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The Meeting Place: Yarrenyty Arltere Artists’ intergenerational survivance
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Yarrenyty Arltere Artists: P. Nelson, T. Inkamala, Marlene Rubuntja, Nanette Sharpe, Rhonda Sharpe, Dulcie Sharpe and Sheree Inkamala, The Meeting Place, 2019. Courtesy Yarrenyty Arltere Artists.
The Yarrenyty Arltere Artists are a group of Arrernte, Luritja, Warlpiri and Alyawarr women working in Mparntwe/Alice Springs’ town camp of the same name. The collective predominantly works in soft sculpture, transforming blankets into embroidered visions of the Desert and its creatures, self-portraits and scenes from life in the camps. Since 2011 however, they have also been making animated short films which bring these sculptures to life. One such film, The Meeting Place (2019) is an excellent demonstration of the importance of kinship to the artists as a tactic for negotiating the fraught colonial tension imposed on the Indigenous experience of life in Mparntwe. In sharing knowledge and stories through new media, the artists dream forth a future for their children and grandchildren unmarked by cultural alienation.
The film unfolds as the artists gather to warn against the dangers of the titular Meeting Place. The younger women do so with wide, cheeky, smiles, relishing the naughtiness—as P. Nelson describes, “Purrula… see her dance in her sexy dress! She is looking for Panangka, her meat meat [boyfriend]”. Nannette Sharpe responds in Luritja “but he is jealousing her with another girl, with Panarta!” As the artists speak, their words animate their work, birds and women wandering about in the darkness of the world that appears on screen — the hushed soundscapes of the Desert. Embroidering sculptures as they take turns in narrating, the film becomes something like a Desert equivalent to the waulking songs of the Outer Hebrides. These parallels reiterate the potency of collective storytelling in ancient cultures globally as a fundamental vehicle for cultural agency and resilience.
The production of the film demonstrates an exciting and original approach to remote Indigenous filmmaking and representation. In translating the conventions of their artistic practice into a digital medium, the artists devise their own cinematic language, an easy companionship between traditional storytelling and experimentation. The titular ‘Meeting Place’ refers to the local 24-hour Caltex Servo, where the town camp’s youth gather after the sun sets. Commenting on the Artists’ films, Marlene Rubuntja, a senior community spokeswoman, describes Yarrenyty Arltere as “a place for everyone to get well so we won’t have that scary time again”. Two decades ago, the town camp had some of the worst dependence on petrol sniffing in the country. While the community has overcome the pressures of sniffing and many other such issues in the years since, largely through the success of the arts centre, the Servo offers a shadowy metonym for being up to no good, a reminder of what once was. While this story is told light-heartedly, the artists’ delivery gives the tale the shape of a worn-river stone, almost becoming oral history: these are memories as old as invasion.
A foundational precept behind the establishment of the Artists’ collective was its intergenerational model, centred around the transfer of knowledge and culture from older generations to younger community members. The success of this approach is sustained by the strong existing kin networks among the artists, many of whom belong to the extended Sharpe-Inkamala family. It is thus fitting that intergenerational concerns have coloured much of the Artists’ work in new media from the beginning. The difficulties of intergenerational relationships in times of community unrest and instability guided the plots of the Artists’ first two films, Antanette and Tom (2011) and Little Dingi (2012). Antanette exclaims in the former, “We can go and watch Nanna making things stronger for our future.” In The Meeting Place these same concerns arise. As Jennifer Biddle observes, “the space of childhood, of family, of cultural transmission itself—of belonging in place and time to others, collectively—is staged as at risk.” In The Meeting Place, Rubuntja exclaims “grandmothers worrying for those young kids” — not only herself and her grandchildren, but all of the grandmothers of Mparntwe. This is also expressed in the elder generation’s bemused discussion of the truant habits of Mparntwe’s youth: “Sometimes they might steal, drink and fight… They have nothing to do; they do whatever they want.”
As Alexis Wright observes, town campers have been continuous victims of “superficial stories intended to create a negative image of Aboriginal people with the aim of shaping a national perspective of acceptance for achieving political outcomes”. The Meeting Place demonstrates a strategic effort on the artists’ part to reclaim these narratives. Humour is a tactic often deployed at Yarrenyty Arltere, the film’s disarming cheekiness establishing a form of cinematic self-representation that is meaningfully relatable to both local and national audiences. This humour is characteristic of much new media produced in so-called remote communities, an experiential opportunity to engage with artists, their art and lived experience that bypasses the persistent sensitivity of non-Indigenous audiences to engage seriously with Aboriginal culture. In overcoming such representational sensitivity, The Meeting Place enables new duties of spectatorship to emerge, implicating viewers in the confronting reality of Desert life. This too is complicated by the distinctive transcultural mode of the Artists’ community and oeuvre, a “non-traditional” medium which confounds expectations of Central Desert art: there are no Papunya dots or Hermannsburg watercolours to be seen.
Kinship and humour together in this film demonstrate two significant tactics that both engage and implicate audiences and their responsibility towards the core tension of the Artists’ message. In this practice of storytelling and filmmaking, the artists address both the wayward youth their parable describes—to involve and empower young people in community and culture— but also reclaim the narratives of vilification and crisis in which they are invariably viewed.