How making maps makes meaning

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Kim Mahud has always loved maps.

It was something about the patterning, how things fitted together,

the jigsaw puzzle of the way the land was kind of assembled.

Geological maps, treasure maps, mud maps you trace with your finger onto the ground.

The fact that it wasn't about language, you know,

they somehow combined aesthetics and communication.

Kim was a teenager.

When she made her first serious map,

she was home from boarding school for the summer and described her family cattle station

in the Northern Territory called Tanami Downs.

As Kim moved through adult life, becoming an award winning writer,

a visual artist, map making became a collaborative thing with scientists,

artists and traditional owners.

It became a way of describing and honouring the irreducible complexities of remote desert life.

I just think that's where we live.

This is the country we live in and we are having to work with that all the time

and maps let that exist.

They don't come up with a, oh, if we just do this, we'll fix it.

Or, you know, here's a problem, let's solve it.

It's like, here are these things.

They sit, they're constantly interacting, interweaving, undoing, remaking stuff.

And I think a map can reflect that.

A good map can reflect that.

You know, it does a thing that language, words can't do.

I'm Meredith Lake and Soul Search is a show curious about the beliefs and practices

we draw on to navigate the world.

And I mean that quite literally, at least in this episode.

You and I are in the company of a map maker

who pays close attention to people and to the places that change them.

I've packed a thermos, a hat.

Because Kim Mahood has agreed to come for a drive.

How would you describe where we are?

I guess we're looking out at the...

the absolutely iconic Western McDonald's, you know, Namajira country view.

It's probably a landscape that anyone who looked at it

would associate with Central Australia.

Here in the heart of the continent,

Mbantua Alla Springs is cradled by ancient mountains.

I love them.

And to take them in, I've pulled over on a raised dirt track

about 10 minutes west of town.

From my point of view, it's just a... it's a hill.

It was the easiest spot to get to, you know,

when I was absolutely driven to make the...

You know, I had a whole lot of work to make.

And from here, you know, I probably got about eight drawings

from this particular location.

Because it just... it's endless, you know, everywhere you look.

I've met Kim once before

at an exhibition of her latest artworks,

landscapes,

drawn right here,

capturing the desert horizon.

You would have seen a dual-cab ranger

with toolboxes on the back

and a person standing with a plank across between the toolboxes

and a large drawing board and a, you know,

two big sheets of paper

and kind of sitting on top of the toolbox

a big set of trays, you know, full of pastels.

Just totally focused.

Just on trying to draw the landscape,

swat the flies or, you know, on the days the flies weren't too bad,

you know, you were dealing with the wind.

None of which even enters once you sort of get into the zone.

You're just so completely focused and chasing the light

because this landscape is... it's so changeable with light.

.

These hills we're looking at to the north,

the sun's sort of on them at the moment

and they're quite highly sort of, you know, illuminated.

When the sun is heading down to the west,

these are in dark shadow

and it's just something completely different.

And as you watch that shadow come across, it's like, you know, it's literally sometimes light either filling the hills or seeping out of them.

It's almost like it comes, it wells up from the inside and illuminates them and then drains away again.

Kim has spent a lifetime paying attention to the country around her.

The cattle station where she grew up, the inland lakes of the East Kimberley region, the mysteriously energetic mountains here on Arrinda country near Alice Springs.

She tries to describe what she sees and articulate the experience of being here.

That almost physical reaction that you can have to a place that you love.

I mean, this spot is just an example of many.

Because.

All around the centre.

It's equally as captivating and astonishing that, you know, the further west you go, you still get these incredible kind of mountainscapes.

But you go east and it's equally as powerful, but stranger in a way.

I've always had a kind of physiological reaction to this particular place and some others as well.

And I don't know what it comes from, really.

I.

I've always felt this landscape is it's almost like if you turn and look away and then look back, something is probably to do with the light mostly, but everything it's like it's always on the verge of shifting, changing, moving.

It's incredibly animate.

And of course, once you start knowing the stories associated with it, you know, that that animated sense of them being full of energy is part of what affects, you know, that's what I'm sort of responding to.

But.

I.

I don't know.

There's just something about a certain conjunction of light and colour and mark the sort of iconography of these landscapes that they're kind of just heart stopping.

And at the same time, you think, how can I represent that?

