalling to the imprisoned men on Wandjemup. Harley tells the sorrowful story of the post-colonial relationship between this hill and the Prisoners on Wadnjemup, with an ode to the Dingo Dreaming story, the Seven Sisters Constellation and its significance to the land that is Walyalup.

Artist Bio

Harley Penny Richards is a Noongar man from Walyalup with ties to Wagyl Kaip and Minang regions down south.
He’s currently living and working in Whadjuk Country.
His art practice has always been inspired by visual, self-expression and storytelling through symbolic motifs, with a keen interest in how the world is perceived through the eyes of others. He has a strong fascination in the unknown cultural world, language, technology and self-identity, which is demonstrate through his paintings and digital artworks. He explores his own mind and cultural heritage whilst creating new concepts.
His main focus in his artistic ambition is to connect himself further with his lost culture and identity in a contemporary stylistic approach.
Harley’s art style is ever-changing and boundless. He demonstrates his growth and versatility from drawing in sketchbooks from a young age to painting on walls and creating murals and now working in the augmented reality world.

Derbal Yerrigan | Swan River

Dabakarn

by Yabini Kickett

3D Technical Artist: Dylan Davies

Dabakarn, meaning to ‘go slowly’ in Noongar daa depicts a gentle lapping portion of the Bilya we know and live by here in Walyalup/Fremantle. Yabini has been working on these linear designs in oil pastels for some time, using them as a meditation on country, reflections on geology and water. Here they’ve been given the chance to flex and sway as the river does, around several species of shell also utilised in Kickett’s textile work.

Artist Bio

Yabini Kickett is a descendant of the Kickett and Hayden families of the Bibulmun/Nyoongar Nation. Having grown up with an artist and poet mother, as well as a photographer and land conservationist father, her practice is heavily rooted in language, endemic plants, family, totemic relations and found objects from country.