Tracker Nat Warano’s art of ngijinkirri, the Tennant Creek Brio and Warumungu history

Abstract During the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s the Warumungu carver Nat Warano, better known as Tracker Nat, produced drawings and painted carvings as gifts and for exchange in the town of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. His art practice was a part of his role as a leader of the Warumungu community, as he played a role in moving the community from a reserve outside the township to Warrabri to the south. His gifting of carvings was part of a history and tradition of ngijinkirri among Warumungu people, in which gifts brought the recipient into a state of obligation to the giver. Ngijinkirri put teachers and politicians into this state of obligation, as Nat gifted painted carvings to them. Since the rediscovery of Nat, and of the history and style of his art, his carvings have been identified in both public and private collections. Since beginning the research on Nat, the authors of this article have attributed drawings and painted carvings in public collections and passing through commercial auctions, and it is anticipated that there are many more yet to be identified.

included a man and rider being gouged by a bull, riders in a horse race, and a man chasing a kangaroo with his dog, spear and boomerang. Recently, Nat's grandson and one of the authors of this article, Joseph Yugi Williams, saw this newspaper report and its illustrations for the first time. He proceeded to speak to Warumungu community and family members about Nat and his place in the history of Tennant Creek, while the other two authors set about looking into archives, museums and auction catalogues for his work. In the process, they discovered drawings as well as painted carvings in public and private collections, as well as records of his work being traded on eBay. This, however, is only one side of Nat's story, for he is already well known in the Northern Territory for being a leader of the Warumungu people during a tumultuous period in Warumungu history. His art was a way of extending his authority into white society, with gifts of artefacts and drawings incorporating missionaries, teachers and government officials into the Warumungu system of a ngijinkirri, a mutual gifting that implicates the giver and receiver into a relationship of obligation. Nat's art created relationships with those outside Warumungu society to further his political aims to secure a better place for Warumungu people in Australia. Today, Williams and other artists in the Tennant Creek Brio collective carry on Nat's legacy as they use art and exhibitions to create relationships and impress political messages upon the non-Warumungu world.

Warumungu history and materialism
To establish Nat's place within Warumungu history, it is worth revisiting the history of the contact this language group had with non-Indigenous people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The interest of the Warumungu in material culture and in making exchange relationships with outsiders offers a way of understanding Nat's use of drawings and painted, carved artefacts to negotiate relationships with the colonisers from the 1930s to the 1960s. The first substantial encounter of the Warumungu with the settler invaders of Australia was probably their encounter with the Scottish explorer John McDouall Stuart who was surveying a track for the telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin in 1860. Stuart was well known for his refusal to employ Aboriginal guides, instead relying on his bushcraft to make it through dry and harsh parts of Australian deserts. 4 He did not always succeed, however, being unable for example to get past the thickets of bullwaddy and lancewood on what is today known as the Murranji Track. The Murranji was only made passable in 1904, when Aboriginal guides helped the drovers Nat Buchanan and Sam 'Greenhide' Croker find the waterholes that would allow cattle to pass through the scrub. The guides were paid in beef and tobacco. 5 Neither did Stuart's reluctance to foster relationships with local Aboriginal people help him find his way through Warumungu country. In 1860, on his second attempt to traverse it, Stuart's party was repelled by men shouting, throwing boomerangs and setting fire to the grass around them. They were well equipped with 'a number of boomerangs, waddies, and spears'. 6 The explorers shot at the Warumungu warriors in return, before being followed to ensure their departure to the south. The conflict between Stuart and the Warumungu is memorialised in the name of Attack Creek, just north of Tennant Creek on the Stuart Highway. A plaque unveiled there in 1960 records that 'hostile natives and illness forced the party to return'.