You know, how can I make a drawing or a painting or, you know, how can I reflect and honour that in a way that captures something of its essence?

And, you know, when when you've chosen that way to sort of be in the world.

And.

You know, at the expense of like an income and, you know, a predictable life and a family and all of those things, there's got to be something very deeply, you know, a very deep driver that that makes you do that and feel that way.

So.

It's a very warm winter day today, and even though we have the windows rolled down, this car is like an oven.

But just a few minutes further along this road, I know a spot.

We're an old, dry creek winds through a gap in the rocks.

There'll be shade there under the river gums.

I reckon that's where we should head now.

There is hot water, tea bags.

All right.

Let's get the chairs out and I'll bring the cup of tea as well.

Well, I guess I mean, when I started drawing seriously as a kid, we actually lived here in Alice Springs.

And I remember my my dad, who was also a painter.

He was also an artist, bought me my first set of oil paints.

But I think, I mean, we all drew as kids, my whole family, because I mean, my mum drew as well.

Even when she was a journalist, she would do really clever little illustrations of things that were happening.

So drawing was in our family a very common.

It was just a means of communication and also of just describing the world around us.

And I think because my father always aspired to be an artist and, you know, that was continually sidelined, for me, it became embedded as a kind of, if you wanted to do it, you had to foreground it.

And it just seemed to be, I'd looked around at lots of people's lives and they didn't seem to enjoy themselves very much or be very happy about, you know, how they lived.

And I just thought being an artist.

Was was something I really, really, if you could, if you were prepared to go without all the things that you were told you needed, then you could get to be an artist.

At the very beginning, I think, like most kids drawings, it's it's telling the story of your life, what's happening, you know, around you, representing it.

Yeah, it's a descriptive means of trying to to hold on, I suppose, to what's happening.

You know, it's the beginnings of.

What we do later with telling ourselves the stories of our lives and, you know, as memory kicks in, it's that thing of this happened the other day.

You know, we were mustering cattle or we were branding cattle in the yards.

And I've there's drawings my mum kept that I did when we're down at Fink of, you know, cattle in cattle yards and a windmill and so on.

You know, I was like four years old.

So I guess it's just something that most people grow out of.

And I didn't.

You talked about it as a kind of communication, a kind of description.

But just while we're driving here, you use the language of participation.

When did drawing become something participatory and participating with whom or what?

I'm thinking about, I mean, because I've drawn all my life.

So I've drawn in all kinds of very different situations.

For instance, when I was at school, I found myself drawing images from the things.

I was reading.

So it was a way to bring into my immediate world something that existed in, you know, might have been a sort of ancient Greek myths come to mind.

And they captivated me at some archetypal level.

And I really wanted to I just wanted to give them another expression for myself.

I wanted to interpret them into my world and into my own imagination.

But also to just.

Well, be here where we're sitting now.

You know, I was teaching a bunch of people yesterday.

I ran a drawing workshop and and, you know, just to sit here and find a way to capture the place and the being in the place, because most of the time now it feels like our lives are racing past us.

And there's very little time to to participate in it in a way.

You know, life happens to you rather than being something that you have any kind of agency or attention in.

Yeah, that's right.

So.

So it's an incredible way of paying attention.

That's probably how, you know, in terms of participation is to pay attention to you kind of can't draw without paying attention to something, you know, whatever it is you're drawing.

I think that's why a lot of people take it up, actually, as a way of slowing down and looking at something, learning how to look.

You mentioned your dad, cattle.

Talk to me more about that.

I mean, I know that people come to Central Australia with all kinds of intentions, aspirations.

But what did it look like in your parents' case?

Well, both my parents, my my mother was West Australian.

She came from a small country town in southern WA and went to uni in WA and then became a journalist.

My dad came from Sydney, family on the dole.

He left home at 15 and worked his way north, cutting cane.

And by the time he was 17, he was riding.

He was becoming a stockman in what they call potty dodgers blocks in South Australia.

Stoney parts of western Queensland and a potty dodger is someone who steals unbranded cattle.

So so the standard back then was, you know, there was a big established, often sort of absentee landlord properties.

And then the small, you know, they as somebody said, they're like ticks on the cattle.

You know, they sort of clustered around it and creamed off everything they could get.

So that was my dad's introduction into the cattle beginnings of being a stockman.

