Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery

<>Spinifex

The Spinifex People live in the remotest area of the world – deep in the desert wastes of the Nullarbor Plain in Western Australia. It is an area so remote that in the 1950s, when the British Government wanted to test atomic weapons, they chose it as the ideal test site.

Back then, the very existence of the Spinifex People was known only to a handful of anthropologists. The first reference to them was not made until 1934. Even today, they remain largely unknown. The vast red sand dunes – dotted with the clumps of sharp Spinifex grass from which the local Aboriginal people take their name – have been seen by only a tiny handful of white people.

Because of the inaccessibility of their traditional lands and the harshness of their environment, the Spinifex People were left largely untroubled by the European settlement of Australia, able to continue their millennia – old way of life, hunting, gathering, drinking from water-holes hidden in the desert, and performing their ceremonies.

The isolation began to change, however, at the beginning of the 1950s, as graded roads were run across their country, prior to the establishment – in 1956 – of the Giles Weapons Research Station in the heart of the desert.

When, that same year, the first aerial nuclear bomb was to be tested over the desert at Maralinga, the scattered Spinifex People were alerted to the coming danger only by a single patrol officer charged with spreading the word across the whole three million square kilometres of the Western Desert. Those that he found were told to evacuate the area, immediately. Many were directed towards the newly established mission station at Cundeelee.

During the long trek away from ‘the big wind’ – as they termed the explosion – many died. Some expired of thirst: terrified by the thought of the coming cataclysm, they were to too frightened to venture off the designated track to search out the water-holes in the desert. Some simply refused to leave.

In the decade immediately after the atomic tests, patrol officers discovered Spinifex People still living on their homelands in the desert. In the 1980s the closure of the Cundeelee mission station acted as a catalyst for more of the Spinifex People to return to their own country. Compensation money paid by the British Government for the damage caused by the atomic-testing programme was used by the Spinifex People to grade a new road into the heart of their traditional lands.

The tiny community settlement at Tjuntjuntjara was established. Today, some 130 Spinifex People live there in and around the handful of sheds (and the large electricity generator). There are at least twenty elders in the community, preserving the ancient ceremonial life of the place – retelling the creation stories, preserving the sacred sites, maintaining the water holes – and passing on their knowledge to the next generation.