76 x 76 cm

Acrylic on Canvas

All worked price & packaged unstretched

Shipping included in the price

“This Myroodah Station, Kunmunya. My mob was taken there. I been born here. All my family been born here at this Martu station, together we born at that Martu station. That’s where we were born there, me and my mum, and my grandmother too. We been born here, get big here. We weren’t born in hospital, we were born out bush, and all them kids been born here too. We get big at the Martu station, all them girls, young girls. 

That’s the camp for all the Aboriginals. All the blackfellas we working for manager. We was working for station manager, Mick Lannigan. We had lots of jobs at Myroodah. Cleaning the house, floors, washing the blankets, growing onions, potatoes. We learned all that. We been working for manager, and we go to school here, we camp there, we go to church. We go church and we make our bed, nice and tidy. It was a good life.

We got our own school on station. We clean up every morning for manager and we go to school early part. This the school where I been teach by Mary Lannigan. Mary Lannigan- that’s my teacher. When we finish school we go clean up for manager. We was young girls, we was working making bed, mop the floors. We wash the blankets and sheet, quilt, mop the floor. Then we go hunting, we come back, get a big mob of fish. 

This the kitchen, this the bathroom, and this girls’ bedroom, this boys’ bedroom. We had a fire place in front of our camp where we cooked our damper and dinner. There was a kitchen for the manager next to the manager accommodation. Mum always make a big fire and cook him up on the coals. We go the creek, we go swimming, washing dishes at night time. We go swimming and we come back clean one.

Every weekend we go camping out at Kunmunya Hills. We learned about bush tucker [there], we went camping. We go camping out there and we go fishing. We cook up dinner, fish, goanna, anything. We go hunting. Catch a goanna, crocodile, anything! That's it. Old people taking us hunting, looking for bush tucker, fishing. 

After Myroodah Station finished we been shipped up to Derby. We been finished that Myroodah Station, my boss been go back to Perth and we been pull out. We been going to Looma now. I been camp there.” 

- Maggie Green

Myroodah Station, where Maggie was born and grew up, is located around 100km south of Derby, in Western Australia’s Kimberley region. Kunmunya (also known as Port George IV), just north of Myroodah Station, is an old Presbyterian Aboriginal mission that had operated from 1912 to around 1950. As Maggie recounts here, she, her family and other Aboriginal station workers would go camping in the hills at Kunmunya on weekends. 

For many Aboriginal people, missions and pastoral stations became their new homes from the late 1940s, as they moved in from the desert and away from their traditional, nomadic lifestyles. Life on stations and missions provided an assured supply of food and water, though Aboriginals workers were not paid wages, and they were forced by law to remain on their stations. Nonetheless, many Aboriginal people, including Maggie, fondly recollect this time working on Country with their family.

In this work, Maggie explores the memories of her childhood via an intimate, semi abstract aerial map of the sites she visited as a child, including Myroodah Station school, its dormitories and garden, and the nearby church and dam. Embedded within these landscapes are the figures that played a central part in her life at the time; her mother and grandmother, station manager Mick Lannigan, his daughter and Maggie’s school teacher Mary Lannigan, and her friends with whom she would often ‘‘run amok’.