And he then ended up working on Victoria of Adowns, which was.

A big, you know, it was the Vestey's English kind of absentee landlord set up.

But it was also they used to run about four stock camps and anybody who aspired to become an absolutely top ringer, as they call them in, worked on one of the Vestey's places or in those types of places.

And by this stage, my dad was, you know, very competent horseman and stockman.

And my mum, as a kind of itinerant journalist, she went up to the Kimberley.

So mum ended up up in, you know, in Halls.

Creek and ultimately made her way over and ended up working in the store on Victoria of Adowns.

Then after they got married, dad got a job working for what was then called the Department of Native Welfare and sort of as an acting superintendent at Hooker Creek Aboriginal Settlement, which is now called Lajamanu.

And so basically, as soon as I was born, mum joined him up there.

I was like three weeks old.

And then their story of working for.

Or Native Affairs had its own, you know, the beginnings of the kind of dysfunctional narrative that I still write a lot about.

It all began right back then.

And then dad was offered a job working as a stock inspector in Central Australia based at Fink.

And so that's how my parents came down this way.

Then there was about nearly a 10 year period that we were based around the centre before the Tanami kind of cattle station story came up.

On Radio National, Radio Australia and with the ABC Listen app, this is Soul Search with me, Meredith Lake.

I'm chatting with artist and writer Kim Mahood by a dry creek bed near Alice Springs.

There's a breeze buzzing through the long grass, a bit like the flies around our heads.

Across the sand, through the river gums, I can see the red rock of Chericha, the McDonnell Ranges.

One of the longest rivers in Australia.

One of the landscapes that seems somehow alive to Kim Mahood as an artist and writer of country.

Kim spent a lot of her childhood on a cattle station about 850 kilometres as the crow flies northwest of Alice Springs.

I want to hear about that place, how she experienced it and what questions it provoked for her.

From the mid 60s through to the early 70s, which was when we left the town.

The seasons were not too bad.

But, you know, back then it was a two day drive to get out there.

The Tanami really was a track, not like it is these days.

And getting stock to market was a huge enterprise.

You know, the first few years they were driven like blokes on a horse, driving their cattle along like who are walking.

That's right.

They used to bring them as far as Toolemouth Well and put them on trucks there to come into town.

And then they went on the train down south.

Very little in the way of fencing.

So we managed them through, they'd come into the waters.

No permanent water out there.

So you provided all of it with bores.

In the summer when you got wind droughts, because it was all windmill powered pumps back then,

you'd be dragging a pump jack around from bore to bore to just give the cattle enough to drink.

And then you'd get to the next one.

And, you know, so you just, you'd spend January when it would get to 50 degrees.

Back in the 60s, you know, in the middle of the day.

And your job was just to keep going from bore to bore and pumping water for the cattle.

Do you mean your job?

Did you do that in your holidays?

And I mean, coming home from boarding school, is that what it looked like?

That was part of it.

Yeah.

I mean, I'd used to go out just with my dad because most, that was when most of the staff went on holidays.

All our staff pretty much was Aboriginal.

And they'd go off and that was ceremony time in January.

So it was, you know, it was tough and it was very remote.

The two-way radio.

It was the only contact.

The interesting thing with the radio was that everybody put it on every day.

So you actually had a community, even though it might, you know, cover half the territory,

in a way that disappeared once the phone, once people got the phone.

So that daily checking in and people would listen to each other's telegrams and medical stuff and, you know, everything.

So you knew intimate, if you wanted to, you could know the intimate details of your neighbour's sort of cattle work,

plus, you know, whatever was wrong with them.

And the kids were on school of the air, of course, and all of that.

So it was weirdly kind of both very isolated and yet very, you know, very public.

300 Ks to your nearest neighbour, but you know what their doctor's telling them.

Yeah, I love it.

It's a strange kind of intimacy.

Reading your memoir about your upbringing there and your reflections actually on your upbringing there, it just seemed to draw on so many of the big stories that people from the coast have.

About the outback or the interior, however we imagine it, you know, the whole pastoral story, there was a Catholic mission down the road, there's now gold mines there.

You've written about how you became aware of growing up in a mythologised place.

At what point do you think you realised that the life you lived in your ordinary childhood horizons were, for other people, the subject of these kind of narratives?

Yeah.

Well, I think in one way, or I wouldn't have articulated it that way when I was aware of it, but going to boarding school, I literally, you know, I remember an occasion where something happened to my dad.

There were bushfires out on the station and he was driving a petrol ute and it caught fire.

And, you know, he sort of got out and ran and eventually, you know, passed out, was unconscious, but survived.

And this somehow made its way into the news.

And I was in about my third year at boarding school and I can't even remember how I got to hear it because we didn't have much access to news.

But I thought that's got to be my family, you know, and there was no phone or anything.

The only way you could get in touch back then was through telegrams, radio.

And I was trying to tell the then matron of the boarding house that I thought it was my family's place that this had happened.

And I wanted to.

And I wanted to see if I could find out what was going on.

And she said, it can't be.

No one lives out there.

And I was like, I do.

My family does.

And she just refused to believe me that, you know, that's where I came from.

I ended up having to go above her head to, you know, someone in the senior school to say, you know, I want some information.

But that was kind of a marker of the, you know, that's all empty out there.

There might be some, you know, wandering nomads, but there aren't any white people.

And...

But I sort of exploited that complete lack of understanding of where I came from by, you know, telling them I had to sort of leave school a week early for my holidays because I had to meet up with the cattle truck.

And I mean, often it wasn't actually a lie, but I've been, you know, tricking both sides because my parents never asked the question.

It's like, yeah, she's arriving.

We'll pick her up, you know, and I'd tell them when I had to go back and they never queried it.

And the school, I would just say, I've got to leave.

I've got to, you know, get the mail plane or this or that.

But it made me realise while they often didn't believe the true things, they were willing to believe the really exotic things that were not necessarily true at all.

And I think that's still the case, actually.

I think it's still very easy to construct an exotic narrative that people want to believe rather than, you know, because a lot of the life out there these days is tough and mundane and, you know, what looks fabulous if it's on television.

And when you're branding cattle, you know, I've just come from Mungle Downs now called Tanami Downs, you know, and they were heading out on a day.

It was going to be 38 degrees and they were going to have to spend the entire day, you know, wrangling half-grown heifers and steers and so on in the dust and that heat.

And it was going to be an incredibly tough few days.

So, you know, the actual reality, the lived reality is hard and a lot of it's pretty mundane.

Right.

Do you think you've ... Have you felt the pull to resist the mythologizing?

I think by the time I was writing my first book, very much so because, partly because,

I mean, my mum in particular was a natural born myth maker and romantic, you know.

But did that outlast the actual experience of her life?

Of her?

Totally.

How is that?

I don't know.

Totally.

She was just really,

really good at um deciding to remember what she chose to remember and in one sense she was a real

optimist and that was she just that she she managed to maintain that I mean she obviously when my dad

was killed in the helicopter mustering accident you know that for that period that was very tough

for her but you know she adapted to to that um dad being gone you know she didn't have him there

contradict some of the things that she then chose to remember so um and I have enormous as you can

tell you know enormous amused respect for that capacity but I've always been really interested

in trying to figure out what's actually happening you know underneath all the sort of um you know

the and it's very much still the same where you know we tell stories to make life livable

um and you know there's that that mythologizing and romanticizing whereas I've always been just

intrigued at like what what's actually happening here what's really going on you know underneath

everything else why do people do what they do what circumstances actually impact on people's

lives you know what's going on in the biggest story that is making all of this happen and um

yeah I think that's still one of the my strongest sort of motivating forces for writing in

particular

Kim's family left the Tanami when she was a student almost half-heartedly at university

her dad's business partnership ended so he and the family moved to Queensland

years later after Kim had dropped out of uni been traveling done her visual arts studies

her dad was suddenly killed in a helicopter accident

in the middle of the night

while mustering it was a turning point in Kim's life a juncture that eventually prompted her

award-winning first book craft for a dry lake it also somehow galvanized her to make maps

first for herself then with others

well I mean I actually was making them before he died and I I think in

the second book positioned out for which is a lot more directly about

maps and mapping um I describe you know spending one of my Christmas holidays you know when we

weren't dragging a pump jack from windmill to windmill making a map of the station and its

environs um based on a geological map which showed the geology of the landscape there and it was

something about the patterning um how things fitted together the jigsaw puzzle of the way

the land was kind of assembled

that just intrigued me and at the same time like most of us I read Treasure Island I I sort of loved

the look of maps I think we and and we used sort of the mud map or what you call a mud map you draw

on the ground that was a pretty common standard way of where we're going to muster planning you

know it was it just felt like this the fact that it wasn't about language you know it it's it was

communication it communicated the things that words

didn't in a very direct way so I was always interested in them um I just and and at both

an aesthetic level they somehow combined the aesthetics and communication so even as a teenager

like if I'd you know swung past mongrel downs those school holidays I'd have found the teenage

