Reflection on 'Makinti, Me'

I always come to visit Makinti when I am in this place- I feel I should call her Aunty for she is an elder and my better all things -but we share no kinship. More precisely I am nothing to her. But her art and her way is a continuous gift to me.

When I first encountered this painting I was struggling with colour. You see, I loved bold, trumpeting things that are uncompromising and certain. It was the way I liked to conceive of myself I suppose, a way of being I had predilection towards and had embraced as a matter of course in my life. And in my making. Full, loud and sure were my preferences. Then.

That was until I spent time staring at a river red gum. I had taken myself to the Narran River at Angledool- the birthplace of both my paternal grandparents and the place I refer to as my homelands. There, I found the tallest, widest tree on the river’s edge and sat with it. I chose that yarraan precisely because of its towering presence- singularly and confidently tree. It was as I liked things - one certainty done well. Scanning its skin I acknowledged yarraan grayness; it's a state that has always been ‘meh’ to me. Gray is too in between, too undecided. Gray, to me, is a failure to become, its weakness in its lack of vibrance and commitment.

Yarraan’s magnificence pushed high into the Yuwaalaraay sky. I reveled in its scope and its undeniable presence. I leant back, head encased in hands, and stretched myself upon the dirt bank. My eyes traced the tree’s centre shaft. Then its hulking branches. Yarraan was so old that each of its limbs were tree unto themselves. The elongated leaves flickered gently in the breeze that lifted from the warm waters. I began to daydream- swim in thought as I lay upon land. In my driftings I began to decipher streaks within the bark. Merely darker or lighter stains, nothing of note- no scars or amendments or nests to see- only smudging, grimy versions of greater tones that ran up and down yarraan’s entirety.

A dank river wetness licked my nostrils. Grey bark transitioned silver where sunlight kissed it. And silver is something worth looking at. It is stark and proud and assured. It seeks notice in its shine. That same silver became warm gold at the curvature of trunk towards sweet-tea coloured river. I watched as a refracted reflection danced upon it.

Amongst the multiplying metallic hues and I caught it. Or it caught me. Pink. Shy and concealed. Running as a complimentary vein throughout the light and dark smog streaks. Its appearance was a revelation to me. Hidden in stretches and bends, pinks miniscule inference in so great a structure it was intriguing because once seen it appeared everywhere upon the surface. And not in one form. In a plethora of lighten-ing and darker shades. Pinks. Everywhere.

I thought I knew much of my homelands- the river, her trees, the wide blue sky that stretched over endless floodplain. But I had misunderstood her and in that moment it seemed I had been missing important points of detail most of the times I was with her. In my attraction to the loudness of great things I had lost the ability to know and understand the complexity of the small. Pastel pinks of yarran Narran-da (the red gum on the Narran) opened a palette of knowledge I had been willfully ignoring for decades. I travelled back to the city from that trip with pinks and purples, yellows and oranges and violet grays - a landscape of ochre pastels urging me in their understated, patient way, to look and listen and know deeply that which forgoes movement and sound.

I arrived at Makinti, or she or her dreaming or my ancestral teachers arrived in me, a matter of days after. They placed me in front of her painting. I sat at its base as if it were tree and put my new learning into practice.

When I had visited but the work moved I wondered if she had tired of me. Or if I had been the one replaced. I wondered if she had found another, newer, interesting student to reveal the quietness of the world to. I wondered if I had passed or failed the lesson started on my homelands and continued in Pintupi dreaming. As only the Dreaming can, pasts and presents folded into each other. Answers appeared on an art gallery wall.

Mary Webb’s Joie de vivre now hangs in Makinti Napananka’s untitled’s place.

A handful of short seasons ago I was much like the centre of that canvas; bold, confident, assured. In my veins I hope to also carry a new acquisition- a quieter, softer strength. Inspired in me by Makinti. An artwork of her dreaming- the journeying of women. And at the edge of my river, a tree.