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Following the Nyinkka: Relations of Respect and Obligations to Act in the Collaborative Work of Aboriginal Cultural Centers

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Following the Nyinkka: Relations of Respect and Obligations to Act in the Collaborative Work of Aboriginal Cultural Centers MUA3002_02.qxd 8/16/07 4:43 PM Page 101 101 Following the Nyinkka: Relations of Respect and Obligations to Act in the Collaborative Work of Aboriginal Cultural Centers Kimberly Christen hile John McDouall Stuart and his Australia. Every hundred kilometers or so a sign expedition party attempted to “open” the reminds weary travelers that this seemingly empty Winterior of Australia to white settlers land is indeed “settled.” A final pyramid-shaped between 1858 and 1862, he charted the seemingly brick memorial sits on the western side of the high- monotonous terrain in his journal:“this plain has the way as one enters the small town of Tennant Creek same appearance now as when I first started– from the south.1 spinifex and gum-trees, with a little scrub occasion- Down the road from Stuart’s memorial, on the ally” (Hardman 1865:164–174).The terrain was also same side of the highway, a set of buildings and unforgiving to those unfamiliar with its intricacies. another series of plaques marks the landscape. Over several excursions, Stuart and his entourage Dwarfing Stuart’s memorial, the Nyinkka Nyunyu were thwarted by harsh climates, an unpredictable Art and Culture Centre sits just off the main road landscape, and ill health. On December 20, 1861, (figure 1). Entering through the main gates, follow- with failing health and a stubborn will to reach the ing the winding path past the visitor center and café, north of the continent, Stuart embarked on what one comes upon a pile of large black rocks behind a would be a successful journey. By July 25, 1862, slight fence. Here a sign written in both Warumungu Stuart and his party reached the Roper River and and English explains the site’s significance: followed its tributaries to the Indian Ocean.The day before he saw the ocean he recorded “hearing the This is the home of the Nyinkka (spiky-tailed sea,” and knowing that success was finally his. “If goanna). Nyinkka Nyunyu is the Warumungu this country is settled,” Stuart wrote that day,“it will name for the area where the town of Tennant be one of the finest colonies under the Crown, suit- Creek now stands. The Nyinkka used to go out hunting all able for the growth of any and everything” around these rocks, digging around with her (Hardman 1865:x). yam stick for flying ants and termites. Other Stuart’s expeditions paved the way for the tele- dreamings also went around this site—the graph line that would eventually stretch from Sugarbag and the Flying Fox, and the two Adelaide in the south to Darwin in the north. The Munga Munga women went around here look- telegraph line signaled Australia’s connection to the ing for bush coconuts. modern world linking the new nation to its The Nyinkka dug a soak with her shovel Commonwealth cousins and opening the possibili- made of snappy gum, behind the site of the Papulu Apparr-Kari Language Centre. The dirt ties for international trade and communication. The she threw to one side when she was digging route also became the path for the Stuart Highway, forms the low hill on which the Catholic Church the only north-south road to cut through the conti- of Christ the King stands. nent. Today the highway is lined with plaques com- There was another ancestral being, Crow, at memorating Stuart’s expeditions through Central a place called Yawu. The Nyinkka used to go MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 101–124, ISSN 0892-8339, online ISSN 1548-1379. © 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals .com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/mua.2007.30.2.101. MUA3002_02.qxd 8/16/07 4:43 PM Page 102 102 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 30 NUMBER 2 1. The main building of the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre, Tennant Creek, Northern Territory, Australia. December 2005. Photograph courtesy of the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre and Julalikari Council Aboriginal Corporation. from here to dance for that Crow. One day when human-land connections and obligations were not she was dancing, the Crow killed her. Yet her erased by Stuart’s overlaid tracks. essence or spirit lives on in these rocks. During the 1980s and 1990s Aboriginal The sign explains the social-spatial significance of communities in the Northern Territory regained the seemingly sparse landscape. On this very ownership to the territories claimed by Stuart and ground the Nyinkka and Crow danced, ancestors others through lengthy land rights battles. With met and foraged for food, Warumungu people con- nearly 50 percent of the land in the Northern gregated and a small town grew up as part of ances- Territory now under Aboriginal title (Merlan tral actions and colonial invasion. What remained 1998:163), many communities have leveraged these unseen to Stuart and others unfamiliar with land rights victories into the possibility of connect- Aboriginal ancestral landscapes, were the tracks of ing economic sustainability with culturally viable the Nyinkka (‘spiky-tailed goanna’) whose move- local projects.2 Warumungu people in Tennant ments through the territory and relationship with Creek are no exception.The impetus for building the Warumungu people defined the landscape and its center was manifold: to protect the Nyinkka site, to potential set of relations. Over generations the recognize Warumungu ownership of the land, to tell Nyinkka forged a track through much of the pres- the history of Warumungu people from their own ent-day Tennant Creek landscape cultivating rela- perspectives, to create a place for young people to tions with other ancestral beings as well as with learn from elders, to increase Aboriginal employ- humans. The Nyinkka’s track marks a set of terri- ment, and to educate visitors in the region (Tregenza torial relations between humans and ancestors 2000:13–15). These goals informed the production defined by mutual relations of reciprocity and process at every stage as multiple collaborators— respect and the boulders mark a territory whose various Warumungu groups, out-of-town consultants, MUA3002_02.qxd 8/16/07 4:43 PM Page 103 FOLLOWING THE NYINKKA 103 government agencies, and Aboriginal organizations— At the same time as cultural centers reanimate the worked to maintain the integrity of this particular work of museums through traditional cultural Warumungu vision. Yet the singular objective of modalities, they also reframe touristic spaces as building a cultural center brought with it many part of an expanding indigenous-museological con- levels of negotiation, translation, and production for text in which local display-making practices all participants as they sought to carve out a new re-orient the fantastical tourist gaze, dominant Warumungu cultural space defined as much by national histories, and local claims to indigeneity. institutional notions of display and tourism as by Fred Myers suggests that in this emergent museo- local ideals of respect and obligation between people, logical field we “consider the museum process of places, and ancestors. recontextualization as a broader activity of cultural In their recent study of the Vanuatu Cultural or discursive production in which the representa- Centre, Haidy Geismar and Christopher Tilley redi- tion of culture is significant” (his italics 2006:505). rect the efforts of museum studies away from the In this field of cultural production, the daily work view of a museum as “an institutional complex that of making culture plays out in a dense network of visually deploys material culture within a wider relationality where the lines between insiders and ‘exhibitionary’ paradigm” towards looking at the outsiders blur into a more complex terrain of con- “other museum work less visible to the general tingent collaboration. public” (2003:171). Sidelining institutional meaning- In what follows, I examine the micro and macro making allows one to emphasize the social-political politics involved in the production of the Nyinkka frameworks in which indigenous-owned and run Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre and its visual dis- cultural centers populate the ideological and phys- plays. Focusing on the “behind-the-scenes” work ical spaces that national museums once held. If involved in the Centre’s production allows me to sit- museums were once “part of the checklist for being uate Aboriginal cultural centers and their display- a nation” (Kratz and Karp 2006:3), indigenous cul- making practices within sets of interdependent tural centers are part of an emergent list of prac- relations that have the potential to reframe touris- tices and projects aimed at redirecting the tic museum spaces. It is in these collaborative national gaze and rewriting a new list framed by spaces of intercultural exchange —awkward and self-determination and self-representation (Clifford ambiguous as they may be—that I suggest the prac- 2004; Erickson 2002; Fienup-Riordan 2000). In this tices of indigenous representation are made visible context, the “showing and telling” (Strang 2000) of and viable as emergent forms of cultural production Aboriginal culture is predicated on the intercon- and clearly articulated modes of self-determination. nection and acknowledgement of ancestral, territo- rial, and human relations as part of the social What Could Be practices of cultural production, as well as the polit- The Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre’s ical necessity to rewrite national narratives of abo- official ground-breaking ceremony in April 2002 riginality. As Howard Morphy suggests, “museums capped a nearly seven year roller coaster ride of become sites of persuasion that people attempt to community planning, grant applications, architec- use to get their version of history and their regime tural plans, and meetings with government offi- of value acknowledged and disseminated to wider cials to secure funding.3 The ceremony that April audiences” (2006:472).
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