BARBARA WEIR

Barbara was an incredible woman, an artist and politician, she has been campaigning for the local land rights movement since the 1970s. In 1985, she was elected as the first woman president of the Indigenous Urapunta Council.

 

Barbara Weir was born in 1945 at Bundy River Station, a cattle station in the Utopia region of the Northern Territory. Her mother was renowned Utopia artist Minnie Pwerle, and her father Jack Weir was a married Irish man. Under anti-miscegenation racial laws of the time, their relationship was illegal, which led to them being jailed. Barbara was then partly raised by Pwerle’s sister-in-law, Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

 

The Australian government was also pushing a policy of ‘integration’, whereby they were forcibly removing mixed-race children from their families, placing them in care to be raised by white families, and usually prepared for manual jobs or service. So Weir’s family would keep her hidden when rangers came through the area, and Weir remained living there until she was nine years old. At this point, she was abducted by Native Welfare, becoming what’s known as one of the ‘Stolen Generation’. Weir’s family knew nothing of her fate, and after ten years of no communication, they believed she had died.

 

At 18 Weir married, and it was her husband who asked after her family when passing through Alice Springs. They then discovered Minnie Pwerle was still alive and living in Utopia. Following her divorce, Weir moved to Utopia to be with her mother and family. Here she began to explore Aboriginal artistic traditions, and relearn her language.

 

Weir first started painting in 1989, and her paintings include representations of particular plants and ‘Dreamings’, inspired by deep Aboriginal traditions. In particular, Weir’s work focuses on the grass seeds so important to her people. In the Utopia region there are many varieties of grasses. One such type is found in the spinifex sand plains and sandhills that produce a seed that was an important food source for the Aboriginal people.

 

This grass can grow up to 15cm high and is reddish in colour. While found throughout the year, it is particularly abundant after rain. The seeds also ripen at different stages which can make them hard to collect as they fall and are then hidden in the sand. The Aboriginal people developed an unusual way of collecting the seeds.

 

They would look for the nesting site of a particular ant. This ant collected the seeds and ate a certain portion and then discarded the rest. These discarded seeds would be found in a pile just outside the nest, where they were collected by the women of the community, cleaned and then ground into a thick paste.

 

Grass Seed Dreaming is the Dreamtime story passed down over generations of Atnwengerrp people to promote the ongoing supply of the small black seeds. They are highly nutritious and a key ingredient in making damper (bread), important qualities for Weir's ancestors.

Her paintings depict grasses, which have been of vital importance to Aboriginal people throughout their history. Where water is scarce there are fewer plants, but grasses grow throughout the country adapted to diverse conditions that range from desert to rainforest. Many parts of the grass plants were important, the stems and rhizomes were used to make fibres woven into string, bags, rope, baskets and mats. However, it was the seeds from grasses that were most important - they were used to make bush bread.

 

Native millet (Panicum) and spinifex (Triodia) were harvested for their seed. Collecting seeds and separating them from the husks took skills and practice, however, there were also bush-craft secrets. In the Kimberley, the women discovered that after the dry season, many seeds would be left around the nests of harvester ants. The ants had collected and husked the seed and they were able to collect it saving a lot of work.