Anangu, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people living in the north-western areas of South Australia conceptualize changes in the surface of land as evincing the presence of ancestral power. Rain is one such catalyst of change, though it is by no means a certainty on the Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands. When it does appear, water does not stay long on the surface: it is shimmering and unstable. This paper examines the nature of various water sources in contem- porary indigenous life, the spatial relationships between earth and sky and the dialectic between life and death that they mediate.

This article details the material colour practices of Anangu (Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people) living in the east of the Western Desert, to show how coloured things have been instrumental in remaking their lives post contact with the colonizers. I argue here that ‘colour’ is a cultural invention. Brightly coloured things, such as cloth and paints, were eagerly appropriated by Aboriginal people when these were imported during the colonization of Australia. Material colours, including consumer goods, have become integral to Anangu’s conception of their own humanity in the contemporary  world. For Anangu, colours manifest the mutability of things and sequences of colour transformations are states of becoming.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute NS 17, 356-376, 2011

This chapter addresses the materiality of colours. In using the term materiality to designate colour I refer to the material stuff of colour, coloured cloth, coloured paper, coloured paints, coloured food etc. I will argue that colour is a crucial but little analysed part of understanding how mate- rial things can constitute social relations. Here, in emphasising their materiality I will consider what it is that colours can do, something which has been neglected even in material culture theory, as it has been in every other branch of anthropology. It is as much for what they do, as well as for what they can mean, that colours are so useful and worth attending to both in images and in things.

In The Handbook of Material Culture, pp173-185

Deaconess Winifred Hilliard arrived at the Presbyterian Ernabella mission craftroom in far north-west South Australia in 1954 to work as a qualified missionary. She was  33.Her job: to work among Pitjantjatjara women as the ‘handcraft supervisor’ at the mission.
The art history of Ernabella (Pukatja) is arguably the last neglected narrative of first-generation, postcontact Indigenous art-making among Australian Western Desert peoples. The history of Papunya Tula artists, a painting movement begun in 1971 by men in association with a white male cultural-broker, has become ubiquitous shorthand for Western Desert art.2
The beginnings and practices of the Hermannsburg watercolour artists, begun by men, has enjoyed a revival of interest. The influence of Ernabella art made by women remains obscure, a mere footnote
to this art history. This paper discusses how the role of its long-serving female art-broker and the influential intercultural brokerage role she carried out  is germane to this.

This essay is about colour as beauty and offers a critique of Ingold's ideas about the line eliciting form. There can be making with and knowing through colour practices, and coloured materials offer the possibility to elicit form. Groups of colours form culturally specific palettes. Case studies  include the work of American artist Chuck Close, Australian Western Desert artist Ngupulya Pumani,  the colours of landscapes  and media facades and the market driven colour palettes of some Australian Western Desert paintings. The essay argues for beautiful colour as processual, open ended and dynamic.

Although colors are central to our cultural and social interactions with the world, color is a topic that has more often been pushed to the periphery of anthropological study. This entry outlines an anthropology of colors by tracing approaches to color, from interests in perception, linguistics, color naming, evolutionary theories, and semiotics through to the more recent resurgence in material culture studies and the sensorial turn in anthropology since the 1990s. Works since the mid‐2000s have attempted to overcome prior challenges posed by considering color as a fixed single hue by instead examining what colors do through their transformation and their relations with other colors, properties, things, and people. This focus has opened up new possibilities—for example, considering how indigenous peoples have resocialized their worlds by using colors in novel ways following experiences of colonialism. A renewed interest in light and the increasing experience of colors as mediated through digital screens indicate future directions for anthropological investigations of colors.

This chapter is about some aspects of the life and death of cars on the freehold Pitjantjatjara Lands in the Western Desert, South Australia. I will argue that Anangu1 use cars as social bodies. The driver of a car must imitate the complex choreography of spatial etiquette of a person on foot. The car is therefore almost a prosthesis of the persons inside and its carefully constructed uses express much about spatial practices in contemporary Anangu culture. Similarly abandoned cars, which rot extremely slowly in the dry desert, are used as spatial markers in country but are also akin to bodies.

Car cultures, edited by Daniel Miller, pp 35-57, 2001

A chapter in the edited volume  'Rematerializing Colour. From concept to substance'. This  paper discusses colours in art works made by an Aboriginal women artist living in the Australian Western Desert. The paper employs Nancy Munn's well known 1970 paper, on the transformation of subjects into objects in Warlpiri and Pitjantjatjara myth to argue for colours as transforming multiple boundaries of the mobile body across space and time.

