Melody Popple – “ I’ve grown up on the East coast of Australia. I lived in South West Rocks until I was 6, then my family moved to Clunes in the Northern Rivers. I went to high school at Trinity in Lismore.
I was 15 and I found out about my Indigenous heritage. When I was younger my mother was told that she had Caribbean heritage. I suppose at the time it may have seemed more socially acceptable to be from a different country. She does have Caribbean heritage but she also has Indigenous Australian heritage and it’s actually from the Bundjalung area which is a big coincidence. My mum always said she was really drawn to this area. My parents had grown up in Sydney and when they had me they decided they wanted to move to the country and have a coastal lifestyle. It just so happened they came up here to visit Dad’s relatives around the Byron area and decided this is where they wanted to live .
That was a really big turning point for me finding out about my Indigenous heritage. It was at a time when at 15 you are going through a transition of discovering your identity and there’s all these big changes thrown in. To all of a sudden find out about my heritage, I wanted to understand what that meant. We had no idea. We’d never grown up with connections to community and we had no idea what it actually meant to be Indigenous.
I guess I moved my art practise to self inquiry and trying to understand what it meant to be a woman in this Australian paradigm, also what it meant to be Indigenous and obviously with a mixed cultural background as well. All these questions were coming up…Who am I? It was like a mini existential crisis trying to understand myself.
When I was young I loved creating art work. I went to Byron Steiner School for some of my Primary education. It helped me gain confidence with visual communication. I also found Art is Art therapy, being able to communicate things in a visual way that can’t be articulated in vocabulary.
After I finished High School I moved to Melbourne which is where my mum, brother and sister live. I did my Bachelor of Visual Arts and Design and throughout that process I was able to try different art forms from 3D sculptural work to digital imaging to life drawing and I stumbled upon a workshop of Eco printing or natural dying. I had always been drawn to the natural environment. I had to learn and it was amazing to be able to get something from country, from the landscape and put that into something more tangible like a piece of fabric. I knew I that was to be my major work.
That was when ‘Gunyah’ was born. The word Gunyah means home away from home. For me that meant a return to one’s natural home. I wanted to create something that was representative of the current face of Indigenous Australian women. I guess the current face for what I feel it is. I can’t speak on behalf of others and I didn’t grow up connected to indigenous culture so I felt very disadvantaged in that way. I had to create my own ideas which is to be connected to country, protect it and celebrate its beauty.
I got together a group of women friends and we booked accomodation in this little cabin in the woods in The Grampians in Victoria. We spent 3 days filming. The people who owned the property allowed us to film and I built an actual Gunya. That process of going into a space, using what is found in the natural environment to create was interesting to me and to the other participants. The performers were amazing. They have a bit of circus and dance background. They were able to bring their own suggestions as well so it was a pretty humble, collaborative piece. Leading up to that I was naturally dying 50 metres of fabric. I wanted to take the Eucalyptus and Gum leaf dyed material with us into the environment. That was like the Motif brought to the audience. I can’t bring a Gunya into the gallery. The whole weekend brought us closer together. It was very cool.
It was a part of my degree to apply to a gallery to exhibit. I knew I was moving back here so I applied to the Lismore Regional Gallery. At the time they were still building this new gallery and I got a reply to say I’d been selected. Initially I was hesitant. I thought this work shouldn’t be exhibited in a gallery. It was confronting. Exhibiting this work in a gallery is a big contrast in itself, having something so precious and natural to the participants and myself to be brought into the public sphere in an industrial building…I mean it’s a beautiful building and it’s special to me because it’s in my home town but it creates a whole new meaning seeing it in here.
I’m studying my Honours in Indigenous knowledge at SCU at Gnibi College. I feel like it’s all come to this peak at this time. Over the past 2 years it’s been evolving. My Great Grandfather was Indigenous Australian. We don’t know too much about him as lot’s of information is lost from that time but we do know that he was stoned to death in Sydney. He was still quite young.
I plan to eventually be able to teach at a University level. I mean I would love to teach at SCU at Gnibi College. That would be cool.
I live on the edge of the Nightcap National Park so I feel very connected to that area. Where I’m living is where my heritage is from. It feels like home. It is home.”