Kim making a geological map of the station on a piece of canvas you know using sort of

coloured inks and things like that yeah but after dad died um

I well it's actually no it was I was doing it before he died that was the spooky thing was

that I had begun to realise that I really needed to go back to the desert by this stage I was in my

my sort of mid-30s I was making sculpture and so on at the same time but I started to

make maps based on imagery there were bits of text and so on but I was I was

making these things and I was making these things and I was making these things and I was making

figures in sculpture but they were you know when you work with clay you wrap your clay up in wet

rags and so on and I became totally captivated by these ragged wrapped figures and I started to draw

them and then I started to um yeah make make watercolour drawings and I had this notion of

this kind of displaced half nomadic people and I was not in any way referencing Aboriginal people

it was more like the lost white tribe who you know it was the beginnings of the position doubtful

of what are we doing out there but I wasn't consciously thinking of that at all it was

entirely unconscious I think um and it was emerging in these very um emotive images uh you know these

makeshift canopy type tents it was like lives cobbled together in a in an environment that

wasn't didn't quite fit and um so I was I was both making the figures making the encampment

type structures um I actually

did an installation called encampment and part of it were these raggedy types of maps as well

fragmented I mean I was reading things like Russell Hoban's Ridley Walker you know which

is that post-apocalyptic remnant sort of um narrative of I was you know entirely kind of

living in in my own imaginary dystopia I think and uh and completely expressing it through

my art practice it's material it might be unconscious but it's material

having this physical manifestation for sure um and I had this this very integrated practice

that was being driven by this upwelling of something I didn't really understand um and

in the midst of all that in fact shortly before I was due to sort of have this exhibition my dad

was killed so how did mapping kind of come to the fore in the midst of those junctures well I was

using I was using the big canvases of the map and I was using the big canvases of the map and I was

using the big canvases still as part of my art practice and um you know in that trip the first

trip I did back um that I wrote that craft for dry lake came out of um I had this ground sheet

which I was both drawing on and using as a swag cover so you know the the bit but it was made of

artists white artist canvas so you know the stuff that was on the ground was picking up the dirt and

the charcoal and the kind of marks of the country and I was sleeping on it and so it's sort of

absorbing the dirt and I was sleeping on it and I was sleeping on it and I was sleeping on it and

dreams and all that stuff as well um and because I had my dad's ashes or some of my dad's ashes I

was traveling with to take back and all of that and then on the other side of the canvas I was

actively mapping the place in a fairly literal way you know so so and then I did body prints and you

know mapping my body onto it and all those things you do when you're in your 30s seem like a good

good idea at the time and probably when you're out there on your own grieving in some inchoate

kind of way and you know

putting clay and ash on your body that's a very ancient tradition of grieving and so forth so I was

using a type of mapping as part of my art practice had been for a long time um and so when eventually

I ended up being invited out to Mullin Lake Gregory the you know community ex-cattle station

that um all the young stockmen that worked for my family had come from this is in by 2004 I went back

to Mullin Lake where we decided to make a trip around the lake to revisit sites where people

had walked and camped you know in the sort of old days but also where the scientist geomorphologist

Jim Bowler had done his um you know cores and drilling to establish the different sort of lake

dimensions over the sort of centuries and so it it just became a really obvious tool to make a map

of the lake uh painted

map of the lake uh which gave us a way of recording those overlay sites

this is soul search on radio national and by podcast with the abc listen app

I'm Meredith Lake and I'm speaking with artist and map maker Kim Mahood

back in 2004 Kim made a trip to Mullin in the East Kimberley region and that's where it happened

around Paraku Lake Gregory the first of what's become an extraordinary series of mapping projects

working with Walmajari traditional owners with old stockmen with the geomorphologist Jim Bowler