While this conflict is well remembered in both Australian historical accounts of exploration and by Warumungu people, Stuart's diary reveals that it was only one of a series of encounters with local people. Two days before the fight, the Stuart party had met two men who gave them some birds and possums to eat. 7 These men then began investigating the numerous things the explorers had brought along. When they began to carry away a horseshoe rasp and canteens, Stuart forced them to return the items. Stuart did not understand that the Warumungu considered themselves as having entered into a relationship of exchange with the party. The Warumungu men would not, in turn, have understood the value the canteens and rasp held for the explorers. Such equipment, to the settlers, could mean the difference between life and death. Later in the day, one of the men who had brought the birds and possums returned to the camp with several others, including an old man. It is an odd moment in the explorer's diary when Stuart thinks that the old man is making Masonic hand signs to him-signs that are repeated by his two young male companions. Stuart returns the signs, and it appears that they depart in friendliness. It is easy to dismiss this exchange as a product of Stuart's imagination, but it is important to note here the significance of signs for the Warumungu. As Spencer reported years later when he visited the same area, the women 'talk all day long on their fingers and often don't use their voices for hours together except for the purpose of laughing'. 8 The practice of trade and exchange repeats itself through early colonial-era accounts of Warumungu history. Material culture is a part of this practice, and a fascination with the new objects brought into Warumungu country is one that complements their own rich culture of carved clubs, coolamons, shields and spears. The confrontation at Attack Creek took place three days after the Warumungu men attempted to exchange food for Stuart's tools. Only a few months later, a new explorer party once again led by Stuart succeeded in crossing the continent from Adelaide to the northern coast, the first such crossing by non-Indigenous people. Where one might expect another violent fracas at Attack Creek, an extraordinary exchange took place between a Warumungu man and W.P. Auld who was in the explorer's team. Auld reports that: after talking and making signs he untied the lace of my boot. Then I made signs to him to take it off, which he did, and he gave a whistle. Next he took off the stocking, gave another whistle, and tried to peel off more. I made signs to him to replace them, which he did, doing up the lace and tying it in a bow the same as it was before. He seemed very much astonished at the whole process. 9 The incident recalls the visit to Stuart's previous party of two men who were interested in the goods at the camp. It suggests an ongoing fascination with the new kinds of materials and objects that were then making their way into Warumungu country, a fascination that would later recur with the establishment of the Tennant Creek Telegraph Station in 1872.
Over the next 30 years, a changing population of Warumungu lived beside the Station. It became a focus for ceremonial and cultural life, as did pastoral station homesteads, ration depots and other new settlements across the continent at this time. The Station was built near a traditional site, Jurnkkurakurr waterhole, and became a centre not only for Warumungu on whose country it was located but for different language groups who also camped there. 10 At Tennant Creek this richness was recorded by anthropologists Spencer and Gillen who camped there on their way north in 1901. Weeks of ceremonies, often performed into the night and early in the morning, were photographed, documented and paid for with flour and tobacco. The late nights and early mornings exhausted both Spencer and Gillen and left them wondering where the Warumungu got their enthusiasm and energy. Warumungu people understood the exchange with Spencer and Gillen as part of ngijinkirri, a word for mutual gifting. As Alyawarr elder Donald 'Crook Hat' Thompson explains, 'Ngijinkirri is like paying back, might be tucker, like a kangaroo or an object. Everyone, all tribe from all around practice this. Like when a school teacher gives you knowledge, you owe them. Maybe pay you with a full kangaroo pay you with an emu, but no money'. 11 This payment for ceremonial or ritual knowledge is a practice shared across Central Australia, and is known by other names in other Central and Western Desert languages. 12 While camped at the telegraph station, Spencer and Gillen amassed an extensive collection of boomerangs, coolamons, shields and laboriously-made axes, as well as more magical and sacred items. The collection, much of which is held at Museums Victoria, represents one of the most extensive in the country from one location. This is even more remarkable given that it was made over the course of just a few weeks, testament to the prolific material production techniques of the Warumungu. An emphasis on carving carried on through the twentieth century. The missionary at Philip Creek in the 1940s, Mervyn Pattemore, remembers that: 'They came to church with half a dozen boomerangs in their arms. There'd be a whole rattle of boomerangs as they'd sit down and stuff them under their seats'. 13 After Pattemore had convinced one Warumungu man to give up the ceremonies to which the group was still attached, he held onto one boomerang: 'I bin keepin one for company'. Such was the significance of material culture in Warumungu life.

Tracker Nat
In 1953, Nat was one of six Aboriginal people awarded a grant of 40 pounds for 'many years of service to white men' to mark the coronation of Elizabeth II in London. 14 At this time, most newspapers reported that he was 60. 15 He is registered as Nat Warano, and erroneously as having been born in 1901 along with many other Warumungu people, but is more likely to have been born in the late 1880s, as local people remember him as being a teenager or young man when Spencer and Gillen visited in 1901. 16 Nat's skin name was Juppurla, and his Warumungu family group was Purrutu, with totemic affiliations with mantikerra (the Stimsons python) and yakkula (spinifex grass). His personal totem was jalajirppa, the white cockatoo. He was also known as Nat Williams, Old Man Nat, Nat Warana and Blackboy Nat. Nat's father, known as 'Cockney', was an informant for Spencer and Gillen, and later for the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner who visited in the 1930s. 17 The newspaper reports give some indication as to how he spent his early life, recording that he 'worked on the Overland Telegraph Line on the horse mail, and for a number of years as a police tracker'. 18 He was a drover during the 1930s, and a police tracker during the 1940s. Bob Darken was a policeman in Tennant Creek during the war, and remembers that Nat knew the waterholes for miles around. 19 Warumungu people's memories are of Nat as a cultural leader, and can be dated to the 1950s as the Warumungu were being moved yet again from one settlement to another. 20 They had been shuffled from ration station to reserve to mission after a gold rush began in 1933, with the non-Indigenous population of Tennant Creek booming to 600 by 1936. 21 There was also a boom in the Aboriginal population there after the Coniston Massacre of 1928 sent people in search of a safe place to live, and when Warumungu people opened up their country to Warlpiri, Kateye and other groups. Aboriginal people were not, however, wanted in Tennant Creek itself, and after the discovery of gold in the southern part of the reserve that had been allocated them in 1892, they were moved out of there too, its boundaries redrawn onto a waterless part of the country. Then, during World War Two, the Stuart Highway (named for the explorer) became a military corridor, and the Warumungu were again moved, this time out of town to a ration station beside Powell Creek to the north.
Nat's role in this history was as a diplomat and peacemaker. It may have been that after Coniston, Nat saw building good relationships with Europeans as imperative to ensure that such an event would not take place again. At Tennant Creek he is also remembered as giving away ceremonial objects in order to wind down the hard law that brought about Coniston in the first place, a massacre that came from conflicting laws, and the demands by dingo trapper Fred Brooks upon 'Bullfrog' Kamalyarrpa Japanangka's three wives. 22 This took place in 1929, the year that the missionary Annie Lock is thought to have collected Nat's drawings, and Nat to have begun a practice of giving and exchanging art with settlers. 23 So it is that researcher Stuart Philpot remembers meeting Nat in the 1950s, and him being a quiet negotiator who held a lot of power. 24 He wasn't the person at the centre of a dispute, but the person that people would go to for guidance before making a decision. Speaking the languages used at Warrabri, the multi-lingual Nat brought with him the knowledge and experience to make a difference to negotiations. Film footage from the 1950s shows Nat filing the surface of a spearthrower at Warrabri. He is described as 'old Nat the tribal leader', illustrating both his status in the community and in the footage his expertise in material culture. 25 Thompson and Mr David Duggie remember Nat as the one whom the government ('welfare mob') consulted about moving Aboriginal people out of Phillip Creek after the war. 26 There was little water at Philip Creek, which was the reason for the move, but Nat was also concerned that the settlement was too close to sensitive cultural sites. A surviving photograph shows Nat at the official opening of Warrabri in 1958 (Figure 1). He is standing next to the Federal Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, who is pictured holding a shield with Nat's distinctive motifs painted upon it. Next to him is a man we have tentatively identified as the Governor General of the time, William Slim, who holds a second shield of the Western Desert style, with roundels and dots, while Engineer Jack stands to his left (and our right). 27 Before the move, Jack and Nat lived beside each other a little distance from Philip Creek, and as the senior men for the Warumungu and Warlpiri respectively. They worked together to keep the peace and on ceremonial matters. 28 It may be that the second shield is by Engineer Jack, and the ceremony involves a gifting of painted shields by these leaders of the Warrabri community. Nat was one of several significant personalities remembered by the Tennant Creek community today. They include Frank Juppurla, Nat's brother, who first found gold in Tennant Creek in 1932 while herding cattle, bringing a sample to the telegraphist and fossicker 'Woody' Woodruffe. 29  Aboriginal person, and not under the same restrictions his relatives were subject to. Smiler Major was also a non-ward, and wanted to start a cattle station on the Warumungu reserve.

