Louise Numina Napananka / Emu Dreaming (LON140)

Louise was born in 1976 and is the daughter of Barbara Price Mbtitjana who is a senior painter and cultural elder from Stirling Station and Douglas Pananka Petyarre (deceased). Louise has five sisters, Jacinta, Lanita, Selina, Caroline and Sharon Numina, who are also well-respected artists from Utopia.

Louise, along with her sisters and brothers were sent to boarding school in Darwin as no secondary schooling was available in Tennant Creek, 500kms north of Alice Springs. Louise went on to complete a Diploma of Fine Arts from the Northern Territory University. After she completed her studies Louise moved back to Stirling Station and worked with the Community Development Program.

Louise’s family come from a long line of desert artists of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement including her world renowned aunties, the late Gloria and Kathleen Petyerre. Many women from the Petyerre, Mbtitjana and Numina family name hold custody and are knowledge keepers of stories such as Bush Medicine Leaves, Bush Tucker, Seeds, Soakage and Womens’ Ceremony, in common with other skin groups across the vast arid landscape and desert areas of central Australia.

Subjects of importance in the theme-series paintings are various bush tucker stories. Plant foods include wild berries, plums, onion, yam, seeds etc. Many animals can be depicted as a food source or as totems such as Thorny Devil Lizard and Dingo Tracks. Womens’ Ceremony, Awelye Body Art Ceremony are mostly painted by senior ladies but younger women need to know it from a young age. Some themes such as Bush Tucker can be open and universal and others can be secret and passed down through cultural ceremonies. Knowing, carrying and reinforcing these stories gives respect for Country and ancestors and shows responsibility and care of holding such stories to keep the stories and traditional practices alive. The knowledge must be retold repeatedly and handed on. The Numina Sisters have all been taught to paint by their elder painter grandmothers, mother-aunties and cousin-sisters connected across the Central Desert region.

Louise lives in Darwin with her husband and children. Her sisters also live in Darwin and they often travel back to Ti-Tree and Stirling Station in the north Utopia region near Tennant Creek.

In the Dreamtime, Ancestral Beings wandered through the desert, teaching law, language and ceremony to Aborigines living at isolated camps, and creating sacred sites at various places of significance which they encountered on their journeys. These ancestors were originally humans, but they could change their shape at will into birds, animals, reptiles or other natural phenomena such as rocks, hills or trees should danger threaten, or when they felt it was time for them to die. In this way their spirits would live on forever. At some time in their travels a group of these Ancestral Beings changed into emus, and the footprints they left in the sand were called the ’emu dreaming tracks’. Tracks are very important to all the tribes living in the desert, indicating as they do the different routes travelled by their ancestors, and in sacred ceremonies novitiates must learn the correct details of their ancestors’ tracks. All their descendants paint their bodies with the emu design and mimic the events, which happened in the Dreamtime. Until recently this passing on of religious knowledge was only possible by song and dance cycles and by drawing tracks and other designs in the sand. Now this can also be depicted by painting on canvas. A group of these Ancestral Beings became emus, and the footprints they left in the sand were called the emu dreaming tracks. Their descendants paint their bodies with the emu design in sacred ceremonies and teach the participants about the deeds of their ancestor.