78 Australian Geographic
Tjala (honey ant) songline, the creation story for this area.
“Without that history nothing is sacred,” he says. “Our ancestors
left us these stories to uphold the law and maintain country.”
Art has bloomed as a potent means to reinforce this legacy,
both with new generations of locals and to a wider audience.
Just down the street from Lee’s place is Tjala Arts, one of seven
flourishing Anangu-owned arts centres across the Lands. Tjala
represents more than 40 celebrated local artists, including a
cohort of senior law-men and women on a quest to help instil
tradition through painting, weaving and carving.
“The young fellas are the young tree branches with green
leaves,” says artist Hector Burton. “We teach our young fellas
through the family tree to understand and be at home with their
Dreamings and their lands.” In 2014 Hector won the Red Ochre
Prize, Australia’s most prestigious peer-reviewed award for an
Aboriginal artist. Two years earlier Barbara Moore, another
Anangu artist, won the painting prize in the Telstra National
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award.
“When the news came back to town here...my two children
very proud,” Barbara says in her soft voice as we chat outside
Tjala Arts. She began painting in 2003 and was quickly recog-
nised for her swirling brushstroke compositions. She’s an
Anmatyerre woman from the Ti Tree region, 200km north of
Alice Springs, and, like Lee, arrived in the 1970s to be with
family. Now a health worker in town, she’s deeply entwined
with the families of Amata. Painting is an extension of these
ties for Barbara, and her life is nourished by shared stories.
For all its glow and verve, art is just one strand in the Anangu
mission to protect heritage. Caring for country – the living
topography through which the Tjukurpa pulses – is at the heart
of the culture. Havoc wrought by weeds, feral animals and wild-
fire is keenly felt both for the environmental damage and
spiritual harm.O
VER THE RANGE west of Amata lies Apara Springs, a
secluded valley with a terraced creek of permanent water-
holes. It’s an idyllic oasis of green. But in 2013 it became
a mass grave when about 300 desperate camels died here.
“It’s heatstroke that killed them,” explains Lee Brady. “They
drink too quick when they’re hot, then black out and fall to the
ground and can’t get up.” He spent two weeks with a LandCruiser
and snatch straps on the gruesome task of hauling dead camels
from the springs.
“I did it out of my heart,” says Lee. “I’m part Afghan and that
place also runs a bit close to the Ngintaka [perentie lizard] sacred
song, so I had to protect the site. But the work and smell really
mucked me up – my family didn’t want me in the house for a
couple of months.”
The Ngintaka songline reverberates across the breadth of
the Lands, from the granite ranges to the sand country of the
south. A vast rolling sprawl of the APY Lands is dominated by
the rhythms of the Great Victoria Desert. It’s a deceptively
abundant, life-giving world. In Anangu lore this sea of dunes
and scrubland is signposted with rock holes, soaks and sentinel-
like outcrops on the horizon. Family survival and spiritual
wellbeing demands an intimacy with this habitat-come-larderNoisy neighbour. Mobs of
spiny-cheeked honeyeaters
are busy songsters throughout
arid woodland habitats.