Artworks

Earlier this month, Trevor Jamieson and Scott Rankin won a Deadly Award for most outstanding achievement in film, TV or theatre - for their stage production, Ngapartji Ngapartji. Trevor is a performer, and a Spinifex man from the western desert of Australia. Scott Rankin is a theatre director and the founder of Big hArt, an organisation that's mission is to create both art and social change.

Ngapartji Ngapartji is Trevor's story, or more particularly his family's story -and it includes their experience of the Maralinga nuclear tests. Ngapartji Ngapartji has been performed all round Australia, to great acclaim.

It's more than a stage show though. Like a number of Big hArt projects it aims is to bring together remote indigenous communities and local artists to find ways of telling and preserving stories and in this case preserving language as well. It's performed partly in English and partly in Pitjantjatjara.

Although Pitjantjatjara is one of the stronger Aboriginal languages (it has around two and half thousand speakers) - it's still considered endangered.

Lyn Gallacher recently saw a production of Ngapartji Ngapartji in Alice Springs and spoke with Trevor Jamieson and Alex Kelly, the creative director of Ngapartji Ngapartji.

Further Information

Story Researcher and Producer

Lyn Gallacher

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