Selling Yarns

Australian Indigenous textiles and good business in the 21st century

 

Papers

Tjanpi Aboriginal baskets: A (very big) family business

Session: Business stories 1:30 - 2:30 pm, Monday, 14 August 2006

Thisbe Purich

Artist and Cultural Interpreter,

Abstract

Tjanpi Aboriginal Baskets is the dynamic arts employment programme of the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjanjatjarra Yankunyjatjara Women's Council. The Women's Council was formed as a response to the land rights struggles of the 1970s when women realised that they had no voice and no visibility. Their thought was that as single women they could not be heard but as a strong and collective group they would have a formidable presence. The Women's Council is now in its 26th year and has grown from an advocacy service into a major indigenous directed organisation delivering a wide range of health, social and cultural services across NPY desert communities. The Council's primary objective is to improve life on the Lands for women and children.

Tjanpi Aboriginal Baskets is the dynamic arts employment programme within the NPY Women's Council. Tjanpi (meaning 'grass') emerged in 1995 as a result of NPY facilitated basket weaving workshops conducted in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands. Women wanted meaningful and appropriate employment in their homelands. They wanted to be able to provide for their families. They wanted economic independence. The initial weaving workshops were held at Blackstone and soon these women were teaching their new skills to women on neighbouring communities and weaving spread across the Western and Central desert region supported by the Women's Council. Ten years later, in 2005, the major national Indigenous art prize, NATSIAA, was awarded, not to a glowing acrylic from a lone painter, but to a collaborative piece, a family effort, the result of 20 women weavers working together, 20 women from the Blackstone side of the Tjanpi family tree.

At its core Tjanpi is about family and community, about walytja, about relationships. The phenomenal success of the project has been in its consideration of the demands, obligations and joys of family. This was not work which confined you to place or purse. It was work that allowed you to be out bush, at home, on the road. It was work that was easily accomplished with few resources. It was work that more than accommodated social and cultural obligations, it encouraged them. It wasn't work that kept you from walytja it was work that thrived on walytja.

The Tjanpi walytja is a wide reaching network of mothers, daughters, aunties, sisters and grandmothers whose shared stories, skills and experiences are the bloodline of the weaving phenomenon that has swept the Western and Central desert over the past decade. The Tjanpi family extends across 350,000sq kms and takes in 28 NPY member communities, is over 300 women strong and growing all the time.

This paper will describe the 'triple bottom line' approach to developing the Tjanpi family business.

See also: Thisbe Purich's biography