Kim saw very different kinds of knowledge come alongside each other

and enter into a new kind of communication

you know we'd go to one of the sites

where Jim had drilled and people had stories of all the other things that happened there so while

he was kind of explaining how the termites um what they call the termite voids when you core down they

bring the they bring the sort of um evidence of old lake beds up to the surface and embed them in

the termite mound so you've got him telling that story and you've got the old people telling the

story of you know that's where the where the great white egret um picked up all the fish and took

them away from the lake you know so you get that story and you've got the old people telling the

story so you get that amazing kind of binocular uh view of the land of the land itself and a map

allows you know the place itself can hold those parallel interpretations and um it just I don't

know it just made sense and it was I had no idea when that began 20 years ago that you know it would

take on the dimensions that it has these days and I would be spending you know the good part of my

life doing it

I mean did you set out to make a map at Lake Gregory back then or is a map what emerged from

the attention that was being given to those multiplicity of stories all alongside each

other what came first for that particular project it was um it was a very deliberate in fact at that

time I was doing lots of bush trips including to the Tanami with um sort of co-artist friend

Pam Lofts and Pam actually disapproved of the map and she said well I don't know I don't know

what's the point of maps she was always having a go at me because she she saw them in that very

simplistic you know as a colonial tool to kind of you know take over country but nevertheless you

know she could see that when this project came up um and I was thinking about what to do and

and that she actually said she said why don't you make one of your big maps you know

um because she could actually see how it would work um and she helped me paint that first one

because we didn't have a I didn't have a projector or anything so that was done from an

sized you know black and white image i think it was a satellite image even and um so you know i

gridded that up gridded the canvas the big canvas and pam actually helped me do that transfer of you

know the one square inch type through to you know 20 centimeters or whatever the um i'm still someone

who operates in both both you know measurement currencies um so so it was it was a definite

decision that it would provide an ideal cross-communication tool um and it worked so well

that the you know the people from sturt creek who live in um who lived in mullen uh sturt creek being

a still it's still a cattle station that they don't have native title over um well they might

have native title but they don't have other types of tenure uh they specifically said we want to

make a map of our country

like that so it just then took on a life of its own um but i certainly didn't plan to make more

than one what did that map look like even to talk of painting a map is counterintuitive i mean map

is a shorthand for something very multifaceted isn't it it is it is i mean i think i think um it's

a to map i suspect this is my theory and i've i have read quite a lot that supports it

um

is that a kind of mapping is probably the very earliest form of communication we had as humans

where you know the location of danger and resources were the two fundamental things that

you needed to communicate and you did that by drawing a map something that represented

a place and how you got to that place and what was around that place and so on so i think that

it's deep in our you know um

ancient part of our brains is is is mapping and it's why it's so it's so cross-cultural

you know um everybody somehow responds to that it's a it's you know a kind of a non-verbal

way of communicating so the maps that i do now and then this this original one it's a

like it's on a heavy duty a robust artist canvas um with really good quality artist materials

because they are almost indestructible if you if you you know get the right kind of

light materials two and a half by three meters sort of dimensions um so big with that first map

um i we didn't actually i didn't put enough on it you know i mapped the the main lake and a couple

of there's a whole it's a big lake system and there's western lakes as well but the very furthest

western ones didn't make it onto that original canvas and um as soon as we started using it we

sort of went off the edges in all directions which was a map without boundaries without borders

yeah yeah absolutely

so i had to put like every side of that map now has got bits added to it you know where the two

dingo dreaming dogs came from the north i had to add a bit in for that our trip took us out to the

um well 50 on the canning stock route so there's a big strip added on to go out to the yep and then

the southern part we had to add on one of the old mission sites and a uh and a and a creek that

runs in from the south and then to the west it was the direction that the uh falling star came from

you know made the big made the big lake and it's a very awkward object in some ways but it's sort of

still my favorite because it's so reflected that intersection of the you know the western

here's the square you know and it's like it doesn't have boundaries you know it doesn't

hold my story no country doesn't have boundaries um and there's always and with that one just

adding them on which is again the beauty of it if you let it do its job and you just follow where

it takes you then you have to be able to do it again and again and again and again and again and

this thing that has no edges well how do you know when a map is finished given how um how many people

are having input into it and how many things it's describing all at once or perhaps that is it is it

finished no no and that's the other that's the beauty of the maps um and because they're they're