Provenanced work by Tracker Nat
Nat's carving is part of a larger carving movement from the early to mid-twentieth century that extended along telegraph and railway lines, as well as at tourist stops, across desert Australia. It is difficult to identify the individual hand of carvers among the many shields, spearthrowers and coolamons in museum collections and circulating on the private market, although there are a few such as Nat whose style is distinctive. On a few occasions Nat presented drawings and artefacts to people who knew who he was, making it possible to identify something of his style across paper and wood. It is to these works that we now turn. The first group of artworks that we are certain of being by the hand of Nat are the drawings reported on in The Mail in 1932. The newspaper reports that 'Nat Blackboy he humbly signs himself', though there is no evidence of this signature. 30 The term 'boy' was used across English settlements in the nineteenth century to describe colonised people employed by the colonisers. It was used as a generic name for Aboriginal workers on cattle and sheep stations, a sign of Nat's working background as a drover. The drawings were collected by Lock, who is reported to have asked Nat to: 'Tell me about your people'. He then drew: the snake, always prominent in primitive folk lore; there was the kangaroo in full flight, with the wild dogs after him: there was the 'walk about', when Binghi strides with his spear and his shield, while his lubra walks behind him with the fire stick and the walking utensils.
There was the tribal comedian, with his face one wild mask; he is the funmaker at the corrobotees. There was a hint of the deeper superstitions of the tribe in the elaborate figures of two witch doctors with their headdresses nearly as long as themselves. 31 Unfortunately, these drawings of classical themes have been lost. The newspaper does reproduce, however, four drawings that the writer describes as 'decidedly Europeanised'. These are drawings of station life. One drawing shows a rider whose horse is rearing because a bull is rushing and gouging its belly with his horns. Nat has brought character to the horse, whose distress is visible on its face. Another is a picture of two riders in a horse race, possibly at Barrow Creek where annual races took place, with one horse stretching its neck in an attempt to be the first to the finish. A third drawing shows a hunter, carrying a boomerang and a spear in his hands, chasing a kangaroo with his dog. There is a fourth drawing, too, of a man riding a horse.
The Mail reports that the drawings are from 'a book full of drawings, which Lock brought with her when she came to Adelaide on furlough', and that 'Nat's drawings have been shown to the staff of the Museum, which has expressed interest in the excellence of some of them'. 32 While the drawings published in The Mail have been lost, a second group of drawings from what is presumably the same book were given to the South Australian Museum by Lock in 1932. 33 There are seven pages of these drawings on separate sheets, and six have station life as their subject. They show well-dressed men riding horses while they are bucking and cantering, as well as one using a whip. There is a drawing of a woman following a milk cow, and another of two men facing off cattle that look like they have rushed them into long grass and into the shelter of grass and a spindly tree (Figure 2). The seventh page has a drawing of an emu, and a man standing beside a bicycle that appears to have been pasted into the page. The drawings in the South Australian Museum and those reproduced in The Mail portray the particulars of station life. Stockmen are dressed in full regalia: chaps, stirrups, plaited leather stock whips, Australian stock saddles, with bolo-neck ties and hats too. One drawing pictures a man grasping a broken rein, implying the cantankerous spirit of the adjacent horse, either a colt or a captured brumby ( Figure  3). The scene is typical of Nat's representation of livestock, and here, the serene, even smiling expression of the horse contrasts its probable truculence. A type of caricature, Nat's exaggeration of facial features imparts a sense of individuality in his subjects, making them knowable, or at least recognisable.
Based on the highly accessorised inventory of the human figure, the rider is likely the station boss, here demonstrating his technical knowledge to an onlooking 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 'Drawings by Tracker Nat', accession no. AA184, South Australian Museum, Adelaide.
audience of ringers and station hands. The pot-bellied rider appears again straddling a bucking horse, probably a brumby being broken in (Figure 4). He sports a boloneck tie, fashionable in the American cowboy and Indian subculture, which had by this time become popular in Australia. Each detail attests to the rider's material affluence and proficiency as a stockman. As Mr Duggie and Crook Hat, two well-known ringers and Yawalya elders, recount: Mr Duggie: We used to work and get knowledge from the station boss.
