Jonathan Kimberley & pura-lia meenamatta (Jim Everett)

meenamatta lena narla puellakanny : Meenamatta Water Country Discussion

A Writing and Painting Collaboration

shared journeys to meenamatta land

In the days beyond Reconciliation, the people of Tasmania have been largely left to make their own way in understanding the deep history and culture that lives in this ancient island. Many are aware that there is cultural wisdom embedded in the land, but the challenge of engaging with the two thousand generations of human culture that has come before seems, too often, to be the task of the archaeologist or historian.

This collection of work is testament that the culture of the land is anything but the realm of the technician or the scientist.  For at least thirty thousand years it has been the business of ordinary people – mothers, fathers, uncles and aunts.  Brothers and sisters.  People who laugh and cry.  Who love.  Who sit in conversation – in awe of beauty and meaning – who feel the power of the  land and all its life.

Jim Everett and Jonathon Kimberley have begun the task of renewing this conversation.  In doing so, they are creating new threads of hope.  Their discussion in text and paint is formed for those  who see the future as one necessarily defined by respectful conversation and shared journeys.  It is a future that emerges from the gap between old and new; between Black and White.  Their journey offers an opportunity to make these dichotomies redundant and realise that such distinctions are outdated - constructions that were figured at a time when oppression and separation were  necessary to support a new imperial order – what Jim calls ‘the colonial dome’.

In each of Jonathon’s paintings, we are offered a handhold; to grasp as we pull ourselves from the mire of Tasmania’s colonial past into the light of new understandings - of history, land, time and people.  In these works, water is the omnipresent metaphor of endless time.  This rendering embraces a culture that is realised by the business of walking the land and knowing the brethren that reside there.  It is not a linear culture.  It does not have beginning or end – source or  destination. It simply exists in its being with the land.  It is a profound articulation of home.  An  intrinsic home that cannot be separated from the deep human history of meenamatta clan country.

The contrast with Tasmania’s colonial identity – that has been based for the past two hundred  years on a capital-obsessed passion to send seals, whales, apples, young fighting men, woodchips  and creativity away to foreign shores – is stark.

‘Everything of all-life is taken to another place where no heaven can be’ (antipodes)

The ‘all-life’ in Jim’s text is homage to the country’s citizens.  All living things.  Not just plant and animal, but rivers, mountains and land too.  All important and respected.

‘All with spiritual memories of a history and love for country reminding those who can
hear its song in new worlds to bring back shared journeys on a land of blue tears.’
(blue tears in manalargenna country)

This shared journey takes us to turbana, known by most as Ben Lomond.  But instead of encountering the familiar (a reference to some far away Scottish tor), we meet with a marker of sacred country – standing as an eternal sentinel to the ceremony of men and women in meenamatta land.  Time and water embrace the tribes of old days in the same way they embrace  Jim’s family today, as they camp their way around a country that keeps culture alive.

‘here, I find my grandfather and grandmother, my parents, and my brothers and
sisters… we are one family in the all-life, with waterlines that journey in our arteries
and veins…’  (planegarrartoothenar story)

Jonathon Kimberley has journeyed over country and culture – through time itself. His imagery offers markers for a journey that more can take.  To encounter imprints of land - patterns of flowing water. The movement of plant, animal, soil and air.  These are earthen textures, forms and colours that begin in their discussion and now travel across canvas and text.

Jim resists the recognition that his blood countrymen bestow on him.  But when we call him a senior cultural man, we raise up the memories of spirit men from the past.  tongelongeter, manalagenna, wooreddy.  Jim’s life is lived in such a way that the times of these men are made  great and – like the water that permeates this work – endless.

Greg Lehman
Hobart, October 2006

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