Milky Way Dreaming

I bought my first piece of art! The piece is "Milky Way Dreaming" by Janet Forrester Nangala.



The mythologies, Dreamtime stories and language of the Central Desert Aboriginal people change from region to region. There are several different versions of the one story depending on the area and the family group concerned.

A good example is the ancient story of the Milky Way and Seven Sisters Dreaming.

All over Australia, it is believed that the stars and planets were once men, women and animals in the Creation times. The Milky Way is considered a sacred residence for totemic beings. Such beings are represented in this painting.

Seven sisters walked the earth in creation times. They were being chased tirelessly by an enormous ancestor spirit and their only hope of escaping him was to throw themselves into the sky where they became the soft glowing stars of the Milky Way constellation. However, one sister was caught by the old spirit, and after he took her back to his cave, she encouraged him to eat enough food to make him fall asleep. It was then that she made her escape and rejoined her sisters in the sky.

The Seven sisters are totemic for Janet and she has the right and responsibility to paint this story for future generations. Her mother taught her to paint, and although Janet uses acrylic paint on canvas as opposed to the traditional sand mosaics, she is sure to keep the story intact in its original context and therefore retain the spirit and essence of this important dreaming.

Janet paints the dreamings inherited from her mother and grandmother. Her family connections are in Alice Springs, Maryvale and the Ernabella community. The Australian National Gallery has acquired her Milky Way Dreaming for its permanent collection, and her Bush Banana Dreaming painted on John Farnham’s jeans was auctioned at Sotheby’s to raise money for the medical research institute – Jeans for Genes (1995). Her painting career began in the early 1980s with the IAL and Tjukurrpa artists. Janet’s circular background design represents the never-ending story of life, creation, birth and death.