There’s a large sugar gum (Eucalyptus cladocalyx) on the Parkville campus of the University of Melbourne that stretches across the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung peoples. In measuring her age, I employed an ancient unit of measurement—I fathomed her girth. More commonly used for sea than land, this measure of approximately six foot is a corporeal measure; one found between fingertip and fingertip. With outstretched arms I wrapped myself around her girth, imagining other fingers meeting mine in an act that, to onlookers, resembled either an act of love and/or protective protest.

This sweet gum currently offsets the carbon release of at least three humans’ respiration according to its plaque carefully positioned at her base by the team from Accounting collides with Botany.¹ Fast growing, in comparison to the four pre-invasion River Red Gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) growing nearby, this sugar gum has stood for a century as a campus sentinel. What has she fathomed? What has she measured? What has she witnessed? It’s the first eucalypt I met on campus—a fitting first acquaintance given that it’s a tree that grows in South Australia, from where I had just relocated. My thoughts turn to my time in South Australia, on her Country and to what I had fathomed there.²

Punu is the word for tree used by Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people from the far north-west of South Australia. Punu is also the word that is used to describe all of the things that are fathomed from trees. As tree, wood, weapon and tool, punu describes the polysemy of Aṉangu language and life. Fittingly, punu is the abiding inspiration for many works of art by artists working across the constellation of art centres and communities on the Aṉangu, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara Lands. Kunmanara (Peter) Mungkuri, Yankunytjatjara artist from Iwantja Arts, celebrates the tree as the place where culture begins,

I've painted the trees because they're a symbol of Aṉangu culture—the punu (tree) is where our culture starts. Kulata (spears), miru (spear-throwers), piti (bowls), nula-nula (hunting sticks), wana (digging sticks)—all of our traditional tools, they all come from trees… This is beautiful country—we protect our country, we look after it.³

In his 2018 painting with its deceptively simple title Punu, filigree trees grow across luminous surfaces painted in a palette that recalls the first, or last, light of day. This painting was first shown in Tarnanthi: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2019. Aptly the Festival carries as its moniker and curatorial principle the Kaurna word for the first light of day. Growing from the bottom of the painting from pooling black ink and moving upwards towards the light, Mungkuri’s arboreal tracery echoes the indomitable growth and strength of desert trees while also holding culture within. His delicately dotted roundels are reminiscent of the marks drawn in the sand and on the body, marks made by outstretched ochred fingers for inma (ceremony). Mungkuri’s marks also recall the pyrography, or fire-drawing, where heated wire marks the bodies of trees to become punu, akin to the conventions of branding that desert stockmen like Mungkuri are well versed in.

The perceived contradiction of these two worlds—of traditional desert life and station work is reconciled in the work of artists like Mungkuri and his close friend and collaborator Alec Baker, who with Mungkuri’s passing is the most senior artist working in Indulkana today. Both men grew up living a traditional Anangu life before becoming involved with station work ahead of their stellar artistic careers. Living close to the Stuart Highway in northern South Australia these men have negotiated the arrival of white fellas and held onto culture and Country. Across their long lives they, like the trees, have witnessed so much: dispossession wrought by pastoralism, the advent of the missionaries, atomic testing and more recently, the legal acknowledgement of Aṉangu ownership through the South Australian government’s APY Lands Act. The art centre’s early days were synchronous with the 1981 Act, underscoring the kinship between Country and culture and the importance of art as title deed for Aṉangu.

One of the last collaborative paintings involving Mungkuri combines his now iconic punu (trees) with the tjukula (rock holes) and delicate kalaya tjina (emu footprints) of Alec Baker and the distinct chromatic mapping of younger Aṉangu artist Eric Barney. Just as Mungkuri and Baker campaigned for lore and land they have led artistically too, with younger artists the inheritors of their political and cultural advocacy. Titled Ngura (Country), this collaborative three by three metre canvas is epic. Too large to navigate upright it was painted in gloaming colours on the ground with painted trees sprouting from three of its four sides. Describing both the physical geography of a place, and the land to which one belongs, ngura is polyvalent like punu. Ngura means home, family and mother and while this accretion of cultural stories onto canvas using acrylic paint is relatively new, this is a story that is at once ancient and contemporary.

