The illustrated literature of Solomon Cocky: turning the Dreaming into books

Abstract

In 1946, hundreds of Aboriginal workers left their place as indentured labourers on pastoral stations in the North-West of Australia. They went on to organise their own artisanal mines and buy their own pastoral stations, organising themselves collectively against the Australian government and the interests of local pastoralists. Some 30 years later, the ‘Strike Mob’ as they are remembered, established a school with its own publishing programme, making books in the Nyangumarta language so that the next generation would be able to read and write an ancestral language. Solomon Cocky Ngalyarrkiny (d. 1933) was a storyteller and illustrator for this programme, but his books went beyond the needs of the school, with a vocabulary and a distinct, confident mode of illustration. In more than 300 illustrated stories Solomon made a distinct body of literature, turning the printed book from a Western form into an Aboriginal one. The politics of the strikers are reflected in Solomon’s independent spirit, not only in his prolific productivity but in illustrations that adapt the Aboriginal Dreaming to the rectilinear form of the page.

Keywords:

• Aboriginal Australian art
• Aboriginal Australian history
• Pilbara
• Nyangumarta
• Indigenous languages
• children's literature

Acknowledgements

Research on Solomon Cocky would not have been possible without the help of Gwen Bucknall and John Bucknall, who kept Solomon’s books archived, and without the help of Ingrid Walkley at the Nomads Charitable and Educational Foundation. Thanks also to Terry Butler-Blaxell, Samantha Disbray, Barbara Hale, Sharon Hale, Vivien Johnson, Sue Leonard, David Morgan, Paul Roberts, Janet Sharp, Bruce Thomas and Vladimir Todorovic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There was a fluctuating population of as many as seven hundred people at Strelley, with most of them speaking Nyangumarta. The other lingua franca at Strelley was the Western Desert language of Manyjilyjarra.

2 On bilingual education in Australia, see Devlin, Disbray, and Friedman Devlin (2017) and Harris (1990).

3 The most comprehensive account of the strike itself is Scrimgeour (2020). See also Brown (1976), Coppin with Read (1999), Hale (2012), Palmer and McKenna (1978), and Stuart (1978).

4 One account of Solomon’s life is recorded after an oral interview with him in Scrimgeour (2020, 2–3), and includes this estimated year of birth. A second account comes from a biography accompanying a portfolio of posters (Aboriginal Education Resources Unit).

Additional information

Funding

This essay was supported by Australian Research Council award DP210103825.

Notes on contributors

Inge Kral

Inge Kral is a Research Fellow in the School of Design at the University of Western Australia. She is a linguistic anthropologist with some thirty years’ experience as an educator and researcher in Indigenous Australia and Malaysia. Her career began at Strelley School in Western Australia. Recently her research has focused on adult literacy, youth and digital literacies, early childhood learning, Indigenous language documentation and verbal arts, and Indigenous education and language policy.

Darren Jorgensen

Darren Jorgensen is an Associate Professor in the School of Design at the University of Western Australia. His most recent book is The Dead C’s Clyma Est Mort (2023), on music from New Zealand. He mostly publishes on the art history of the Western Desert, including 2023 essays in Art Bulletin and History Australia.