Louise Numina Napananka / Water Dreaming (1A)

Louise Numina was born in 1976 and is an Anmatyerre artist from Ti Tree, 190km North of Alice Springs in Central Australia. She grew up on Stirling Station, a cattle station south of Tennant Creek along with her six sisters and three brothers, where she attended primary school and later moved to Alice Springs to attend Yirara College.

After she completed her school studies Louise moved back to Stirling station and worked with the Community Development Program. Her aunties, very famous artists, Gloria and Kathleen Petyerre taught Louise to paint in 1981 and she sold her art through galleries in Alice Springs and across the Northern Territory up to Darwin, where she eventually moved in 1995.

Louise studied art at Nungalinya College and has a Diploma of Fine Arts from the Northern Territory University. Her art has been exhibited throughout Australia and is popular with art dealers and collectors worldwide.

Louise lives in Darwin with her four sisters, Jacinta, Lanita, Caroline and Sharon Numina, who are also well respected artists.

In the Dreamtime, Jangala and Jampijinpa, two Ancestral Beings of the Central/Western Desert tribes, went throughout the Western Desert of Central Australia teaching law and ceremony to Aborigines living at isolated camps. They found many places where the waterholes and creeks had completely dried up, forcing people to leave their camps and wander through the desert trying to find water. Many died of thirst. These two ancestors sat down one day to consider how they could alleviate the distress caused by long periods of drought. They decided to create a special ceremony called Ngapa Jukurrpa (Water Dreaming), and called on the Lightning Man, boss of the storms, to send lightning strikes into the sky. The first people to see these flashes of light were so terrified that they took up spears and boomerangs to fight them. The ancestors then summoned the great Rainbow Serpent to growl continuously, causing loud thunder to roll across the sky, followed by heavy rain as its forked tongue pierced the storm clouds. As rain poured down, the people dropped their weapons and began to sing and dance with glee. Waterholes were filled and creeks ran with fresh water. Grass sprouted underneath the sand and plants flourished. Animals came to drink at the waterholes, and provided a further source of food for the starving people. Later, the summer sun dried the stalks of edible plant and the wind lifted up seedpods and distributed them at places throughout the desert, thus ensuring food for the people living there.

In rainmaking ceremonies all of these events are re-enacted by the performers in a series of song and dance cycles. The two rain ancestors came to a place called Mikanji, a small waterhole just north of Yuendumu. Here they saw in the sand the tracks of other water/rain ancestors from the Anmatyerre and Pintubi tribes. The combined presence of the Warlpiri rainmakers and the convergence of tracks of rainmakers from other tribes caused a great storm, which spread across the land. It was so heavy and continuous that two big floods started. One of these was at Thompson’s Rockhole, 350 km south of Lajamanu, and the other was at Karlupurlurnu, a lake south of Lajamanu. The rains cascaded from waterhole to waterhole and down dry creek beds until all were filled to overflowing.