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Misused spirits of creation returned to proper custodians

By Debra Jopson

7 March 2001 - "You're not allowed to do that. In the olden days, you'd get a spear," said the Kimberley lawman and artist Mr Dickie Tatayra.

The demurely suited Sydney businesswoman Ms Toni Lennard, sitting opposite him in a Sydney hotel, gasped. "... But not now," he said soothingly.

Mr Tatayra was speaking of the crime - in Aboriginal law - of stealing the image or name of those sweet-seeming mouthless spirits, the wandjina.

Since fellow artist Donny Woolagoogja's giant wandjina image awed the masses at the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony, Mr Tatayra and other Ngarinyin elders Paddy Neowarra and Scotty Martin have set up a Web site, wandjina.com, to spread the message of their culture worldwide.

In the process, they found three companies, including Ms Lennard's, named after the wandjina on the Internet and asked their owners politely to change their names.

Ten years after starting her public relations company, Wandjina Pty Ltd, and four months after the Ngarinyin called, Ms Lennard has given the name back, as an act of reconciliation.

"I found it in the glossary of an encyclopedia and the translation said it meant 'spirits of creation'," she said yesterday. "We thought this was apt because the philosophy of my business was to be 'creative spirits'. I had a little bit of an idea of the images and that they were in caves, but I had no idea that the people were still there."

According to an adviser to the Ngarinyin, Mr Peter Collins, the artists who create wandjina images receive them in dreams. The custodians of these figures are saddened if someone uses them for a different purpose.

The Ngarinyin are keen to have good relations with "whitefellas" and to speak of the wandjina. At Dodnan, 170 kilometres north-east of Derby, they run a "bush university" whose graduates include the Sydney QC Mr Alec Shand and the Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia, Archbishop Peter Carnley.

Mr Martin, a songman who was a main force in creating the Web site which extends the bush university to cyberspace, said the wandjina, which lives in the Milky Way, is "the original
dot com man", at home on cave walls and the Internet.

"It's like a spirit man. He gave us life and that's our Dreaming. Wandjina brought us to the world and left his picture on the wall of a cave for people to look at. He went up. He's still up there, so we still believe in him," he said.

Two months ago, a modern Sydney dot com man, Mr John Turnbull, handed over the name wandjina.com to a group of Kimberley elders in Perth via an emotional video-conference ceremony. He apologised and pledged his support for their cyber plans.

But Mr Collins found another Australian living in California's Silicon Valley less accommodating. He agreed only to modify the name marginally, being angered at the request.

"He tried to tell me it was the same as using Thor or Osiris or Zeus. But this is about the wandjina, which belong to these fellows, who wanted it back."

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

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