handmade with paint um that sense of a it's a physical object that can continually be added to

it so it's it's it sort of has that real palimpsest um aspect as well that there are

things underneath that may not have made it you know like when we first sort of mark things on

it's often i often do it in a in a kind of a pastel pencil um and then as the thing builds

as the sort of narrative and the things people want on it you've still got the option of erasing

if necessary because a lot of these things can be a bit contentious and it gives room for a lot of

people to talk about things and decide yes or no or just sometimes with some of the cultural

material for instance some of the dreaming stories are really strong stories the decision with that

map was leave it on but just in the chalk don't make it permanent but you know 20 years on it's

still there um it hasn't rubbed off um and people may still make the call now about making it

permanent as that knowledge is starting to get lost you know in other jobs i do people are like

we want that permanent because

otherwise our young people aren't going to know these stories anymore but there's the other

important aspect is is that they are topographically accurate via western mapping

conventions um because that's fundamental to the cross-cultural communication aspect of it

um you know there are plenty of aboriginal paintings that would contain a lot of the

same information that goes on the maps that i make but they're documents that are really only

accessible really to the public and i think that's a really important aspect of that

to the you know the people who paint them and their immediate family you know they're very

particular types of documents um whereas the topographically accurate western map that starts

on a base that everybody works out where they fit on the map and then the first layer of information

depending on the purpose of the map usually the first layer that goes on are the priorities of

the aboriginal sort of custodians of that particular place you know what's important to them

and then how that interacts with whatever the project is

often it's things like land management now there's a big um growth in indigenous ranger programs

often uh associated with um indigenous protected areas and so on so so this is one of the

few real success stories particularly in the you know remoter australia um where you've got both

people being employed and properly paid to do something that they're really good at

and then the map is a really important part of that and i think that's a really important part of the

maps allow them to interact with the western notions around land management and the white

fellas who look at the map can when somebody says back when i was a kid this place we used to walk

past this place and there were bilbies there and so if the map's accurate enough that they can

actually go to that place to see whether you know those threatened species are still active things

like that so they just become a you know the moment you get people in a room with one of these

painted maps and you've got

aboriginal people with whom i've worked they direct the conversation it just gives them agency

around this stuff in a way that most you know certainly text-based stuff never does and even

digital um and printed maps don't have the same there's something about the scale which is big

enough to become a proper facsimile of country and that they've participated a great deal in

its making it's it's hands-on actual making and have had the say around what

goes on the map as well that process can go on i mean i've done maps that i'll revisit with people

every year and we update it you know people are using it for their land management stuff but

they're also using it to educate their kids and you know about their country and stuff like that

so they've just become this template taking on its own kind of momentum it's and i'm just kind of

you know blundering along trying to pass some of the skills on me you know before i get to the map

too old or decrepit to crawl around on my knees on canvas maps any longer

it's become the work of kim's life to facilitate this particular process of mapping

attending to the spaces between different cultures and knowledges and creating a shared object

she writes about it in one of her books about how this process has been differently described

some call it co-mapping

cross-cultural mapping counter-mapping even radical cartography but how well do

terms like these get to the heart of what it involves

well i actually don't use the term counter-mapping undoing the kind of mapping that was used to

you know to control and whatever i was thinking about it because i'm also uncomfortable with the

with the term cultural mapping because quite often the cultural

stuff people choose not to put it on the map especially for these land management maps

and i was thinking you know inter-mapping inter-mapping yeah yeah inter in in between

you know um i was thinking is it inter-mapping or intra-mapping but it's something like that i

think inter-mapping is you know it's probably as close as it gets um in between you know it's it's

it's creating that communication sort of space without um collapsing deep difference it's flat

but it's not flattening

yeah yeah yeah yeah my main experience is remote predominantly desert culture aboriginal people

um and you know australian urban and suburban culture i think there are irreconcilable elements

in there um and how do you how do you function in a place where there is there are these

irreconcilable elements and a map lets them sit there you know it doesn't it doesn't try to solve

them it just there they are

they're sitting right there they're things like you know amongst a lot of aboriginal people

mining is a source of royalty so there are plenty of people that want the mining to go ahead and

then you get another you know you might have older people for whom that mine is going somewhere where

it's going to mess with a really profound kind of you know ancestral location and they don't

