Singing the Milky Way Singing the Milky Way follows 90 year old Australian Aboriginal elder and internationally acclaimed fine artist, Paddy Japaljarri Sims, his fellow artists, family, and friends, on an emotional journey ‘out bush’ to reconnect with their hunter-gatherer roots and the source of their spiritual and artistic inspiration. The artists perform songs and dances beneath the haunting rock formations of Paddy’s sacred sites, illustrating their visceral connection to the land and the natural cycles, which provokes a flood of memory – of life in the bush – and how they lost it. | | |
The film is firmly anchored in Aboriginal voice, seamlessly alternating between the time before white people came, the mythological past, and the historical present. Paddy recounts his first contact with missionaries, who lured him into mission life in the 1930’s with the promise of food and clothes and put him to work digging wells and building fences. He tells of his involvement in the famous Yuendumu School Doors project (the doors are currently on an extensive European museum tour), which both sparked the contemporary painting movement and proved the validity of expressing Dreamings (creation mythologies which form the underpinning of Aboriginal life) in new ways to insure their culture’s survival. Paddy also tells of his journey to Paris to install a ceremonial style ground painting in the Centre Pompidou for the 1989 exhibition, ‘les Magiciens de la Terre’.
Singing the Milky Way explores the convergence between modern art and ancient Dreamings, between the personal and the universal. As Paddy Sims’ and his ‘mob’ journey through the sand hills, salt flats, and majestic rock formations of his traditional country, the artists set to work - in parallel time - on an epic canvas of the Milky Way Dreaming. As the bush trip progresses, still photographs and archival footage elicit Paddy’s remarkable life story, and body of work. At the end of the bush trip, while performing songs from the Dreaming, Paddy’s voice falters. Breaking down in tears, he remembers his vanished Japaljarri brothers – the hunter-gatherers with whom he once wandered this hauntingly beautiful landscape.
Paddy Japaljarri Sims’ emblematic life – and the brilliant painting he completed for the cameras, Yiwarra, Milky Way Dreaming – illuminates the world as aboriginal elders see it – through the lens of the Dreaming. To these artists a painting on canvas is not merely an object of aesthetic beauty, it’s a cultural document signifying far more: a ritual template, a map, a deed, an assertion of land rights, a record of a vanishing way of life, a means of keeping that past alive, and a new way of handing down age-old traditions to future generations.
Singing the Milky Way takes viewers on an epic journey through the bush exploring the worldview underlying Aboriginal paintings and the struggle of this last bush-reared generation to keep their cultural patrimony alive.
Director: David Betz
Cinematographer: S. Smith Patrick
Editors: Ben Estabrook, S. Smith Patrick
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| Paddy Sims Japaljarri *ca. 1917 Region: Yuendumu
Singing the Milky Way follows 90 year old Australian Aboriginal elder and internationally acclaimed fine artist, Paddy Japaljarri Sims, his fellow artists, family, and friends, on an emotional journey ‘out bush’ to reconnect with their hunter-gatherer roots and the source of their spiritual and artistic inspiration. The artists perform songs and dances beneath the haunting rock formations of Paddy’s sacred sites, illustrating their visceral connection to the land and the natural cycles, which provokes a flood of memory – of life in the bush – and how they lost it.
Paddy Sims Japaljarri is an outstanding artist and an influential figure for art in the Yuendumu region. His background is very traditional. He was born at Kunajarrayi (Mt. Nicker) west of Yuendumu, in the Northern Territory. As a young single man living near Yuendumu at a time when Walpiri people wore hand-made hair string belts instead of clothes, Paddy worked sawing mulga trees for wood and fuel. Paddy was also involved with gardening crops of watermelons, cucumbers, carrots and tomatoes, and with farming chickens, pigs, ducks and other animals at Four Mile Bore in the Yuendumu district.
Paddy has been hunting goanna, kangaroo, emu and other animals daily for his entire life, and he passes on his knowledge to many of the young men. This has also led him to work at the Yuendumu school teaching Dreaming, painting, hunting, traditional dancing and bush tucker, and he has participated on excursions out of the bush to Alice Springs and Darwin.
Paddy has been painting for Warlukurlangu for a long time. He is married to Bessie Nakamarra Sims, with whom he occasionally collaborates on larger works. He is a long-term committee member of Warlukurlangu Artists. Japaljarri is a strong supporter of the centre and encourages his children and grandchildren to paint there. He has a distinctive style and paints a number of Dreamings connected with his country: Witi (Ceremonial Pole), Yanjirlypiri (Star), Yiwarra (Milky Way), Munga (Night), Ngarlkirdi (Witchetty Grub), Liwirringki (Burrowing Skink), Jungunypa (Marsupial Mouse), Mala (Rufous Hare Wallaby), Wakulyarri (Rock Wallaby), Warlu (Fire), Wanakiji (Bush Tomato), Ngalyipi (Snake Vine) and Jurlpu (Bird).
Painting consistently on canvas since 1985, Paddy has worked on eight of the large collaborative canvases produced by Warlukurlangu Artists for museums and private collections. He is well known for his role in painting the Yuendumu Doors in 1983. In 1989 Paddy was one of the few Walpiri men selected to create a major ground painting installation for the 'Magiciens de la Terre' exhibition in Paris. In 2000 Paddy Stewart undertook to produce 30 etchings of the original Yuendumu Doors in collaboration with Paddy Simms and under the guidance of Basil Hall, Northern Editions Printmaker (Northern Territory University). The first print of the etchings was all on one page and had its debut alongside the Yuendumu Doors while they were exhibited in Alice Springs.
Wayne Quilliam --->
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