Featuring original watercolour works of the contemporary Hermannsburg School - Albert Namatjira’s grandchildren - this exhibition runs alongside a theatrical celebration of the life of Namatjira.

Featuring original watercolours by Albert Namatjira’s descendants, and curated by Ngurratjuta Iltja Ntjarra Many Hands Art Centre, this unique exhibition guides you through spectacular Central Desert landscapes – the artists’ country and the country that Albert used to paint. Alongside the Araluen Arts Centre’s permanent displays in the Albert Namatjira Gallery, these vibrant, contemporary works are testimony to Albert’s living legacy.

The exhibition will be developed through a series of ‘on country’ painting trips and shown in conjunction with Big hART’s Namatjira performance work.

It forms as part of the broader Namatjira project, a niche creative community development process, growing from Big hART’s highly accalimed Ngapartji Ngapartji. With the support of Ngurratjuta Art Centre, this project pays tribute to the life and contribution of acclaimed watercolour artist and Western Arrarnta man, Albert Namatjira.

Upcoming exhibitions in 2011:

• Melbourne, VIC 10/08/2011- 28/08/2011 Alcaston Gallery
• Geelong, VIC 08/09/2011 - 10/09/2011 Gallery Metropolis
• Canberra, ACT 14/09/2011 - 17/09/2011 Chapman Gallery
• Lismore QLD 22nd SEP -1st OCT Norpa Theatre

The Pilbara region of Western Australia is rich with minerals and is one of the most isolated and forbidding regions of the planet. With harsh, dry conditions and summer temperatures soaring above 50 degrees at times, it is a difficult location to establish a new, arts-based project.

The mineral resources boom in Australia is fueling the surging economies of Asia and producing vast profits for some of the world’s largest companies. This mineral resources boom is here for the short term – once the ore is gone, the companies will also be gone. In the meantime ‘the country’ is being shipped out from under the local indigenous custodians.

Big hART has been invited in to work with the community of Roebourne and the Ngarluma, Yindjibarndi, Wong-Goo-Tt-Oo and Yaburarra Mardudhunera people to achieve longer-term goals. Is it possible to work with these companies to enhance a cultural resources boom with local indigenous communities to provide opportunities for future generations to cross between both cultures?

"When I saw Nothing Rhymes with Ngapartji, I thought to myself this would be a great opportunity to the people of Roebourne to tell their stories - of how we stayed strong together and survived through thick and thin. There’s a lot to be told about Roebourne….." Josie Samson, Senior Ngarluma woman and Roebourne Community member.

For more information, visit their website.

Drive is a film about about every young man's quest and struggle to understand himself.

The Drive documentary explores young men, risk taking, rites of passage and car crashes in Tasmania.

The biggest killer of young men in Australia is car crashes.

The state with the highest rate of road fatalities is the island of Tasmania.

This is not just a film about death, it is a film about identity. It is about the rites of passage young Australian men face on their journey to adulthood - gaining a driver’s license and the legal right to drink alcohol.

Young men are dying in high speed, single vehicle crashes, crumpled in metal coffins, on lonely rural roads.

Why do the die? Why do they live?

Join the Twitter discussion at #drivedoco
Read participant blog here
For more information about Drive Email: info@drive.org.au

To coincide with the Broadcast of Drive on ABC1, is the launch of a new website, including 69 short films or "webisodes", image gallery, project resources and much more.

For more information about Drive, visit the website.

Nothing Rhymes with Ngapartji, follows the journey of acclaimed Pitjantjatjara actor, Trevor Jamieson, as he returns to his traditional country to perform his hit theatre show – Ngapartji Ngapartji – to an all-Indigenous audience, in the remote Australian aboriginal community of Ernabella, South Australia.

Trevor has struggled to hold onto language and culture while living away from his traditional country. Ngapartji Ngapartji is a live theatre performance in two languages. But usually the audience is fluent in English not Pitjantjatjara. 2500km from the recent 5 weeks sell-out Sydney Festival season, against the magnificent backdrop of Australia's central desert Trevor is preparing to face his toughest audience yet.

