Ned Kelly Dreaming
Ned Kelly Dreaming
It is with the gaze from Ned Kelly's helmet that I began to look at his landscape. A narrow slit - his self imposed panavision.
This vision is then immersed & melded with the perspective of an aboriginal dreamscape - most specifically from the Yarralin Tribe -
from far north -western Australia.
It is the duality of Australian myth & the Yarralin Aborigines, the inclusion of the figure of Ned Kelly within both cultures
which has resulted in the exhibition I propose.
Ned Kelly represents one of the few inclusive links of white Australia to Aboriginal dreaming,
the results of this investigation has inspired of these images.
"In the farthest corner of the continent from Kelly country the Yarralin people of north-western Australia have taken Ned Kelly into their dreaming.
They tell how when salt water covered the land Ned Kelly and his angel friends came in a boat, made a river and caused the salt water to retreat.
Another story relates that he came to Wave River Station and taught the Aborigines there how to make tea and damper, that
‘although there was only one billy of tea and one little damper, everybody was fed.' This Dreamtime figure who evokes Jesus,
Noah and Moses is also present in the age of European settlement.
According to another Yarralin story, he kills four policemen at Wyndham and Captain Cook takes him back to England. There Ned's throat is cut and he is buried.
The Sky darkens, there is a sound like thunder and Ned Kelly rises up into the sky. White men are rigid with fear and distant Darwin buildings tremble.
"I Jones, Ned Kelly "A Short Life , p339.
(Based on the study of Deborah Bird Rose, 'Ned Lives', Austarlian Aboriginal Studies , 1989. Volume 2.)
