About Annabell Amagula Dingmalmurrangka

“I grew up in Angurugu, I grew up with my father and mother, when I was 6 year old I would sit and watch my grandmother make bush bags from pandanas. When I was 10 I started making baskets. When I was 12 my great great grandmother would take us out to collect the colours for pandanas, that’s how I learned, from my elders.

I used to watch my father paint and I learned to paint copying my father.

About Ghost Nets

A ghost net is a plastic fishing net lost or discarded at sea from a fishing boat that continues to drift and ‘fish’ on its own entrapping and killing marine life. In many Northern Australian communities tonnes of ghost nets – the majority from South East Asia – wash up on beaches, causing pollution, damaging reefs and killing wildlife. The name has evolved from the net’s ‘ghostly’ ability to fish by itself.

Ghost net weaving on Groote Eylandt has developed since a seeding project initiated by Ghost Nets Australia where contemporary fibre artists Aly de Groot and Cecile Williams worked with the rangers, school and weavers to experiment and explore with creative ways to utilise this environmental threat. Ghost net weaving has since been incorporated into the creation of baskets, jewellery and sculptures by Anindilyakwa women in continuous changing ways.

About Anindilyakwa Arts Centre

“The Land Council started by people coming together to think and talk for the future. They made the art centre in 2005 for all Anindilyakwa people.

Some people were already making art and selling it to Balanda (non-Indigenous people) on the Eylandt. Spears, Woomera, didgeridoo, paintings and baskets.

Now we sell the art to the art centre first, they pay us and sell it on.

The art centre can sell it anywhere, like when we go out to Darwin for the art fair. People love what we’re doing, the bush dye and jewellery.

Balanda (non-Indigenous people) when they buy art straight from our art centre, it’s better. We get good money to build the art centre for the future.

The art centre is for people to come and learn, we learn (teach) new people from the community to make art the old ways.

The art centre is good for community, not everyone is an artist or interested in learning the old ways. It’s important that we teach them so they can make baskets and dilly bags too. The old people left us this for the future.”

- Annabel Amagula, Senior Anindilyakwa Artist

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