I am still landing from a two-week stint in Ernabella where myself, Dave Wardell and Trevor Jamieson ran film and performance workshops for the NPY Women’s Council school holiday program. The program was a huge success with inter-generational participation in telling, scripting and filming stories and video clips for songs recorded with Ngapartji Ngapartji last year.

Stories developed included Mamu Tjara, a story told by Alinda Davey, about children being watched by two mamu (spirits) when the women went hunting. A small boy sees the mamu hiding when he goes to the toilet and runs back to camp to tell the others, who promptly run to the wiltja (shelter). In another short film a group of kungka (girls) come across a fire when walking out bush. Two younger kungka go to the fire for warmth and one is grabbed by a mamu disguised as a rock. A third mamu film instigated by the younger boys involved a wild chase around the car tip which looked quite stunning in the afternoon light.

Community member and first time director Carol Williams directed a video clip for Chriswell's song Wilurara which involved a band, a rockface and a troupe of dancing kungka. With this kind of material the final movie night went off, with up to 180 community members showing up, filling the school hall with screams and laughter as everyone got to see what everyone else had been up to. That last night the kids also asked to perform a martial arts/dance sequence Trevor had taught them over the week he was there, of which they were very proud.

Carol directing Chriswell, alongside Dave                                                    

  
Kids making mamu film at the tip

 Dave and Jasmin filming 'Kungka Mamu'

During our time there Scott Rankin, Alex and Suzy Bates (back from her travels) joined us for a few nights to commence meetings with the community about the imminent staging of the show in Ernabella. This entailed locating a site for the show which will be performed two nights, following the Ernabella Arts Centre’s 60-year celebrations in September.

Suzy has returned to direct a documentary about the project through the story of the upcoming tour and is now back in Alice on the job, having been working through the vision and plan for the doco with Scott, Alex and Trevor in recent weeks.

Over in Beth's corner of the office, there's been a flurry of faxing and folding as we start to get the word out to far flung communities such as Tjuntjuntjara, Oak Valley and Irrunytju that the show is coming closer to home in Ernabella, as well as to Ministers, funders and project supporters.

Beth’s also been continuing to liaise with local designer Elliat Rich on the mobile gallery which Pantjiti and Simon McKenzie and Imuna Kenta have decided to name 'Munta uwa! Nyangamala!', which translates as 'Right! Let's have a look!' Elliat is apparently practising how to say the name as she drafts plans for an amazing scaffold gallery.

In other news Melanie and Alex attended Lingfest 2008 in Sydney and ran a forum on language policy. The session was well attended by some key linguists and academics and it was decided that Ngapartji Ngapartji would continue to offer support and advice to the indigenous languages sector to develop messages for policy makers.

This week we are going public with our Language Policy Paper so if you'd like to have a read go to...

Palya

Dani Powell
Community Producer