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Senior Wardaman
Elder is well-known in Australia. Two Film Australia
TV films (1997; 2001) traced his Wardaman family and
‘Land of the Lightning Brothers’. Jan Wositzky’s
Born Under The Paperbark Tree (1996) put Bill in print
with his stockman’s background filled with yarns
of cattle station life. Wardaman tours from Katherine
make the rock art an important tourist destination.
Major paintings of his grace Parliament House in Darwin
and the Court House in Katherine. Today his community
lives on the huge Menngen cattle property he worked
for thirty years to regain as Wardaman land; and his
early years feed into his son’s growing management
experience. He has over 100 dependants in his extended
family, works long hours making/decorating didgeridoos
and painting canvases, presides over the Wardaman
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attends to the maintenance and running of the station,
and goes to conferences and policy work within the wider
Aboriginal community of Australia. He regularly paints
and exhibits at the ArtMob Gallery in Hobart and in
Sydney and Melbourne, and his material is presented
to the public at the Planetarium of the University
of Colorado, Boulder, U.S.A., through the Dark Sparklers
material in particular. His wife Dixie and many of his
family appear in photographs in the book, and he is
hoping they can develop such tradition in family and
community that they can live in their life’s two
worlds in proper Aboriginality and in proper practical
modernity. |
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informal
education in Britain included the Avebury standing stones
and viewing Stonehenge though computer-type astronomical
theory. Degrees from Oxford and Edinburgh universities included
study and research at Princeton, the College de France,
and the University of Bochum. Dreams of Aboriginal intellectual
world were born attending Levy-Strauss’ lectures in
Paris in 1968 (while ministering at the Scots Church). In
Sydney in 1976, Elkin pointed him to the Milky Way as a
‘tracing-board of stories’ in Northern Australia.
During years as a college principal he studied Aboriginal
and astronomical materials and sites, and in 1988 started
research with a view to publications (eg. Oxford III’s
book Archaeoastronomy in the 1990’s). He joined J.J.Drew
in 1997 for a research trip to Wardaman country. They recorded
Bill Yidumduma Harney one night pointing to Corona Australis
as important in Wardaman culture, and he was invited to
chronicle the Dreaming worlds of Wardaman astronomy in 1998.
He lives in Sydney and Merimbula with his wife Hilary who
assisted with the field-work. They have four children and
nine grandchildren, and delight in them.
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Painter
and
her husband Damien Naughton listened to Hugh Cairns in 2000
after his Wardaman fieldwork. Sam responded to Bill Harney’s
world with fascinating canvases that appear in Dark Sparklers.
In the mountains near Byron Bay they plant trees, paint, exhibit,
bring up their young children, enthuse many youngsters at
local schools, and relate the night skies stories to the local
Aboriginal people. |
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Site design by Excell
- © 2005 |
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