Dream Weaver

- Samantha Trenoweth

The road to the red dust town of Mutitjulu winds around the base of Uluru. It’s midday, 40 degrees even in the rock’s waterholes and deep red crevasses. Rene Kulitja stands on the outskirts of town in the shade of a desert oak tree. She’s wearing prints in every imaginable shade of blue, which make her look impossibly cool and breezy. She has been out this morning collecting the tjampi (spinifex grass) that she sculpts into fantastic forms and creatures. Rene is one of the Tjampi Desert Weavers, whose work was exhibited at the 2015 Venice Biennale, but her accomplishments don’t end there – not by a long way. Turning 60 this year, Rene is just hitting her stride.

“There’s so much to do,” says the softly spoken artist, environmentalist, chorister, dancer, women’s rights advocate, maker of bush medicine, keeper of traditional knowledge, grandmother and renaissance woman of the APY (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) lands, which sprawl across 103,000 square kilometres to the south of here.

“I feel strongly about a lot of different things,” she says simply. “I feel I can help bring people together.” And she does.

Rene is driven by a desire to enrich and protect the lives of the local Anangu people, “and to manage the land in order to keep the tjukurpa [the Anangu spirit, culture, lore] alive,” says Clive Scollay, General Manager of the Maruku artists’ cooperative. “Without engagement with ‘the West’, Rene believes that the tjukurpa will die,” he explains. So she has spent much of her life relentlessly engaging.

Her painting of Uluru, Yananyi Dreaming, was the first Indigenous artwork to adorn a Qantas plane.