Amy Nuggett
Any Nuggett is a storied artist and painter who was one of the four women who painted their homeland on the Ngurrara Canvas. During our time in the Kimberley Amy, her daughter Annette and grand daughters took his to her birthplace in the Great Sandy Desert - Purluwala, 150 kilometers South of Fitzroy Crossing. Purluwala is a jila or waterhole located between the sand ridges in the desert. She met her first white person when she was 13 years old having lived deep in the desert. Amy still returns to her jila to speak to the snake and pay her respects to Country.
Amy Nugget's Story from "Keeping Country"
Amy Nugget is one of 40 people and one of four women who painted the Ngurrara Canvas in 1997 as evidence of Native Title Claim for 82,000 square kilometers in the Big Sandy Desert. The Canvas was presented to the Government to answer three key questions necessary to regain ownership of this land:
Prove our culture, our law, our traditional law
Where we come from and who we are
Where we walked the land
The 40 artists decided to paint the most important part of their home - their source of water in the desert. Called jilas, these permanent water holes wee the key to live in the Big Sandy Desert. And it was only after a prolonged drought in the late 1950s that forces Amy's clan the Walmajarri, to wander north towards the large cattle ranches where white Australians had leased grazing rights on the Crown Lands. Upon discovery the Walmajarri went to war on this ranches as servants and lost their country to the government until the Canvas was submitted as evidence.
The lead plaintiff agains the government was Amy;s daughter Anette Kologo and we first met Anette and her mom at the Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency in April 2013. Dr John Bolton a pediatrician who worked for the Australian Medical Service introduces us to them and arranged Anette and Amy to take us to Purluwala. At the time we did not know of the canvas or Amy's role - she was just a very popular and important artist in the Fitzroy Crossing community and had done exhibits of her paintings all over Australia and Europe.
The painting below of her homeland is composed of the red lines representing the sand dunes in the Big Sandy, the circles are jilas that exist between the sand dunes that are around one kilometer apart, The dots and figures are bucsh tucker - the food of the desert that sustained Amy's clan for hundreds of generations. I actually bought this painting after retuning home in 2013. This painting along with others on my walls remind me of Amy and her life but also the role of country in one's identity.
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