The film follows the Ngapartji Ngapartji team’s journey to Ernabella and performance of their acclaimed show in situ. It is terrible timing for Trevor; whose father, a central character in the stage show, passed away only weeks before. Not only does Trevor have to confront his grief in order to deliver the performance, in doing so he has to grapple with the decision to risk breaking traditional law by saying his father’s name, acting the part of him, and showing footage of him as part of the show. Is Trevor going to get a knock on the head?

Trevor's family story is one of struggle & survival. Beginning in the 1950's Trevor's grandfather witnessed British atomic testing spread sickness throughout his land; the performance follows three generations of an Aboriginal family as they grapple with becoming refugees in their own country.

Elders in Ernabella have their own memories of the Maralinga bombs, and Trevor knows that the Ngapartji Ngapartji show will be a potent reminder of what people have not talked about for a long time.

As excitement builds amongst the company and the community about performing for an indigenous audience in Ernabella, so too the trepidation builds in Trevor, as he fears the consequences of performing a story so close to his own heart.

Will Trevor’s resolve be his own undoing? We find out.

Director: Suzy Bates
Producor: Alex Kelly & Shannon Owen
DOP: Sarah Davies
Sound: Stuart Thorne
Music: Damian Mason
Editor: Vanessa Milton

Featuring Trevor Jamieson, Amanyi Haggie, Pantjiti McKenzie, Beth Sometimes, Scott Rankin, the cast and crew of Ngapartji Ngapartji and the Ernabella community. For more information, visit their website.

ICAF has invited Big hART to be the major Australian company present at the festival, presenting four works at different stages of the Big hART life cycle. The presentations will range from performances, to screenings, to workshops and discussions.

The Pilbara Project - Workshop
The Pilbara region of Western Australia is rich with minerals and one of the most isolated and forbidding regions on the planet. It is a difficult location to establish a new, arts-based project. The mineral resources boom in Australia is fuelling the surging economies of Asia and producing vast profits for some of the worlds largest companies. However, the boom is here for the short term - once the ore is gone, the companies will also be gone.

Big hART has been invited to work with the community of Roebourne to achieve longer term goals.

This workshop will demonstrate the narrative that has led to involvement in the project and discuss the first steps in setting up a new Big hART project, where resources are not a problem, but where there are many pitfalls in this frontier setting. Is it possible to work with these companies to enhance a cultural resources boom with local Indigenous communities, providing opportunities for future generations to cross between both cultures?

For more information about the Pilbara project please visit the website.

Namatjira – Workshop and Discussion
This workshop will examine a Big hART project that is fully operational and "punching above its weight." We will show scenes from the production and rushes from a documentary being made about the project. It will discuss the ways in which the project is hoping to drive economic change for Indigenous artists, through aligning internationally touring performance pieces with Indigenous arts centres to generate stronger income as a proof of concept for better support for Indigenous artists and creative communities.

For more information about the Namatjira project please visit the website.

Ngapartji Ngapartji – One - Performance
The Ngapartji Ngapartji Project began as a large touring festival work with a cast and crew of more than thirty. The project was instigated to help bring about indigenous policy change in Australia using performance, web, documentary, media and lobbying. In Ngapartji Ngapartji - One, the one-man version of the larger show, Trevor hones down his family’s story into a deeply intimate and emotional sharing in the simplest way... just him on stage with his words, his body and documentary footage of his family’s almost unbelievable encounters with the non-indigenous world.

For more information about the Ngapartji Ngapartji project please visit the website.

Northcott Narratives – Screening and Discussion
This workshop will explore a Big hART project which has now concluded. Having won multiple awards and international recognition, the many layers of the 150-week project will be examined. From partnerships with ABC TV, the Sydney Festival, public housing, the police, local artists, state government, this sophisticated inter-woven project will be used to explore what can and can't be achieved through communities making art.

For more information about the Northcott Narratives project please visit the website.

Smashed challenges young people on the North West Coast of Tasmania to tackle the issue of youth binge drinking through a community based media project. The project is a response to the strong need for a culturally desirable and generation-relevant education strategy around binge drinking.

