The following excerpt is from an article that appeared in Eureka Street — volume 1, number 1, back in March 1991. In it, Rosemay Crumlin recalls travelling in search of Aboriginal Christian art for an exhibition to coincide with the World Council of Churches Assembly. She was joined on her pilgrimage by exhibition co-curator Anthony Waldegrave-Knight and the project's conceiver, Frank Brennan, then director of the Jesuit research and social action agency Uniya.
Our first journey into the outback was full of adventure, incredible 49-degree heat, and quite a lot of disillusion. You see, part of the process involved visiting remote Aboriginal communities to see whether we could discover any art that gave evidence that people were re-thinking Christianity in their own symbolic system. And what Christian art we did find was often as bad as I'd expected.
But at Balgo, in the Central Desert, we came across some huge wall-hangings and panels rolled up in the church the people there use for liturgies. I knew we were at the edge of something. But the heat was terrible and Anthony and I and even Frank (who looks like God, walking around in his hat) thought we'd had enough. It wouldn't have taken much to persuade us to omit Turkey Creek from our itinerary.
I rang Sister Clare Ahern at Turkey Creek, admitting to some hesitation. Her reaction was unambiguous: 'I think you should have come here first.' So we caught the little mail plane to Turkey Creek and arrived at the Meriingki Centre.
There, on the walls, was what we had been looking for. Startling! ... absolutely knockout works from the people of the Warmun Community. But particularly astonishing were those of Hector Sundaloo, George Mung and Paddy Williams. These three had been Christians from way back, and now, in their late 50s or early 60s ... they are the unmistakable community leaders. Hector is regarded as a ngapuny man, a man of God.
There were many paintings we might have taken from Turkey Creek, all of them done not as an artist would paint in a studio but as part of liturgy, done for use.
George Mung had carved a statue out of a piece of tree, a work of extraordinary beauty. Here it was, sitting on top of a hot-water system. About a metre high, it is an Aboriginal woman, a Madonna, pregnant with a man-child who