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pura-lia meenamatta (Jim Everett) & Jonathan Kimberley
meenamatta lena narla peullakanny - Meenamatta Water Country Discussion
Bett Gallery Hobart 2006
227mm x 176mm, soft cover, 37 pp
$25 rrp

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  Their journey offers an opportunity to make these dichotomies redundant and realise that such distinctions are outdated - constructions that were figured at a time when oppression and separation were necessary to support a new imperial order – what Jim calls ‘the colonial dome’.