Skin: Kngwarrey

Language Group: Alyawarr

Region: Thely, Utopia, NT

Dreamings: Wallaby, Kangaroo, Lizard

Freddy Kngwarrey Jones (deceased) was one of the important Elders on Utopia. He lived at Thelye community on Utopia all his life where passed on his Dreamings to his son, Charlie Pitjara Jones. His works are depicted from an aerial perspective - the ground designs for the sacred ceremonies for his Dreamings – the Wallaby Greyneng, the Caterpillar Aylperlayt, Snake Kwerrenty and the Kangaroo Aherr. The designs are prepared on the ground during lengthy song cycles marking the journey of the Ancestors. Meticulously executed because of the importance of his subject matter, Freddy’s work is very geometric and masculine.

The Ancestor leaves tracks stretching for hundreds of kilometers, each track linking a series of Dreaming sites at waterholes.  The different sites in his paintings are identified with the Ancestor, ‘who jumped up, or stopped or went down there.’ The paintings can be viewed as a map of the journey of the Wallaby (Greyneng) Ancestors.

He used iconography and abstract imagery to depict the sacred ceremony and the sites pertaining to that dreaming. The sacred sites are where the Dreaming occurs and where the power is still all pervasive. The symbols or signs denote places and sites or the tracks and pathways of the Ancestor. The Dreaming is painted from an aerial perspective and is abstract in form.

It is this system of beliefs - known as the Dreamtime (Altyerr) to the Anmatyarr and Alyawarr people of the Eastern Desert region – which form the basis of their law, social structure, kinship and governance. This set of beliefs maintains order, cohesion and harmony within the community.

For the Alyawarr and Anmattyarr ‘Bush men and women’, the past is still alive and vital today and the Ancestor Spirits and their powers are present in the forms into which they changed at the end of the 'Dreamtime' or 'Dreaming', as the stories reveal.

A Dreaming name denotes a Dreamtime being, a site associated with that Dreaming and the country surrounding that site.

Woodrow W. Denham, Alyawarre Ethnographic Archive