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Thursday, 20 March 2008
We’ve been an industrious place these past two weeks with young people and their families coming in most days keen to catch up, flick through the Sydney photographs and participate in the new Learning thread of the Ngapartji Ngapartji project. Some of the young people who went to Sydney, and others interested and visiting from Docker River and Mutitjulu, have begun some projects using the enormous amount of photo images we have of that tour, and others (Check out the gallery for more photos of Sydney.) The walls are starting to fill up with drawings and laminated comic pages created from photos and writing about Ngapartji Ngapartji people and activities.

And in the ‘ngapartji ngapartji’ way, we’re acknowledging that the learning here is two-way, be it Pitjantjatjara or English, so that ‘learning notes’ are appearing all over the Alice office. Whenever any one learns something, whether it’s a new word or expression in Pitjantjatjara, how to spell an English one, or a grammar or maths rule, we jot it down on a sticky note and put it on the wall to share. Along with the comics, these look fantastic, and its inspirational to see the young people so keen to learn in this way.

The acquisition of a new computer has meant more people can work on their individual projects at the same time and with our new literacy worker Jane on board we can offer young participants a more individualized learning program.

After a visit from Ben and Helen from CAAMA, who showed us some digital stories online, Sadie and Julie have started the process of putting together images to make digital stories about their own experiences. We hope we can finish some of these for the Ngapartji Ngapartji kungkas to present at the NPY Kungka Careers conference in May – an annual conference of young women from the APY Lands coming together to hear about jobs, activities and projects other Indigenous women have done which might help them think about how to realise their dreams for the future.

And while the young people are working with their stories Mariaa and Alex are working through the backlog of administration which has accumulated these past 6 months. Alex is trying to draw up a 24-month plan for the future of Ngapartji Ngapartji in recognition that the project is finite and that how it ends and the legacy we hope it leaves actually influences the choices we make now about where we are going. The task is to consider what is valuable to the project and participants, as well as viable, in terms of the many offers that came out of the Sydney Festival and the Australian Performing Arts Market, such as touring the theatre production both in Australia and overseas, making a film and pursuing the work on the ground. No small task.

Happy Easter.

Dani  

 
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In the news this week

There's been a little discussion about shifting focus from creating discreet workshops in town to  finding points of community engagement in the myriad events and work that we have before us. This week we mapped out the next 18 months of the project and were excited and overwhelmed at how much we have on our communal plate, including the production of a documentary, upcoming filmmaking workshops in Ernabella in July and the SA/NT tour in September/October. We received funding through the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) to develop a mobile gallery to house and share the images and text produced by project participants throughout the project and started the first of a series of workshops in the newly renovated community building in Abbott's camp. And long-term project participant and established watercolour artist Elton Wirri flew to Melbourne last week to co-present with Company Director Scott Rankin at the Deakin Lectures.

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