Crook Hat: Horse breaking, everything, branding, learn about bullet business. We had aboriginal law too. When the station manager would go away to town, he got his  Aboriginal headstock men-who was a knowledge man-the manager would learn from him, put him as boss. 34 There is a third drawing that can be firmly attributed to Nat, too, of the Tennant Creek Telegraph Station buildings. The drawing is dated 1934 and was sent to the anthropologist and early champion of Aboriginal art, Charles Mountford, who was looking for examples of Aboriginal drawing. This drawing has been preserved in the State Library of South Australia. Tennant Creek postmaster George Ashton had sent it to Mountford, apologising that he was not able to commission more from Nat. 35 A second group of work whose provenance lies with Nat comes from the descendant of a Tennant Creek schoolteacher, Bernadette Pash. She taught in Warrabri for two years, from 1954 to 1956. Nat gave her a collection of artefacts as she was leaving the community. 36 Such gifting extended ngijinkirri beyond the Warrabri community. The Pash collection is made up of a shield and coolamon painted with nearly the same design as that visible on Hasluck's shield. The design features a man dancing before a kingfisher, a lurnku, who sits before him on a tree. The kingfisher is a Dreaming story across the Central and Western Deserts, where it is known by different names. Roundels, the classic icon of Western Desert art, take up the centre of these artefacts, while a kangaroo stands under a tree in both versions. There are also boomerangs painted onto both shield and coolamon, including a fierce looking, Lshaped hunting boomerang. The overall design suggests that the subject of the shields and coolamon may be a hunting story, with the kangaroo as prey. There are also two boomerangs, two spearthrowers and an ingkwelthe (pointed stick to be worn in the hair during ceremony) in the Pash collection. 37 There is also a hunting story on one of the spearthrowers, with a man armed with boomerang and spear resembling the hunting scene reproduced in The Mail. A kangaroo and a kingfisher are also painted onto one of the boomerangs, a recurring part of Nat's repertoire that will turn up again and again, including as we shall see in artefacts that have less certain provenances.
In September 2018 the shield, coolamon and a spearthrower were consigned for auction at Leski Auctions in Melbourne before being seized by the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council. The Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 in Victoria requires people who have custody of ancestral remains or secret-sacred objects to report them to the council. Nat's artefacts, however, are not secret-sacred, having been gifted to Pash. 38 Nor is the iconography or figures on the shield, coolamon and spearthrower that were seized secret-sacred. The roundels on the shield and coolamon are generic, while the kingfisher, or lurnku, has totemic significance further north on Warumungu country but not for Nat, whose country was to the south, around Barrow Creek, a repeater station on the telegraph line south of Tennant Creek. While a man wearing emu feathers and other ceremonial regalia recurs on Nat's artefacts, this is not the drawing of ceremony that would otherwise be the privilege of a male audience. If Nat was privy to any sacred knowledge about the lurnku, it is not being represented here, in this gift to a female schoolteacher. These shields were stored in Museums Victoria, before being returned to Warumungu custody in 2022.
With significant exceptions, such as the Spencer and Gillen collection, many provenances of artefacts collected in remote Australia have been lost. If the names of their artists were at all known by those who collected them, these names are often lost as carvings, drawings and the like have passed through families, antique shops, auctions and so on. Nat was a prolific maker of objects, and these are likely to be unprovenanced in collections, private and public. Shields, spears, coolamons and the like circulate on eBay and in auctions with little to document their origin, leaving only their style to give some clue as to where and when they were made.