This article discusses the diversity, distribution, and qualities of materials and substances categorized as red among Pitjantjatjara-and Yankunytjatjara-speaking Western Desert Aboriginal people: Anangu. Valued red materials and substances include elements of the encultured landscape-country-such as ochre, timber, food, blood, and fire, alongside cloth and other industrially produced materials. Previous scholarship defines reds among central Australian Aboriginal cultures only in static symbolic terms as representing blood. Based on long-term fieldwork, this article discusses how Anangu employ a system of analogy across domains which connects together red materials and substances with particular affordances. I argue that Anangu conceptualize these red materials and substances as making visible kurunpa/spirit. This has implications for concepts of health and for constructing the local cultural value of consumer goods and substances found in country. Reds connect the mental and the material. The article contributes to studies of how contemporary Anangu mediate relationships between kin and country and participate in a wider market economy. It addresses anthropological knowledge about, and the importance of, the materiality of colours and the role of coloured materials and substances in shaping local ontologies and epistemologies.

Colour as the edge of the body Colours as space-time in the east of the Western Desert Diana Young Why colour? What does colour do? What do Anangu (Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara) people living in the Western Desert of Central Australia on the Anangu (Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands or APY Lands) conceive that it does? In this chapter I explore these questions through the interrelations of colours to space and locale and the idea of colour as a new material in relation to one artist's painting. I situate that painting's place in a local art history of colour. The painting, called Minyma Kutjara/ Two Women, is by Kunmanara (Amanyi Dora Nyuwara) Haggie (okai) henceforth 'Dora' 1. I discuss one woman's placement of herself, emotionally, physically and spatially through the palette of red, yellow, green, blue and black. This group of colours is divided into 'chords' (red/yellow and blue/ green) to effect both a transformative movement and a contraction and expansion of space. In an insightful paper drawing on the work of Lefebvre, Munn (1996) discusses the basic duality of space for Western Desert people with relevance to areas or locales that are forbidden to individuals. There is firstly the corporeal-sensual field of a person that extends outwards at a

This is a book about colour as a primary aspect of things. What can we learn if we give colour this respect? In the following essays, colours are materialized as cake icing, railway signals, gravestones, clothing, landscapes and atmospheres, paintings, film and photographs. The colours are 're-materialized' because as material stuff they are part of our everyday lives and not merely the mental concept 'colour' , an idea that belongs to post-Enlightenment European cultures. This is also a book about the socialness of colours. Attaching colour to culture refigures it as part of human society relevant to political economy and aesthetics (Gage 1993; Pinney 2006). Colour can swiftly travel from being merely a consumer choice to a fundamental idea about ordering and classifying the world. Investigating the concept of colour leads to some other key concepts: universality and relativity, cognition, classification, agency and the vitality of things, the colonialism of ideas, the dynamic interaction of people and environment, of subjects and objects. Colour in the singular often refers to the concept of colour, and colours in the plural to practices and substances (Batchelor 2008). over recent years materiality has become important theoretically in anthropology. Cultural theories about things promise that the relationships between people and things (subjects and objects) are central to understanding cosmology, power and multiple facets of a society (Miller 2005). Things have qualities that they bring to bear on humans. one of the purposes of this book is to ask what coloured materials do. It is not novel to write about colour as materialized. There are a multitude of books on colour already in the world. The majority are practical manuals aimed at the consumer, and they provide tips on colouring your home, choosing assemblages of colour in your clothing,

This paper critiques the visual conventions applied to the photography of ethnographic museum collection objects. To "think photographically" in a museum collection, I draw a productive parallel between my fieldwork with Indigenous women artists in central Australia, and photography of poorly documented museum collection objects. I explore the presence of an intersubjective affective gaze in the central Australian Indigenous art works which is amplified through photography. This resistance inspired an experimental exhibition entailing photography of sculptural museum objects with faces. The exhibit's aim was to resocialize these objects into the present through photographs of them.

This illustrated catalogue was published for the exhibition 'Nyukana (Daisy) Baker; A retrospective' curated by Diana Young and held at the Jam factory Adelaide in 2009. The essay discusses Baker's influential career at Ernabella Arts from the 1950s onwards, her multiple skills as a painter, print maker, batik creator, carver and ceramic decorator, and the evolving style of her work. It suggests that Baker was probably the first Indigenous woman to make a professional a career from art.