Apparently Canning could change political history. Australia, its national imagination captive to that vast, hostile centre, mythologises frontiersmen just as it does soldiers. Monuments, buildings, streets, whole suburbs โ federal electorates! The track was designed to open the southern beef markets monopolised by the Kimberley graziers to the farmers of the far north. To the white eye it was ostensibly arid, inhospitable, near impossible country.
But to hundreds of families from numerous Indigenous clans it had been home for tens of thousands of years, a country punctuated with soaks that attracted animals for hunting and where the mystical jila rainbow serpents dwelt. For them the waters were home โ the focal point of family, social, spiritual and economic existence.
They were โ and remain โ part of a continuum of the Dreaming and the story and song lines that criss-cross the water and stretch back to creation. For Canning and the graziers, however, water was a vital commercial asset that was theirs for the taking. Others were coerced โ chained by the neck and fed salt so that maddening thirst would force them to lead Canning and his men to the water.
Maltreatment of the black people was endemic. This week, with the name Canning ringing in my head, I paid a visit to Kaninjaku โ stories from the Canning Stock Route, an exhibition at the National Museum of Australia.
Not only is Kaninjaku the Indigenous take on what happened after Canning began carving his track the violence, displacement and dispersal, the interconnection of different tribes of desert people, the social, spiritual and cultural upheaval, and the dawning of arts communities across the desert. He explains that the exhibition title, Kaninjaku, is inspired by one of the featured works by desert artist, Kumpaya Girgaba of Martumili Artists.
