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Establishing a Spinifex Enterprise
In the heart of spinifex country, where landforms ripple and glow with wind and sun on a wild and luxurious abundance of native grasses, is Papulankutja (also known as Blackstone). Home to a community of 200 people in the remote Ngaanyatjarra Lands west of the tri-state border in Western Australia, Papulankutja is also the home of a highly successful Aboriginal owned and managed artist’s cooperative.
Papulankutja artists carry with them a substantial cultural legacy based on the traditional beliefs and practices of Indigenous people of the Western Desert region. Influenced strongly by their environment, this group of artists are renowned for having collectively won the highly prestigious Telstra Indigenous art award for a Toyota ute they wove from local grasses. Accustomed to the scale of their own landscape they are also celebrated for having created an 8 metre ‘big basket’, from local grasses, commissioned for the Hanover World Expo in Germany.
Spinifex is used by the Papulankutja artists in a number of forms and is an integral part of their lives. Encouraged by Community Development Worker, Helen Gordon in 1990’s the local women developed a process for making spinifex paper which is soft and flexible, accepts printing ink and lends itself to many types of painting including sand painting. The unique paper retains the natural colour of the spinifex in the surrounding landscape and involves a safe and simple process that can be carried out in a sheltered outdoor environment suited to the local lifestyle.
The paper making process involves the careful collection of the right type of spinifex grass, softening of the grass through boiling with soda ash, pulping the grass and setting it in prepared frames, making of the paper from pulp utilising troughs, drying of the paper, then watermarking. The resultant products have potential application in the tourism and art markets.
The simplicity of the spinifex paper process has offered a genuine opportunity to engage people in an enterprise within a community that, offers limited employment prospects. In 2004 Papulankutja Artists, the Combined Committee for the Production of Spinifex Paper and Blackstone Remote Area School collaborated on establishing of a paper making enterprise to offer employment for school leavers. The enterprise also provided potential for the development of secondary products such as limited edition prints, cards and framed images.
In establishing the enterprise it became apparent to Community Arts Worker, Dianna Isgar, that the project would need to be run from a larger facility to meet the production, storage and display needs of the both the art centre and the spinifex paper making project. In collaboration with the community she identified that a purpose built building would increase the potential for the activities to become financially self-sufficient and improve the prospects of the organisation’s longer term aims.
With support from the Office of Aboriginal Economic Development, Dianna sought funding assistance to build the centre, essentially a more spacious tin shed than they had previously operated from. She was successful in securing assistance from The Department of Local Government and Regional Development, but after receiving the funds the tyranny of time and distance began to frustrate what seemed on the surface to be a simple project.
“In the time taken between submitting the funding application and receiving approval the project had grown a little and costs had risen. It was also a requirement of our funding that we employ a project manager and this seems to have been our biggest stumbling block.”
With the Project Manager located in Kununurra, far removed from the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, additional issues associated with travel and communication arose causing further delays and costs which Dianna acknowledges added to the frustration associated with the project.
“The remoteness of Blackstone makes everything one does that bit more difficult and we had considerable trouble getting the simplicity of our requirements out to builders and architects.”
It was at this point that Dianna was referred to Lotterywest, and received a Lotterywest grant for an additional $162,428 towards the fit-out and construction of the centre. Along the way the Spinifex Paper Project also received assistance from Department Employment and Workplace Relations to employ a project worker to assist and train workers for the paper business.
With long delays associated with finalising the construction plans, paper making and art activities had to be relocated from the old Arts Centre to the Blackstone’s Town Hall. The hall is temporarily providing additional workshop space, after having recently provided the venue for the Blackstone Art and Music Festival.
Whilst construction in remote areas is a slow process, with distance, climate and labour shortages a cause for frustration, the Papulankutja artists remain resilient. Like the surrounding Spinifex they continue to flourish, as Dianna acknowledges:
“Building woes have not prevented the Papulankutja artists from creating and selling their works on spinifex paper, or travelling to places such as the WA Museum in Perth and Tandanya National Cultural Institute in Adelaide, to exhibit, conduct paper making workshops, and deliver interpretive sessions on paper making, grass collection and bush tucker, as it is done in Blackstone.”