Official catalogue accompanying Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, the groundbreaking exhibition initiated by the National Museum of Australia in partnership with the art group FORM, which toured in Australia in 2011-2013 and in Japan in 2016-2017.
Title: Yiwarra Kuju: the Canning Stock Route
ISBN: 9781876944780
Format: Paperback with dust jacket
Publisher: National Museum of Australia
Year: 2010
Pages: 256
Size: 285 x 235mm
Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route features essays by exhibition co-curators Carly Davenport, Monique La Fontaine and John Carty.
Yiwarra Kuju includes beautiful plates of the complete Canning Stock Route Collection and tells the story of the stock route’s impact, and the importance of the country around it, in Aboriginal voices and interpreted through Aboriginal eyes. It is a story of contact, conflict and survival, of exodus and return. Above all, it is a story of family, culture and Country.
The Aboriginal people of Australia’s Western Desert lived in their homelands for thousands of years. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the expansion of the Western Australian mining and pastoral industries led to the surveying of a track along which cattle could be driven from Kimberley stations to markets in the south. This track became known as the ‘Canning Stock Route’.
In July and August 2007 nearly 70 artists travelled up the stock route on a six-week return to Country. Over 100 canvases were produced on that expedition, and more stories and artworks have since been added to the collection, which was acquired by the National Museum of Australia in 2009.
Cover image: Sunday Well (detail) 2008, by Dadda Simpson, Martumili Artists.
SOURCE: National Museum of Australia