7 SISTERS DREAMING

Our friends Anna & Arthur had an exhibition opening on Friday 13 June where the art work, from WA, SA and the Northern Territory, focussed on one of the most powerful indigenous song lines, the Seven Sisters story or Kungkarangkalpa. It's the story of seven women fleeing a shape-shifting trickster, transforming the land as they travelled and eventually heading into the sky to form the Pleiades star cluster. 

The artist whose work I bought early this year from Anna & Arthur -  Athena Nangala Granites from Yuendumu in the NT - has some more work in this exhibition. The e-catelogue with more information about the artists, their homelands and their art is available on the Artitja website. Some of the paintings are about the landscape created by the sisters such as the rock paintings in Cave Hill (SA) and salt lakes near Mt Connor (NT) that the sisters walked through and some about the skies to which they fled.

I had heard the Seven Sisters story before I bought the painting but what I hadn't realised was that it was a story that has only recently come to be understood. The early Australian anthropologists who collected songline stories from indigenous people in the 19th and early 20th century where mainly (white) men and not surprisingly, they spoke to men and not the women and so didn't document women's stories. Another point that is fascinating about the story of seven sisters pursued by a single man is that it's shared by many other cultures. Anna is of Greek heritage and in that mythology, the sisters were nymphs, daughters of the Titan Atlas and companions of Artemis, godess of the hunt, who were pursued by Orion into the skies. Here's a discussion about the link between Greek and Indigenous culture and evidence that the seven sisters story may go back 100,000 years: the world's oldest story.