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Pictures From My Memory: My Story as a Ngaatjatjarra Woman
Pictures from my memory is a compelling and accessible autobiographical account of Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis’s life as a Ngaatjatjarra woman from the Australian Western Desert. Born in the bush at the time of first contact between her family and White Australians, Ellis’s vivid personal reflections offer both an historical record and profound emotional insight into her unique experience of being woven between cultures -her Aboriginal community and the Western worlds.
- GenresNonfiction
153 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 18, 2016
‘My name is Elizabeth Warnngupayi Marrkilyi Ellis and I have lived a semi-traditional life. I was born in 1962 in the bush at Warakurna, Ngaatjatjarra country, in the Rawlinson Ranges just west of the West Australian—Northern Territory border in the Western Desert.’
In this book, Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis writes of her life as a Ngaatjatjarra woman from central Australia’s Western Desert region. Ms Ellis was born around the time of the first contact between her family and European Australians. Ms Ellis writes of the two Australian worlds she occupies: Aboriginal and European, and of two very different cultures.
‘If you lose your language, you lose the culture.’
I found this memoir both interesting and informative. While I knew that the Western Desert people were some of the last to have contact with European Australians, I didn’t realise that this was as late as the early 1960s. This makes Ms Ellis’s account even more important: she is a literate and educated woman, able to share (where appropriate) her knowledge and experience of her heritage. Some much Aboriginal culture is now lost. But Ms Ellis’s experience need not be. She is able to explain the complicated familial relationships that are so important to Aboriginal people, explain how traditional society functioned, and how the world was viewed.
‘But knowing a language is not enough to be able to practice a culture. You can’t just speak the
language and be an active participant. It starts as a child.’
Straddling two worlds is not without its challenges. Ms Ellis writes of her marriage to Michael Ellis, a white school teacher. Of her brother’s negotiation of Michael’s car as a bride-price.
The book contains both an introduction and an anthropological overview of Ngaatjatjarra culture by anthropologist Laurent Dousset. It also contains a glossary of Ngattjatjarra words.
I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in an articulate, interesting and lively account of a life being lived between European and Aboriginal worlds.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
In this book, Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis writes of her life as a Ngaatjatjarra woman from central Australia’s Western Desert region. Ms Ellis was born around the time of the first contact between her family and European Australians. Ms Ellis writes of the two Australian worlds she occupies: Aboriginal and European, and of two very different cultures.
‘If you lose your language, you lose the culture.’
I found this memoir both interesting and informative. While I knew that the Western Desert people were some of the last to have contact with European Australians, I didn’t realise that this was as late as the early 1960s. This makes Ms Ellis’s account even more important: she is a literate and educated woman, able to share (where appropriate) her knowledge and experience of her heritage. Some much Aboriginal culture is now lost. But Ms Ellis’s experience need not be. She is able to explain the complicated familial relationships that are so important to Aboriginal people, explain how traditional society functioned, and how the world was viewed.
‘But knowing a language is not enough to be able to practice a culture. You can’t just speak the
language and be an active participant. It starts as a child.’
Straddling two worlds is not without its challenges. Ms Ellis writes of her marriage to Michael Ellis, a white school teacher. Of her brother’s negotiation of Michael’s car as a bride-price.
The book contains both an introduction and an anthropological overview of Ngaatjatjarra culture by anthropologist Laurent Dousset. It also contains a glossary of Ngattjatjarra words.
I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in an articulate, interesting and lively account of a life being lived between European and Aboriginal worlds.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
January 5, 2020
Almost two-thirds through Pictures From My Memory, Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis writes the following sentence:
"Many of the animals that used to live in our country have become extinct. Introduced animals like rabbits, feral cats, foxes and camels made their lives hard. These animals compete with native animals for food and some of these animals kill the native ones."
She is recapping her life as an Aboriginal woman living in multiple areas in the Australian outback with multiple families and multiple cultures between her own tribal people and the "whitefellas" who have shown up more and more in her life. When I read the above sentence, I thought how fitting it was for Ellis to write something like this about her own life as an Aboriginal person, to parallel it to her own life and the life of her fellow native people.
But Ellis didn't do that. Pictures From My Memory was a disappointment this way. Perhaps I've read too many books about Native American indigeneity (no such thing!), and perhaps my expectations were too high/different in regards to a book about Australian indigeneity. But I found the book simplistic and juvenile, not really delving that deep into culture and the idea of being between two worlds, as other indigenous people's memoirs often include. This book was a disconnected list of names, places, events and (briefly) beliefs without any overarching theme or cohesiveness, with only a page-and-a-half of real reflection toward the end. It was a disappointment, and not a very good primer into Aboriginal life in Australia in the past several decades, nor was it even an insightful memoir into one woman's life.
"Many of the animals that used to live in our country have become extinct. Introduced animals like rabbits, feral cats, foxes and camels made their lives hard. These animals compete with native animals for food and some of these animals kill the native ones."
She is recapping her life as an Aboriginal woman living in multiple areas in the Australian outback with multiple families and multiple cultures between her own tribal people and the "whitefellas" who have shown up more and more in her life. When I read the above sentence, I thought how fitting it was for Ellis to write something like this about her own life as an Aboriginal person, to parallel it to her own life and the life of her fellow native people.
But Ellis didn't do that. Pictures From My Memory was a disappointment this way. Perhaps I've read too many books about Native American indigeneity (no such thing!), and perhaps my expectations were too high/different in regards to a book about Australian indigeneity. But I found the book simplistic and juvenile, not really delving that deep into culture and the idea of being between two worlds, as other indigenous people's memoirs often include. This book was a disconnected list of names, places, events and (briefly) beliefs without any overarching theme or cohesiveness, with only a page-and-a-half of real reflection toward the end. It was a disappointment, and not a very good primer into Aboriginal life in Australia in the past several decades, nor was it even an insightful memoir into one woman's life.
August 16, 2020
Fascinating perspective into a completely different part of our nation
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews