7 min read
This article is more than 1 year old
This special wooden lizard is being returned to the lands it was made on
After more than 50 years, 250 Indigenous artefacts discovered in a private collection are now being returned home to the communities that created them - on the Tiwi Islands and beyond.
Published 26 March 2023 6:18pm
By Laetitia Lemke
Source: SBS News
Gibson Farmer Illortaminni turns over an intricate carving of what looks to be a prehistoric creature. It’s a frilled-neck lizard in full flight.
Standing on its back legs, face angled to the sky, the 40cm-long reptile appears ready to run.
The paint markings along its body are traditionally seen in Indigenous art from Australia’s Tiwi Islands and were immediately familiar to Mr Illortaminni.
“I knew straight away that was my grandfather’s work,” he says proudly.
“I saw it and I had tears!”
The frilled neck lizard was created by Gibson Farmer Illortaminni's grandfather, Jack Illortaminni, in Paru in the 1960s. Source: SBS News / Laetitia Lemke
Mr Illortaminni has clear memories of the Paru community, where the lizard carving comes from. Dozens of families lived there, on Melville Island (the larger of the two Tiwi Islands), in the 1960s, working to provide food for the nearby Catholic mission.
“My grandfather worked at the bakery,” he says.
“When they used to finish work then they used to do these carvings.”
A carved crocodile by Mickey Aruni has also been discovered among the collection. Source: SBS News / Laetitia Lemke
Mr Illortaminni says his grandfather, Jack Illortaminni, would ferry his creations by canoe to the mission at Wurrumiyanga for sale.
The lizard has now outlasted the community it was created in.
As government funding flowed to provide water, power, housing, schools and clinics to other centres, the homelands of Paru were abandoned.
“Now there’s one or two white people [living there],” Mr Illortaminni says, “but my people want to move back.”
A decorated stone axe made with traditional materials by Pipero Munkara on Bathurst Island. Source: SBS News / Laetitia Lemke
Mr Illortaminni believes returning the objects will help educate young people on Tiwi traditions that pre-date colonisation and Catholic missions.
“It should go back to the rightful people … We have to tell [these stories], like what really happened in the past, so our kids can understand what really occurred on the island.”
More than 3,000 people live on the Tiwi Islands today and more than 90 per cent are Tiwi.
A collection of spears from across the Northern Territory. Source: SBS News / Laetitia Lemke
The frilled-neck lizard was discovered in a private collection of more than 250 pieces in the small Victorian town of Creswick, just outside Ballarat, late last year.
Its owner, John Morris, bought the items during the 1960s and 70s while working as a lay missionary, and then a federal government patrol officer, on the islands.
Detailed logbooks he kept at the time show he bought the works legitimately and for modest fees, reflective of the time.
A butterfly carving by Jack Illortaminni. Source: SBS News / Laetitia Lemke
Mr Morris is now gifting the items back to the Tiwi Islands.
A carved cockatoo stands amidst a collection of works from Paru. Source: SBS News / Laetitia Lemke
Mr Morris declined a request for comment from SBS News.
It should go back to the rightful people … so our kids can understand what really occurred on the island.- Gibson Farmer Illortaminni, Tiwi Land Council chairman
As the boxes arrived at the council head office in Darwin, just before Christmas last year, the true extent of the gift was realised.
Mr Illortaminni’s grandfather’s works, including a carved butterfly, a detailed junglefowl and a plump bandicoot - as well as the plucky lizard - feature heavily in the collection.
Carvings included in the collection. Source: SBS News / Laetitia Lemke
“The young generation, they’ve got that white-man glue that they mix up with the paint to make it stick – this was done [the] really hard way.”
Wide ceremonial armbands. Source: SBS News / Laetitia Lemke
“It was just like opening a magic box, it was just incredible,” Tiwi Land Council senior anthropologist Helen Haritos says.
“Gibson was over the moon.”
Anthropologist Helen Haritos and a woven basket from the collection. Source: SBS News / Laetitia Lemke
While the national eye is on the repatriation of human remains and objects like these, finding the funding to support such efforts has been difficult.
Yanuwa, Larrakia, Bardi, and Wardaman woman Franchesca Cubillo is the Australia Council of the Arts' executive director of First Nations arts and culture and has spent 30 years working across the art and repatriation space.
She says gifts like Mr Morris's collection are still a rarity, but the activism of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has improved the general understanding that such objects come from a living culture.
Gibson Farmer Illortaminni holds a bark painting showing Larrakia and Tiwi men fighting with spears over women. Source: SBS News / Laetitia Lemke
“It is a great gift to the community and one that should be encouraged from all researchers and ethnographers.”
A ceremonial headdress made of cockatoo feathers. Source: SBS News / Laetitia Lemke
“That’s where the federal government really does need to think more thoroughly in terms of repatriation; when they are gifted back to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community, where will they be stored? So these communities have facilities in place for safekeeping for their future generations?”
A finely woven fishing net from Maningrida that has been gifted back to the Gunavdji people. Source: SBS News / Laetitia Lemke
“People were saying, ‘that’s my mum’ and ‘that’s my dad’ and ‘that’s my grandfather’, and seeing the emotion of that memory for people, captured right there [in the artwork], and to have that returned, it was very, very special,” she says.
People were saying, ‘that’s my mum’ and ‘that’s my dad’.- Helen Daiyi, Tiwi Land Council policy officer
Philip A Clarke, the former head anthropologist of the South Australian Museum, has been advising the TLC on the collection.
“They still need to be sorted and perhaps classified … if indeed there is any material in there that is too culturally sensitive,” he says.
A tableau of a Tiwi pukumani (burial) site with miniature painted pukumani poles surrounding a timber mound grave. Source: SBS News / Laetitia Lemke
Ms Daiyi says there are strong hopes the frilled-neck lizard will herald a return home to Paru homelands.
“It is an auspicious omen that good things are ahead for that community to once again have the potential to be a hub, rebirthing the next generation of Tiwi culture and a return to Country,” she says.
The TTiwi Land Council is also applying for funds to get essential services and housing to the site in the hopes of reviving the once-thriving community there.
Would you like to share your story with SBS News? Email