In the photograph of Nat it is possible to see a style of shield that he was making during the 1950s, as he painted a series of motifs that he repeated on different types of artefacts. A 1954 report notes that his 'scenery and animals on native shields and woomeras … are sold by him in Tennant Creek for about £3 each, and his total annual income from painting would be approximately £200'. 39 The estimate suggests that Nat was making around 66 works annually. Evidence of Nat's prolific output is also in The Mail article of 1932, which reports that as a child Nat 'would sketch with anything-a piece of white chalk, a lump of red ochre, a bit of charcoal, and on anything, including posts'. 40 From the small sample of artefacts that we have available to us, there are likely to be some surviving from the 1950s that feature these motifs of a ceremonial man, lurnku, roundel, kangaroo and boomerangs.  (Figure 5). The drawing has also been published twice in papers that attribute it to an 'Anmatyerr stockman'. 41 One of the papers documents the drawing as 'a rare visual record of Anmatyerr participation in the industry'. 42 Here, however, we want to argue for its provenance to be by the hand of Tracker Nat, based on the anatomic accuracy of the cattle and men, the attention to detail, and with a subject known to be of artistic interest to Nat at this time. The unique markings and pizzle of the longhorned cattle, the fidelity with which the saddles are rendered wherever they appear, and the prevalence of accessorised riders and their steeds in action, betray a working knowledge of mustering. The similarities between this drawing and those collected by Lock, and those published in the newspaper, suggest Nat's hand is at work. Nat also has totemic and geographic affinities to both Beetaloo Station and the Anmatyerr 'tribe' named in the drawing. Nat's mother was Anmatyerr, giving Nat some ties to the provenance of the writing on the drawing, presumably from someone at the South Australian Museum. The subject here may well be the cattle brought from the Overland Telegraph Station to Barrow Creek. The ZTZ marking on the cattle and horse is still in use at Beetaloo. While the 1932 article in The Mail identifies Nat as being from Tennant Creek, we suspect the description of Nat as being from Barrow Creek, written in Lock's handwriting onto one of the drawings she collected (Figure 3), more accurately describes his home in the 1920s. 43 The 1929 date also coincides with Lock's visit in May of that year, suggesting that she also collected this drawing and donated it to the South Australian Museum. 44 The other possibilities are that Nat visited her at Harding Soak, where Lock was later based, or at Rabbit Flat Bore, both on Anmatyerr country. There is simply no way of knowing for certain.
There are other artworks in a public collection, too, that it is possible to attribute to Tracker Nat. A shield and a coolamon in the Berndt Collection were collected from an antiques shop without provenance. The shield has Nat's signature motif of the lurnku, again with a man pointing at it from below the branch it sits on ( Figure  6). The presence of the lurnku and a similarly painted kangaroo on the bottom half of the shield's face suggests Nat's hand. It is dated in the Berndt's files at 1939, and the design suggests an earlier version of the Pash collection artefacts that also feature a man and lurnku and kangaroo. The Berndt coolamon, bought from the same antiques shop, shows a hunting scene above a kangaroo and emu, as well as hooked boomerangs, a flower and a love heart shape (Figure 7). Included in both of these early shields is an emu, which stands alongside the kangaroo, and which does not appear in the Pash or Hasluck paintings. The kangaroo and emu face each other in the coolamon painting, while facing away from each other on the shield. The combination suggests that Nat was playing with the design of the Australian coat of arms, which was not an uncommon subject among Aboriginal artefact makers of the early twentieth century. 45 The simulation of the coat of arms may have played to the national sentiment of collectors of Aboriginalia in the early twentieth century, or functioned for artists as a kind of diplomacy, a way of forging a shared symbology with the settler culture.
There are other carvings attributed to Nat, too. A shield and coolamon offered at auction display the kangaroo and emu motif (Figure 8). They face each other above the familiar image of a hunter with hand outstretched to a sitting lurnku. This image of man and bird make Nat's work instantly recognisable, his style drawn from a set of recurring motifs. Anthropologist Jason Gibson identified another painted shield in the Anthropology Museum at the University of Queensland in October 2022, while a private collector in Melbourne also identified a painted coolamon, and a painted  the leading private gallery in the Northern Territory, its inaugural show exhibiting a breakthrough collaboration between an Indigenous and non-Indigenous artist. 49 The Brio, too, combine Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists, with Rupert Betheras joining Warumungu artists Fabian Brown, Marcus Camphoo (who exhibits as Double00), Simon Wilson, Lindsay Nelson, David Duggie, Clifford Thompson, Mathew Ladd, Jimmy Frank, and co-author of this article, Joseph Yugi Williams. The Brio are descendants of Nat's generation of Warumungu people. While Williams is Nat's grandson, Jimmy Frank is the grandson of Frank Juppurula, who is mentioned earlier in this article and well known for his discovery of gold at Tennant Creek.