want it to be there um and there's you know on the white

side there are the obviously environmentalists who don't want the mine and there are the there

are the mining companies who do so you've just got all these conflicts going on and in some places a

mine goes ahead in others it doesn't and there are certain outcomes either way but there's a you

know there's a kind of there's a something both pragmatic and irreconcilable going on there and i

just think that's where we live this is the country we live in and we are having to work with that all

the time and

um

let that exist they don't come up with a oh if we just do this we'll fix it or you know here's a

problem that's solved it's like here are these things they sit they're constantly interacting

interweaving undoing remaking stuff and um it's you know there aren't comfortable solutions um

there's just a thing that's happening that you kind of have to work with and i think a

massive amount of people that are doing that are doing that are doing that are doing that are

can reflect that a good map can reflect that far better than a document or you know someone like me

talking about it I can talk but you know if you see I watch how the maps work when people are in

the room that stuff all just it's all there and you know it does a thing that language words can't

do what do the maps do to you look sometimes they're just hard work it's uh you know some

days getting you because the there are there there are many things you know every map I make

because I work with lots of different groups that is there are different challenges so on the one

hand they keep me you know um constantly

taking

having to problem solve in ways that I don't necessarily feel qualified to do um and they

need to work aesthetically um and that can often be a challenge because quite often people the

people in the room everyone assumes that all aboriginal people are natural artists well they're

not um and a lot of them are either very timid about and I have to facilitate you know getting

them to feel confident about putting stuff on the map um and with others they're really confident

and

you know it looks terrible um and you know so it's it's that just that

um attention it's a bit like drawing you know you're just attentive to everything that's going

on and the and the fact that there's a discord happening out here that you don't understand but

you know has to be attended to that's going to impact on the map and there's you know people

that certain people won't come into the room if others are there all of those types of conflicts

are all being played out

um and so you're navigating all of that stuff

it's often not until afterwards I kind of think oh my god you know did I really experience that

did that really happen um it's it's a way of staying alert to something that is changing all

the time and changing in ways that mostly are not making it into the public domain you know

they're changing all these complex ways I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't

know is it getting more like western culture in some ways it is and in other ways it's not it's

like people are making a life a society and you know in each case that works for them adapting

to what's around them um and it just keeps me aware of that you know I don't have any

kind of solutions obviously as you would have gathered I'm not somebody who

really thinks that way anyhow but just staying alert to it so I think the it's a it gives me

a way

to be in places doing something that keeps all of that alive it's a legitimate way to be there

that's not you know I'm not in there trying to fix things or I'm just there to facilitate this

communication and it happens to take me into extraordinary remote places working with

extraordinary people um it's kind of you know if I could have invented a job for myself back when I

was you know hanging out on the periphery of my university career

trying to figure out how to do it you know I feel like it's taken me you know most of my life

I've nailed it you know just as I'm becoming you know too old to to keep doing it um it's almost

as if all it's it's that that thing that's driven me all my life how do you communicate between the

extremes of this continent we live on I think that's been my driving kind of modus operandi

since you know almost the time I could walk around the world and I think that's been my driving kind of

and talk and that this is the this is what it's become this is what it's turned into and um it's

still you know it's morphing and changing and growing and it'll you know hopefully it's the

one thing that will continue when i'm not it'll have its it'll have its ongoing kind of um um

you know it'll it'll work in its own way so

kim mahoud is the author of three widely acclaimed books wandering with intent position doubtful and

craft for a dry lake she's also the most recent artist in residence at the araloo and art center

here in mbantua alice springs and for 20 years now kim's been facilitating the extraordinary

intermapping projects that you and i have just been hearing about

you

I was so glad to have the chance to sit down with kim for a conversation

and if you've enjoyed hearing it too why not recommend this episode of soul search to a friend

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search website and use the contact us option special shout out to graham in perth thank you

for your note i'm so glad you felt both intrigued and inspired by the recent interview with pearl

proud that was a special episode on healing and transformation and there's more like that to come

in the next few episodes of soul search if you're keen to hear more from central australia you can

find some links to some other episodes we've made by heading to the website for now though this

episode was recorded on arundh country here in central australia and produced on gadigal land

by the abc's rowan salmon my name is meredith lake and i'll catch you again next time for soul search

curious conversations about how we make and find meaning on radio national radio australia and with

the abc listen app

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