ART FOR ART’S SAKE

One of the country’s best surveys of Indigenous Art is the annual Desert Mob exhibition, at the Araluen Arts Centre until 24 October 2022. This year curated by Hetti Perkins (eldest daughter of first Central Land Council chair Charlie Perkins) and Marisa Maher, it brings together hundreds of new artworks from emerging and established artists. Enjoy talks, short films and a marketplace selling jewellery, fashion, ceramics, homeware and fibre art. desart.com.au

Hermannsburg Potters has developed a niche market for ceramics. The potters work in the hand-coil and pinch technique, using terracotta clay. Their pots feature a signature sculptural lid. A vibrant palette of ceramic underglaze is used to depict landscape, flora and fauna, family and traditions.

We meet Patricia Ansell Dodds, an Undoolya elder, artist, academic, and herself the subject of a mural in Target Laneway called Not to Scale, by Gus Eagleton and Brontë Naylor. As she gives us a potted history of the Arrernte people and dot-points the highs and lows of Indigenous Australia, she makes one thing crystal clear: “If you want to understand the art of Central Australia, you need to understand the Country.”

So off we go… Our five-day Mereenie Loop road trip (4WD required because there are unsealed sections) helps shape that understanding. Even if, by the end of it, we still puzzle over the geography: all those gaps, gorges, chasms, canyons, bluffs, escarpments and ranges.

Make your first stop the Olive

Pink Botanic Garden; walk to the top of Tharrarltneme (Annie

Meyer Hill) for absorbing views, an abundance of black-footed rock wallabies and western bowerbirds.

Next, picnic by the pretty waterhole at Simpsons Gap, in the West MacDonnell Ranges. Stop by the Ochre Pits. This outback paint shop is a cliff-wall striped in yellow, red-browns and white ochre that Indigenous people used for art and ceremony. We also visit working cattle stations, a camel farm, and the Karrke