Exhibition: 13 - 28 May 2022
The Yuendumu Doors represent one of the most important cultural and artistic collections in Australia. Painted more than 30 years ago at a remote desert school by artists steeped in traditional knowledge, the Doors survived against the odds and have now been conserved for display at the South Australian Museum. This exhibition introduces visitors to the Yuendumu Doors and the knowledge and history each Door presents.
Yuendumu is a town in central Australia, around 300km northwest of Alice Springs. The community is largely made up of the Warlpiri and Anmatyerr Aboriginal people and the town has a population of less than 1000 people.
The Yuendumu Doors were painted in 1984 by a group of senior Warlpiri men. The community elders were worried that their children were not engaging fully with the new education system, and were not learning the lessons they would need to prepare them for a changing Australia. They decided to wrap the school in the Warlpiri education system, the Jukurrpa.
Each Yuendumu school door was painted with Jukurrpa stories. The Jukurrpa is translated as the ‘Dreaming’ or ‘Dreamtime’ and is the Warlpiri creation period.
During the Dreaming, ancestral beings in both human and animal form moved across the desert singing, dancing, fighting and interacting with one another. As they travelled, they created the features of the land, its waters, plants and animals, and people, languages and ceremonies. They also established the moral, practical and spiritual laws that still govern Aboriginal societies. At journey’s end, the ancestral beings returned to the earth, transforming themselves into important waters, hills and rocks. Others took their places among the stars. These narratives form a vast network of ‘Dreaming tracks’ or ‘songlines’ that crisscross the desert.
The doors became integral to the school, both as Jukurrpa to connect the children with their culture, and as way finders in the school, a type of signage for each of the classrooms. In October 1984 photographer Gerry Orkin from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (now AIATSIS) spent several days documenting the thirty school doors. These photographs, which feature in the DFAT panel display depict the doors in their original state.
In 1995 the South Australian Museum was approached by Yuendumu school committee members and the artists forming the Warlukurlangu cooperative to acquire the Doors. Over time they had weathered and graffiti had begun to obliterate some of the paintings. The Museum undertook to conserve the Doors, with a promise to exhibit the Doors within and beyond the Museum in Adelaide.
