KARIJINI EXPERIENCE: DAY TWO
6.00am Day two of the Karijini Experience experience on Banjima country starts in a fashion typical to the National Park. The Sun rises over a breathtaking paradise of untamed wilderness, and nature springs from everywhere you look.
A gentle breeze moves through the gum trees, birds call to their young and the dance of life begins under a beautiful blue sky.
Of course it’s freezing cold because allthought the landscape is breathtaking, it’s got very few geographical features that hold heat. I heard somebody say it gets down near 1 degree Celsius at nights, and I believe them.
Nonetheless a lot of great things happen at this festival throughout the day if you know where to look. Here are some highlights from the day that was.
J-Milla at the Festival. Image Credit: Ngaarda Media
10 :00 AM Northern Territory First Nations Musician J-Milla is at the Karijini Festival, holding a song writing workshop for kids with his Fiancé.
He’s quite a hit, and his workshop is collaborative mentoring environment. You get the feeling J-Millar is here to teach kids his own personal process for making art through music.
Millar says having an invested passion is the key to writing music.
“The recipe to writing a good song? I reckon it comes from the heart”, he says.
“You need to really feel what you’re saying, you really need to know what you’re talking about, and you really need to have a good instrumental behind it that suites your vocals.
“I think the main recipe is just connecting to people.”
12:00 By noon the festival village is up and running.
If there’s one thing I’m learning from this trip to Banjima country, it’s that the Traditional Owners here know how to feed their guests. The local Banjima mob are making Damper free of charge and it doesn’t taste half bad. they’ve also got some kangaroo cooking for anybody with a hungry belly.
They’ve also got Pilbara Kitchen Company to cater for the staff, and those guys have some great food.
Artifacts on display.
2:30 PM There’s cool things afoot at the festival this afternoon. A Yinjibarndi fella is in one of the communal areas, standing behind a table full of indigenous artifacts. He’s not selling any of them, which is a shame because they’re extremely interesting.
He’s got some indigenous shields, boomerangs, woomeras and tribal punishment spears.
In pre-colonial Australia the punishment spears would be ceremoniously shanked into the leg of an alleged offender, in retribution for abject bad behavior.
I’m informed If you were found guilty of a crime, and you tried to escape being ceremoniously stabbed with one of these things, your entire family would be punished for your gutlessness.
The man behind the table is a wealth of information, and he can tell you all the gory details. He shows me how one of the punishment spear is barbed. So if you’re unlucky enough to have this thing put through your leg, you can’t pull it out the way it came in. This thing is designed so you have to push it through and pull it out the other side, leaving an exit would.
The man also has some truly beautiful emu eggs on display. He’s spent hours scratching away the black exterior shell, to show an amazing sky blue layer below the surface. He describes this as the opposite of painting. Rather than putting a layer on, you’re taking a layer off.
Emu eggs, with the black exterior scraped off to reveal blue beneath. Image Credit: Ngaarda Media
Yamatji Artist Mark Atkins. Image Credit: Ngaarda Media.
3:30 PM Yamatji Musician Mark Atkins is at the festival, holding a didgeridoo workshop for kids. By his own admission he’s been playing music for over 50 years, and I can see he’s got a fair few stories to tell.
When I find him he’s got a posse of kids blowing into PVC pipes. He’s provided beeswax for the rim of the pipes so the kids don’t cut their mouths on the edges.
“I set a maximum of ten and we ended up with 12”, he says, chuckling at the number of kids who showed by wanting to learn didgeridoo.
He says teaching children didgeridoo is about more than learning music, it’s about culture and life lessons.
“It’s not just teaching didgeridoo”, he says.
“More so these days, in this era, its getting kids to learn how to make one… learning respect for their elders and each other, learning to work together.”
Mr Atkins also played at the Festival the other night, and his performance was proclaimed deadly in a good way by audience members.