The workshop-based project will offer year 9, 10 and 11 students the opportunity to be trained to work with other youth in the community to produce short films examining the issue of youth binge drinking. The project will culminate in the Smashed short film competition which will bring the issue out into the light of community scrutiny.

Smashed aims to support the participation of young people in peer education, skill development and the rollout of a project that reflects positively on their exploration of the issue through a creative medium. It also aims to strengthen the student’s internal reasoning through participation in workshops that challenge, develop and strengthen their thinking about complex issues.

Students will have an opportunity to experience a leadership role through sharing their opinions, experiences and perspectives on binge drinking to a community audience – setting the agenda for open, honest discussion about the issue.

The Smashed Project is funded by the Federal Department of Health and Ageing – National Binge Drinking Strategy: Community Level Initiative. Big hART’s community partners are the Cradle Coast Authority and the Burnie Wynyard Liquor Accord.

For further details, visit the website.

Namatjira is another groundbreaking new Australian work by Scott Rankin (Box the Pony, Certified Male, Stickybricks). He has teamed up once again here with Trevor Jamieson, following their national sell-out sensation Ngapartji Ngapartji, to bring us the deeply moving story of Albert Namatjira. In their sure hands, we are taken on a journey, at turns deeply compelling and hilarious. This beautiful lyrical work is already taking the country by storm, premiering to full houses at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre in 2010, and winning Best Newcomer for Derek Lynch, and Best New Australian Work at the Sydney Theatre Awards in January 2011.

Utilizing Jamieson's elegant physicality, and the music of internationally renowned Genevieve Lacey, this story captures the intense beauty, depth, opportunism, mateship and injustice that has shaped our country. Namatjira is more than a night at the theatre, this is an experience of art, live on stage. Before our eyes, the grandchildren of Albert Namatjira - 3rd generation watercolour artists - assist with the re-telling of his life, filling the stage with a huge landscape drawing of their desert country.

Albert Namatjira's achingly beautiful watercolours introduced the lounge rooms of Australian suburbia to the exquisite beauty of our central desert heartland. In a similar way, this sweeping narrative acts as a window through which we can see ourselves, and our nation, as clearly as the landscapes he gave to us.

Namatjira has been created working closely with the extended family and community descended from Albert Namatjira, living in Western Arrarnta Country, in Alice Springs and Hermannsburg.

Many of the family continue to paint in the tradition of their grandfather, and Big hART is working with them to exhibit their watercolours alongside the tour of the Namatjira theatre work.

Likewise, the tour of Namatjira will incorporate watercolour master-classes and robust panel discussions about the vital role of art centres in Aboriginal communities.

Image courtesy Michael Corridore.

A celebration of the life and legacy of critically acclaimed Indigenous watercolour artist Albert Namatjira, through the visual and performing arts.

The 8th of August 2009 marked fifty years since acclaimed watercolour artist and Western Arrernte man, Albert Namatjira, passed away. A year on, Big hART and Ngurratjuta Iltja Ntjarra Many Hands Art Centre invite you to celebrate his life and legacy in this journey through visual and performing arts.

How did Australia’s most celebrated watercolour artist end up dying a broken man? Hear pieces from the epic tale of Albert Namatjira’s life, as performed by Ngapartji Ngpartji’s Trevor Jamieson, and written and directed by Big hART’s Scott Rankin. Co-directed by Wayne Blair, and supported by Namatjira family artists, this mix of song, dance and performance will have you joining in a joyous celebration of the life of an iconic Australian artist and Western Arrernte man.

The celebration will developed and shown in conjunction with the Namatjira’s Next Generation watercolour exhibition. It forms as part of the broader Namatjira project, a niche creative community development process, growing from Big hART’s highly accalimed Ngapartji Ngapartji. With the support of Ngurratjuta Art Centre, this project pays tribute to the life and contribution of acclaimed watercolour artist and Western Arrarnta man, Albert Namatjira.

Following this celebration at the Araluen Centre, Namatjira will premiere at Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney, in September 2010.

Image by Nicholas Higgins

A groundbreaking new Australian theatrical work about the life of Albert Namatjira, accompanied by a contemporary watercolour exhibition featuring his descendants.

Elea was born in the desert in Arrernte country, Central Australia, in 1902. Two years later he was baptized Albert. Thirty one years after that, at his first solo exhibition of watercolour landscapes, he signed his work with his father’s name for the first time: Albert Namatjira.

Half a century after his death, Company B Belvoir and Big hART have invited some of his descendants - 3rd generation watercolour artists - to spend six weeks filling the Belvoir St corner with a huge drawing of Namatjira’s country. Each night as they draw, the charismatic Trevor Jamieson will retell Namatjira’s extraordinary life.

At the height of his fame, Albert Namatjira’s shows sold out within minutes. If you didn’t own one of his paintings you probably had a print in your loungeroom. He also supported over six hundred members of his community, lost two of his ten children to malnutrition, was forbidden to own land, imprisoned for having a drink with his friends, and died a broken man.

Trevor Jamieson and Scott Rankin were two of the creative forces behind Big hART’s Ngapartji Ngapartji. They’ve teamed up with our Wayne Blair to create this whole-hearted tribute to a great Australian artist and a great Arrarnta man.

Namatjira is part of a broader Big hART project by the same name. The Namatjira project is a celebration of the life and legacy of Albert Namatjira. Developed with Big hART’s highly acclaimed community development and cross-cultural processes, and made in partnership with Ngurratjuta Many Hands Art Centre, the project has grown from Big hART’s highly successful Ngapartji Ngapartji project, through which Big hART has worked with central desert communities for over five years. The Namatjira story came to the attention of writer/director Scott Rankin as a result of working with Elton Wirri, a descendant of Albert’s. Elton, now 19, has worked on Ngapartji Ngapartji since he was 14 years old, and toured the country with the performance piece, receiving applause from audiences for his chalk drawings depicting Western Arrernte landscapes.

Big hART invites guests and team members to Alice Springs join the celebration and conclusion of the remarkable Ngapartji Ngapartji project. This will feature the premiere screening of our new documentary Nothing Rhymes with Ngapartji as well as launching the project’s memory basket.

The memory basket captures the story of the project through photos, music, text and film and is being produced as a legacy gift for all project supporters and participants to keep the stories, learnings and memories strong.

Project participants and performers from Alice, Docker River, Ernabella, Tasmania and across the country are returning to Alice to celebrate and reflect on the wrap up project.

A collaboration between Windmill and renowned arts and social change company Big hART Nyuntu Ngali is a post-apocalyptic love story set in Pitjantjatjara country.

Nyuntu Ngali
(You We Two)
“Evanya pula Roamnga mukuringkula altingu palu palumpa pulampa tjukaruru wiya.
Palumpa pulampa witu-witu ngaranyi munu pula ngulu wirtja-pakara anu.”

It is the 25th Century in central Australia and humanity has farewelled the days of cars, ipods and mobile telephones. The industrial and technological culture that thrived for generations has ravished our planet. Welcome to our post climate-change future, where our very survival depends on our ability to recover the traditional hunter-gatherer skills that we have lost. It’s time to get back to basics.

In the harsh environment of this post apocalyptic world, a fragile and secret love has blossomed between Eva and Roam, but their joy will be short lived. Their wrong-skin marriage has placed them in terrible danger and they must run to escape the terrifying and unseen enemy that now threatens them – their own families. Pregnant and injured they must run, hide and then try and survive. This moving and powerful story of survival in both

English and Pitjantjatjara is told utilising sand storytelling, choreography, video art, shadow image, wood work and a highly atmospheric musical score.

Nyuntu Ngali is a collaboration between Windmill and the renowned arts and social change company Big hART.

The DRIVE documentary explores young men, risk taking, rites of passage and car crashes in Tasmania.

The biggest killer of young men in Australia is car crashes.

The state with the highest rate of road fatalities is the island of Tasmania.

DRIVE is not just a film about death, it is a film about identity. It is about the rites of passage young Australian men face on their journey to adulthood - gaining a driver’s license and the legal right to drink alcohol.

Young men are dying in high speed, single vehicle crashes, crumpled in metal
coffins, on lonely rural roads.

Why do the die? Why do they live?