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Pantjiti (Kathy) Tjiyangu McKenzie: Biography

Artist, Ernabella Arts Inc.

Pantjiti was born in 1942 and her home country is near the Blackstone Ranges in Western Australia. She and her husband have four grown children, and numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren. She now lives at Ernabella, Pukatja Community, started by the Presbyterian Board of Missions in 1937, and the first permanent settlement on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, in far north-west South Australia.

As a child Pantjiti lived in the bush in the traditional way with her father and his two wives. After her father and one of his wives died, his second wife Pantjiti's mother, and her family group walked 600 kilometers east to Ernabella to visit family.

Throughout her childhood, adolescence and young womanhood, Pantjiti moved constantly between the communities of Ernabella, Mulga Park, Amata and Areyonga, ranging mostly on foot, over an area of 87,000 square kilometres.

She worked at both Ernabella and Amata in the community art centres and again in the early 1980s in Alice Springs, she made artwork while her husband was working in town for the Pitjantjatjara Council. The Council was the precursor of Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara, the governing body for the Lands and in which inalienable freehold title rests, following passage of the Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act (1981) South Australia.

When Ernabella Video and Television (EVTV) began in 1984 Pantjiti and her husband, Simon Tjiyangu McKenzie, became custodian managers and producers, and later on were BRACS workers (Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Community Services) for PY Media (Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara Media).

Over the next fifteen years they produced over one thousand videotapes documenting Anangu Pitjantjatjara life and culture from the inside.

In 2002 the State Library of South Australia commissioned Ernabella Arts Inc. to supply the designs for a series of three "momumental" rugs for its $41m extension; Pantjiti's, which like all the submissions was realised in batik, was the chosen design.

The Library holds a unique collection of drawings made in the 1940s and 1950s by Ernabella schoolchildren. This was the first time that the children had used paper and coloured pastels, and their flowing curvilinear patterns were soon after echoed in the hand pulled woollen rugs, which were among the first range of goods, now collectors' items, made in the new "craft room" that opened at Ernabella in 1948.

Like all the art made by Ernabella artists, Pantjiti's rug design reflects an aspect of country, that country which is central to everyone's life. The design (or walka in Pitjantjatjara which translates as meaningful mark) on her batik evokes a creek (karu) and its banks; in the bed of the creek are the circles representing tjukula or soakages, and along either side of the creek are scattered grass mounds (tjanpi).

See also: Abstract of Pantjiti (Kathy) Tjiyangu McKenzie's paper:
From Batik to designer rugs for the State Library of South Australia