MAGGIE GREEN - KUNMUNYA, MYROODAH STATION

MAGGIE GREEN
KUNMUNYA, MYROODAH STATION,  2024
Acrylic on Canvas
100.5 x 100.5 cm
 
REGION
Derby, WA
 
PROVENANCE
 Spinifex Hill Studio, WA, Cat No; 24-880
 
STORY
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 me working on Country with their family.
 
In this work, Maggie explores the memories of her childhood via an inmate, 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 me; 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’.