“This is the story of Tiwi and white people working together in the early years, telling how it all began, beginning the Tiwi Design Art Centre.” — Bede Tungutalum

Bede’s largest print Murtangkala (printed 2015), is an image of the blind old woman who created the Tiwi Islands. Murtangkala is the eldest of three sisters from Arnhem Land, who made the Tiwi Islands: its people and sustaining, law-giving ceremonies. The repeating designs in the textiles and prints all stem from this foundational narrative and associated ceremonies.

Kulama and Pukumani are ancestral initiation and funeral ceremonies that directly transcribe a design language. Tiwi women and men play an equal role in ceremony. Pukumani is elaborately choreographed, and Tutini (funeral poles) and Tunga (painted bark baskets) are intricately painted to intertwine with kinship and relationship to Country.

Tiwi art relates directly to these complex ceremonies. Tiwi Design textile printing is noted for its vibrant abstraction and repetition, particularly though all-over patterning on cloth. Printing on fabric demanded changes to traditional methods and materials—shifting from gleaming red, yellow, white and black ochre, to being able to print fabrics using dyes in the full colour spectrum.

In the 1970s, ‘when it all began’, entrenched art world demarcations held sway – craft/art and Primitive/Modern. Aboriginal art was acknowledged as “contemporary” in the 1979 Sydney Biennale, however to some extent art museums and galleries still validate the distinction between tribal and individual. The extraordinary Pukumani poles commissioned in 1958 from Tiwi artists by AGNSW Deputy Director Tony Tuckson were exceptionally housed in an art gallery rather than an ethnographic collection, only to languish for years in a dimly-lit, ethnographic display in the archival basement.

The art/craft distinction was another tough fixed legacy of European modernism. The role of arts and crafts advisers and the arts-crafts workshop may be traced back through utopian socialists such as William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose arts and crafts ideals travelled across the Empire along the old trade and missionary routes. ‘Fancywork’ (embroidery, appliqué, beading) taught to First Nations women by nuns, missionaries and reservation/mission wives intersected with local cultural knowledges, materials and skills. Cultural survival and celebration, and a savvy understanding of white consumer demand underscores the rich history of this under-documented area of art practice. DWC would iron freshly printed tablecloths and serviettes at night, just as artists at the Babarra and Merrepin textile workshops do today.

This historical meeting of fancywork and abstraction is ironically showcased through the versatility of the silkscreen production process. Silkscreen’s techniques, experimental qualities and suitability for small editions were already well known to Australian modernist artists and designers like Margaret Preston and Marion Hall Best. The introduction to Australia of brilliant Marimekko prints from Finland, with their bright circles and stripes, were a platform for the introduction of all-over textile design on the Tiwi Islands, as documented by DWC. Bede Tungutalum was excited by the possibilities as seen here in his earliest textile prints, featuring circles and leaves birds and animals from 1974.

How It All Began offers textile truth-telling in the lead-up to the Voice to Parliament referendum. The artists use cloth and paper to tell tales of encounter, of Country, of creative cultural survival and economic adventure, of uneven government initiatives and of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists seeking new spaces in the art-world. This exhibition makes manifest historical interactions across cultures, feeding pathways to voice, treaty and truth.

“My Land is coming back to me in a Dream. The songs are all in my head, the images are all in my head.” — Bede Tungutalum.

How It All Began: Tiwi Textiles and Prints draws on Diana Wood Conroy’s archives including Tiwi textiles from 1974, diaries, tapestries and watercolour painting, and from the joint book Tiwi Textiles, co-authored with Bede Tungutalum (launched December 2022).