In 2020 the Brio's work was selected to be a part of the Sydney Biennale, with an installation of pokie machines run through with punishment spears, smashed televisions hanging on meat hooks, and everything painted over with loud colours and shapes. Their inclusion can be seen as something of a breakthrough not only for the artists, but for a Biennale that has historically been dominated by globetrotting professionals, with little attention paid to less-established artists and their practices. They have since exhibited as a part of the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair and Desert Mob in Alice Springs. As part of this show, Brown's Memories of Coniston (2020) looked back to the Coniston Massacre. Brown is a descendant who can trace his family history to this event, as he is related to Bullfrog, the man who killed the white man whose death was used by the authorities to justify the killings. Brown's work features Warlpiri writing and is a mix of expletives against the constable, William George Murray, and anecdotes of how his two grandfathers hid in trees while the killings occurred. 50 In an essay in The Monthly, Anna Krien cast the Brio as outsiders who had come out of a town 'largely known for shock headlines of vicious violence, endemic alcohol abuse and intergenerational poverty'. 51 She also writes that in Tennant Creek 'ties to culture are tenuous and often irreversibly tangled. It is a mongrel place, many say; it exists on the fringes of white and Indigenous worlds, belonging to neither'. There is another side to this story, in which Tennant Creek led the fight against alcohol and its abuses in the Northern Territory. 52 It is possible to read the Brio as a part of this struggle, and as an attempt to tie its artists back to a cultural history of ngijinkirri materialism.
While violent encounters in and around Tennant Creek, including Stuart's return from Attack Creek, and the Coniston Massacre, have received much attention, the collective is part of a wider story about cultural practice and the maintenance of fierce Warumungu history that the Brio are building on today. To do this, the Brio draw upon older ideas in order to convey their life in the centre of a universe steeped in law. This is the meaning of Wanjjal Payinti, the name of their Desert Mob installation in Alice Springs in 2019, terms that combine the past and the present. Here, alongside their distinct paintings, they installed wartilkirri (number seven boomerangs) and karlala (spears). Unlike many other art centres exhibiting in Desert Mob that are based in small, remote communities, the Brio have long negotiated with outsiders visiting the Telegraph Station, or driving the Stuart Highway. Brio is part of a renewed, twentyfirst-century renewal of the strength of Warumungu culture, a part of a series of intercultural projects that includes the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre.
In the days when Tracker Nat was the tribal leader, each of the language groups represented by the Brio were hurtled into mutual proximity at Phillip Creek mission at a hinge moment in the region's history, which saw many groups of Aboriginal people fleeing ancestral homelands due to the Coniston Massacre. Sixty years later, the same groups converge as a small community in Tennant Creek, as well as an artist collective. Williams prophesised this uncanniness on an old TV painted with acrylic and enamel paint which became the thematic locus for their showing at the 2020 Sydney Biennale: NIRIN. He painted the words on this television: 'We are really re-enactments of before the Christ ancestral beings, we are the living history'. Williams' statement speaks to an understanding of a past and present that forwardly propels rather than recedes, a past constantly slipping into the present.
Another example of this living history is the collaborative painting by Fabian Brown, Simon Wilson and Williams, Memories of Coniston (2020), recently acquired by the Australian War Memorial. On it, Wilson worked his signature spills on the background, which Brown then shaped into a bodiless figure of Constable William George Murray-the main perpetrator of the killings-and added text in Warlpiri, while Williams attached a large boomerang above the figure of Murray. While different to the artefacts made by Tracker Nat, the similarities are, nonetheless, striking. As such, their artistic, strategic and historical connections cannot be overlooked. Rather than thinking of these Brio works as a revival of the same strategies employed by Tracker Nat, we might instead think of them as Williams does, as re-enactments.
The momentum generated by the rediscovery of Nat's work has put into motion a burgeoning body of activities. Williams, already working on a project to draw photographs from Spencer and Gillen's 1901 visit, has been re-enacting Nat's work with a series of shields inspired by his artefacts (Figure 9). Crossing between contemporary artworks, art-historical research and oral history, Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre applied for funding from the Australia Council for an exhibition, which is currently being developed. The project hopes to give recognition to the originality, historical significance and scope of Tracker Nat. Interwoven is Tracker Nat's role as a community leader in the wake of the Coniston Massacre-a critical moment in Central Australian history, which triggered large migrations of Aboriginal people across the Central Desert. The project is ambitious in scope, and as such, shares much in common with the quality of artworks, artefacts and oral histories pertaining to Nat. Synthesising Dreaming, pre-contact, colonial and contemporary actions, the principles informing this exhibition are clearly voiced in the Warumungu notions of payinntalki (new) and wurmuralki (old)-a lateral space-time testified to by the artworks themselves.