For fellow Iwantja artist Kunmanara Coulthard the tree has a powerful memory or mnemonic function, with the mixing of paint colours recalling the grinding of the Tjuntala, a desert acacia during her early years. The Tjuntala is the star subject of her paintings, binding her to Country and culture. Born out bush near Oodnadatta, Coulthard traversed vast tracts of Country while travelling as a girl with her sheep-herding family. Later as a young woman she was placed into domestic service at Granite Downs station, part of which was later returned to Aṉangu for the establishment of the Indulkana community where Iwantja Arts is located. As Coulthard states,

I was born near the Wintinna homestead, close to Oodnadatta. When I was young, we would walk everywhere. That’s how I know this country so well. My paintings are about the beautiful country I grew up on and the tjuntala tree. Tjuntala grows everywhere near Oodnadatta and the far east of Indulkana. The flowers are bright yellow and are very beautiful. When the flowers come, it is my favourite time of year, they are so special. My parents taught me how to grind the tjuntala flowers with sand and ashes. We would grind them together into a paste to eat, it’s very sweet and delicious!⁴

This bush food grows prolifically across Coulthard’s canvas with its dark tendrils set against orange and magenta surfaces that echoes the plant’s prodigious growth in hot arid climes. Such growth is also amuletic—it protects against colonisation and will continue its memory function long after the artist’s passing, late July 2025 while the tjuntala was in flower.

The commitment to punu in all of its polyvalence, emerges in the ongoing Kulata Tjuta project, a cultural maintenance initiative for young men centred around spear making that began in 2010. Since its inception it has manifest as a series of contemporary artworks including the installation of 550 kulata made by Aṉangu men suspended in an explosive formation above a circular installation of hand-carved piti (water and baby carriers) made by Aṉangu women for Tarnanthi in 2017. An artistic response to weapons testing on Country and an unwaivering reclamation of punu from artefact to art, the radiating spear shafts cast shadows onto the surrounding walls drawing an analogy to the cumulative and mushrooming effect of the atomic bomb testing directly referenced in the work.

Underpinning this iterative decade and a half long project is the recognition by Tjilpi (senior men), including Mungkuri, that skills in weapon and tool-making were crucial for cultural identity and that punu could be reset as both pedagogic device and payback.⁵ Recently the National Gallery of Australia exhibited the project’s most recent inflorescence, titled Kulata Tjuta: Tirkilpa.⁶

We (Anangu) have a word for the rattle of the spears; that word is Tirkilpa. We have a technique where we roll spears over each other to make this noise. A long time ago this noise would be heard before a battle begins… Sometimes I hear the Tirkilpa today; it is a different battle today but the fight is real for us.⁷

Just as the Kulata Tjuta project has kept culture strong for male artists across the APY Lands, the Tjanpi Desert Weavers, an art movement that began three decades ago as a series of workshops facilitated by the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council, has kept culture strong for women artists. Involving more than 400 women from twenty-eight communities across South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, Tjanpi weaving has a significant precursory history found in manguri, the hair and fibre-string rings placed on one’s head when carrying piti (bowls), and in the making of wiltja (shelters).  This practice relies heavily on deep knowledge of desert grasses and trees. 

Made by seven senior artists during a bush camp in 2012, Tjanpi punu is a sculptural installation that was initially commissioned for and exhibited as part of Heartland: contemporary art from South Australia in 2013 before touring nationally for Tarnanthi in the Kungka Kunpu (strong women) travelling exhibition.⁸ The eight trees constructed from desert grasses, wool, wire, feathers, raffia and found objects, relate to each of the women’s Tjukurpa while collectively underscoring the importance of trees for Anangu. Made from, and made about Country, this polysemy is explained here by the artists,

We Anangu are like the trees growing strong and our children are the branches. A bushfire might come and burn the trees or they may be chopped down with an axe but they won’t be finished. They will still grow strong again. New life will come because the roots are deep and far reaching. The roots of the tree are made strong with the stories of country and the stories of family. These tjanpi trees are like the trees in the paintings, strong and full of story. We made these trees together, working together. When we work together we can do anything.⁹

The polyvalence of punu in desert art is far from an isolated example of the sentience and cultural significance of trees for First Nations people. Back on Kulin Country, and the wurun (manna gum) with its co-dependent djeri (witchetty grub) provides the very name of the language spoken here for millennia—Wurundjeri.