December 16-22, 2004

art

Deep Impact

SNAKE CHARMER: Boxer Milner's Kandimalal (Wolfe Creek Crater) and the Rainbow Serpent painted the serpent's arrival according to family stories.

How a 300,000-year-old meteorite and its community became one woman's creative crusade.

by Susan Hagen

Peggy Reeves Sanday traveled to Australia's Wolfe Creek Crater, the second largest meteorite crater in the world, for a highly personal reason: Her geologist father, Frank Reeves, had explored and published the first scientific paper on the crater in 1947.

During her own 1999 visit, Sanday became curious about the crater's meaning to indigenous people and her personal interest evolved into a full-blown anthropology project. Sanday, a Penn anthropology professor, developed a collection of Aboriginal "Dreaming" paintings while at Wolfe Creek; these works are now featured in an exhibition called "Track of the Rainbow Serpent" at the University of Pennsylvania museum.

"Dreamtime" paintings—a term referring not to literal dreams but to the order of the cosmos --often appear abstract to untrained Western eyes, but they are rich in iconography and symbolism. They describe myths about the origins of the world, the power of the totemic ancestors, a way of life or law and a profound connection to the land. In bright, rich colors, the paintings use detailed dot patterns and a schematic, bird's-eye view of the landscape. Many are done in acrylic on canvas (a medium that has become popular since the 1970s) and employ techniques, symbols and forms dating back to ancient rock art.

Sanday discovered that only the "traditional owners" of the crater (members of certain clans) were allowed to tell the story of its creation. She said her previous fieldwork as an anthropologist taught her that "people don't like to talk directly about things that are personal," she says. "You have to understand their way of communicating these ideas." She bought Daisy Kungah's painting—of two striped snakes in a Pollock-like scene of cosmological chaos—and visited the crater with her. Suddenly Sanday realized Dreaming paintings could be the ideal language for studying Aboriginal culture and spiritual beliefs.

Between 1999 and last year, Sanday commissioned 25 paintings about the crater and purchased several others that filled in the gaps. All Aboriginal tribes have a totem, and the totem of the traditional owners of the Wolfe Creek Crater is the Rainbow Serpent. This serpent appears in many of the paintings, as it has in cave paintings, rock art, stories and songs, and body painting for religious ceremonies for thousands of years. It can be male, female, a couple or a hermaphroditic creature. It can be a creator being from the heavens, a mother goddess inside the earth, or a combination. The feminine symbolism appealed to Sanday, an anthropologist and author who's studied matriarchal cultures in Indonesia and date rape in America. Sanday interviewed the artists about the stories in their paintings. At the museum, the artist's description of the story accompanies each painting, as well as Sanday's explanatory notes. Her objective, as an anthropologist, is to "highlight the people's point of view."

Frank Clancy painted one of his family's Dreamtime stories about a dingo, a man, a cave and the Rainbow Serpent, and he showed the movements of the human ancestor with a row of footprints. Boxer Milner painted the serpent arriving at the crater, where according to his clan's stories, it has lived underground for centuries. Another of Milner's paintings, titled Waters of Sturt Creek and the Black-headed Python is "not of the dreamtime." It shows a snake that would normally be hunted for food; it's a mundane, real-life scene, represented using the techniques of Dreaming paintings. He explained, "The python is black like all of us, like the mother snake." It is one of the most striking paintings, with a beautiful pattern of orange with black dots and blue diagonals and a row of connected waterhole designs. Jane Gordon's beautiful Fly Dreaming (Ngurriny) shows the crater with rings of quicksand in the center, and the Rainbow Serpent as an underground tunnel between the crater and nearby Red Rock. She represents flies as gray spots ringed with tiny white dots, and there are more rings of dots depicting camps in harmonious shades of tan, gray, mauve, black, white and pale yellow. Other paintings in the exhibition illustrate different aspects of local culture, such as women's law, travel and food.

As another important part of the project, Sanday is documenting the paintings and the stories that their makers told for a book, which she describes as "an anthropological memoir of this experience." Plus, Sanday's fateful journey to Australia has produced an exciting new development: Inspired by Ayers Rock, a heritage site in Australia with Aboriginal cave paintings that have been ritually repainted for thousands of years, Sanday and a group of artists are beginning to organize a campaign to have Wolfe Creek Crater legally returned to its traditional owners.

Track of the Rainbow Serpent: Aboriginal Paintings of the Wolfe Creek Crater Through Feb. 27, The University of Pennsylvania Museum, 3260 South St., 215-898-4000