Painted by George Jomeri at Mowanjum, Western Australia in 1975
Kim Akerman Collection
Mary Macha, Perth, Western Australia
The Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands

FILMOGRAPHY                        
FLOATING…like wind blow’em about, Michael Edols (dir), 1975 Eastman colour 16mm, 72 mins, Ronin Films, ACT          

Michael Edols, Aspects of Life: working with Indigenous Australians, Edols, ACT 2011

Painted on a fragile piece of bark, with significant crack to the left side of the middle of the painting. The painting has suffered a number of areas of pigment loss, although the reading majority of pigments appear stable.
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This bark painting was made during the filming of Floating, Like Wind Blow’em About. Made by Director-Producer Michael Edols, this film revealed the problems realised by the elders in a Kimberley community as they watched traditional values being eroded by the impact of the modern world. In a scene in the film George Jomeri can be seen working on this painting. In a poignant moment a child places its hand on the raw bark below the freshly painted Wanjina and Jomeri blows white pigment from his mouth over the hand to create a stencil. The paintings were abandoned in the bush area behind Mowanjum and re-discovered at a later date, when Kim Akerman was photographing men preparing for a re-enactment of a coffin-return ceremony.

The acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog wrote the following review in Su Deutsche Zeitung, Munich April 1, 1978, “for me the most interesting film is ‘FLOATING’ by Michael Edols. It deals precisely with the collision of the white’s lack of history with the black’s prehistory. The director has simply presented images, without comment, but with intensity and insight – images of destruction. Every one of them, however fleeting, reveals a tragedy. The frail and questionable nature of white technological civilization, the planes, the sirens, 🌄the bars, the hymns on the mission, everything.

Faced with all this the pre-historic has no chance of survival and it hurts to be an onlooker. Not that it makes you yearn for a state of natural, innocent primitiveness. For though the Australian Aboriginals are indeed pre-historic and by our standards primitive, when you realize that their ཧculture is a highly complicated one, with an extraordinary mythology and a world view in which people, objects, time, the Dreamtime and especially dreams are still one. Seen from this point of view it is our civilization that is shattered. And we harbor the secret hatred of alienation. We destroy cultures, animal species die out; but here a rare human possibility is being swept from the face of the earth, a whole rich culture. With it goes our own pre-history, which we ourselves lived for 50,000 years and which somewhere deep within us we still presumably carry. We are the poorer”. Ibid p.9