Kujjura Mampaly Nyirrila: Two Together
(continued)

JULALIKARI CDEP WOMEN’S ARTS AND CRAFTS PROGRAM started in a tin shed. CDEP is a scheme where Aboriginal people work for unemployment benefits. Temperatures in Tennant Creek in summer are 40+. Dust blew through the shed. But the women kept turning up to paint, design, make things. With the support of Julalikari and the commitment of coordinator Trish Dobson, the program grew.

They moved into the Pink Palace, an almost derelict concrete block building on the edge of Ngalpa Ngalpa (Mulga) Camp, one of the ten urban living areas for Aboriginal people in Tennant Creek. The Pink Palace was built in the 1970s as a hostel for Aboriginal stockmen by the late Mary Ward from Banka Banka (part of Peggy’s country). When she started the hostel, townspeople held a public meeting to oppose it, claiming land would be devalued if there were Aboriginal people living there. Mary ward was undeterred. Today Aboriginal people make up more than one third of the town’s population, a different story to those days when they were allowed into town to cut firewood and cart water and then had to leave before the curfew.

The Pink Palace has taken on a new life, as a meeting and working place for women artists, set in lawn and indigenous plantings, shaded by eucalypts, its walls glowing with a mural of ochres and dusk blue.

Perhaps the Palace itself is a symbol of the tolerance the Fellowship sought to express.

1997