Bayi Dha-ang: Walk Strong - Dixon and Craig

Aerial shots of bushland and a river, and a shot of two men walking beside it.

Text on screen: The Department of Health commissioned Bitja (Dixon Patten Jnr), a local First Nations artist, to create an artwork we could us in association with Aboriginal Health and Wellbeing initiatives.

Deputy Chief Aboriginal Health Advisor Craig Taylor met up with Bitja near Bendigo to discuss the piece.

Bitja and Craig are standing together, overlooking the river.

Bitja: You're on the beautiful Campaspe river. In my Yorta Yorta language, we call it the Yalooka that flows up to the Dhungala, which is the Murray River. I always feel at peace. So I always come here to pause, clear my mind. I talk to the ancestors. I talk to my higher self. And you can see these big, beautiful gum trees here, that ancestral family tree, we’ve all got roots.

Craig: My grandmother used to say when we’d sit by the banks of the Murray River: put your hands over your eyes, let it go black. And just imagine what it was like when there was nothing else but nature.

Bitja and Craig walk over to a picnic table, unroll a copy of the artwork, and sit down facing one another.

Craig: Dixon, what first inspired you to create art?

Bitja: I've always been around many creative people. My mother's an artist. My grandmother, my father. A lot of uncles and aunties. I think, sitting around a campfire, I’d listen to all the yarns and the storytelling. So for me, the way that I view it is that everything is design, everything has creation story.

Craig: And artwork for our people and our ancestors from thousands of years ago, it is important about telling the story, and being able to pass those stories from generation to generation. What's your artistic process of bringing the narrative into the artwork? I mean, this is a fairly complicated piece of art. We could look at it and just think, wow, it's beautifully to look at, but how do you bring that all together to get that narrative?

Bitja: There’s a cultural practice in our communities, it's called deep listening. In my Yorta Yorta language we call it Gulpa Ngawal. So for me, it really is the ability to be able to deep listen. With my mother and my father, my grandmothers taking me out on country, allowed me to sit amongst nature and really listen, listening to the calls of the birds, listening to the river, listening to the wind, and just paying attention to what country is telling you.

We cut to shots of Bitja overlooking the landscape, and close ups of nature and the river flowing.

Bitja: I think really that is important part. And when you're hearing Elder stories, when they're telling you something they experienced, it's being able to see all the layers All those things, I think that informs my artistic narrative and the kind of key messages that I want to share with people. Not just for our community, but for people that are interacting with it that aren't mob, that can see themselves in that story. I'm telling a human story. I'm just telling it from our perspective as being mob.

We see more close ups of nature and the river.

Craig: So I note in the artwork there's circles and, as black fellas ourselves we understand the connection through circle, it's about getting together and yarning. But did you just want to explain a bit more about some of these elements of what the circle is, and what it represents?

We see the artwork from the top down, and Bitja is pointing out various elements as he talks about them.

Bitja: Well, first of all the artwork is called Bayi Dha-ang which in the Dhudhuroa language means “walk strong”. And you can see, all around, on the edge here you can see these footprints, that represents walking strong in culture, walking in the footsteps of our ancestors.

And you can see as well, the gum leaves represent being welcome. We often use that in ceremony. Welcome ceremony. We use it when we burn the gum leaves as well, for our smoking ceremonies, which represents spiritual cleansing and physical cleansing.

In the centre of the artwork you have the main meeting circle, and that represents the Department of Health and all the different programs coming together to talk community, to allow community to have a voice, to have a say in their own affairs. That kind of goes with self-determination. It's us putting our concerns forward and also talking about solutions.

All the different people that you see represented have different motifs and different colours. It just represents that we're not one homogenous group, that we all come with different, culture, different lore. We might have similarities that underpin how we are in our societies, but ultimately all come with our own experiences and histories, and just sitting side by side and shoulder to shoulder and respecting each other's different experiences as well.

And part of the artwork is that we, as individuals, we can create ripples, but together we can create waves. And so you can see from the artwork, when it starts to filter out that, you can start to see the ripples, which in turn into bigger waves. And that's that movement that you can see as well.

You can see all these smaller circles. I represent different communities. And each of those having different resources, different strengths, different weaknesses, and what they need for the department as well to support them and them achieving self-determination.

It's a universal concept at the meeting circle, when we come together, it was often around water. So you can say water is represented in the artwork as well. And water, represents life's journey. But it also represents reflection, sitting water's edge and thinking about where we've come from. And what we're doing now affects future. So all these kind of conversations that the department has with their community now into the future.

Craig: Yeah, it's a very peaceful piece of artwork.It certainly does have that, impact on you around, peacefulness that the rippling water effect that you've spoken about. And most importantly, drawing connection, as you said, to the various communities around there. Whilst we may have different clans, different tribes right across Victoria, it's really important to understand that there's a connection there as well.

Bitja: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And that is the primary theme of the work is, is that connection. So we all have a version of land, water, sky, family, ceremony, people - so that they're universal things as well, that it doesn't just apply to First Nations peoples. But universally, everyone across the globe, they've all got a version of family, they've got a version of Country and Home. So, I want people to resonate with that story as well.

We see an aerial shot looking down on the river, then tilting up towards and wider landscape. It fades to black, and a shot of the artwork on a black background fades in. Video ends.

End transcript.