Taripang / Dharripa / Trepang

We think of them when we sing. It reminds us that there are people there [in Sulawesi] for us.

– Professor Brian Djaṉgirrawuy Gumbula-Garawirrtja (1962–2023), Birrkili-Gupapuyŋu Elder, ceremonial leader and academic.

‘Makassans’, trepangers from Makassar, South Sulawesi, ceased coming to Northern Australia’s coasts after 1907 due to targeted customs restrictions in line with the White Australia Policy. They and other Maritime Southeast Asian seafarers had been coming here since the distant past, evident in the presence of foreigners, ships, iron and even Allah in the paintings, ceremonies and cosmologies of certain coastal Aboriginal peoples. This is an unfamiliar subject to many Australians, even in the Top End where I live.

Demand for sea cucumber (taripang in Makassarese; dharripa in Yolŋu Matha; trepang in English) emerged in mainland China in approximately 1700, and begat an industry centred around the port city of Makassar. These fisheries gradually expanded outwards, reaching Northern Australia by the 1750s, where trepang are also abundant. By the 1780s, hundreds of ships and thousands of people were journeying to the coasts of the Kimberley and the Northern Territory annually.^[1]

The cross-cultural connections that were made during this period remain alive and continue to evolve in the ontologies of the peoples involved. The impacts of these relationships have also been studied continuously by anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnomusicologists, linguists and many more while they were still in peoples’ living memories. In more recent times, this has developed into a wide range of more collaborative, international projects across both the arts and academia; the exhibition being reviewed here is one such expression.

In my short academic career, I’ve caught glimpses of this history entering the present. I’ve travelled to Sulawesi with Yolŋu elders who met their blood relatives there, and I’ve sat with Yolŋu and Bugis people while they spoke about the many words shared across their respective languages.^[2] For the average Australian, though, these narratives remain obscured by Eurocentric representations of Australia’s pre-modern history and its south east colonial contact zones.

Taripang / Dharripa / Trepang, at the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA) on Larrakia Country, curated by the centre’s director, Petrit Abazi, brings light to this history in a way that is both thorough and accessible. Explicitly a truth-telling endeavour, the exhibition is comprised of an eclectic combination of archival material and contemporary artworks from the NT and South Sulawesi presenting modern permutations of these histories. Video installations, depicting Yolŋu (Dhalwaŋu) and Tiwi ceremonies, modern-day Mandar seafarers and Yolŋu elders teaching children about Makassans, sit among Aboriginal bark paintings and carvings and Indonesian textiles. In placing contemporary tellings of these shared histories alongside more traditional works, Abazi’s curation leads us on a journey that showcases what these unbroken connections to the past mean to their owners today.

At the back of the exhibition, guests find themselves face-to-face with the catalysts of everything they have just viewed: ten live trepang in a tank. At a point in the past, trepang became a valued commodity for the peoples and as a result, gained ‘social life’ by becoming a socially relevant ‘thing’.^[3] The rest of the works show how the many cultural significances attached to these unassuming creatures have persisted, despite the cessation of the Makassans’ voyages more than a century ago.

I attended the exhibition opening as well as a panel discussion the following day, presented by Agency Projects as part of UNTOLD Darwin 2024. The panel, moderated by Leila Gurruwiwi and Petrit Abazi, featured some of the exhibition’s contributors: Makassar artists Zaenal Beta and Abdi Karya, Tiwi artists Michelle Pulatuwayu Woody Minnapinni and Colin Heenan-Puruntatameri, and Muran historian Don Nawurlany Christophersen, provided insight from key knowledge holders and into the far-reaching collaborations that made the exhibition possible. I was also fortunate to tour the gallery with a group of Indonesian and Australian colleagues, including co-curator Abdi Karya and senior Golumala elder Renelle Gandjitjiwuy Gondarra.

Like other exhibitions of Top End art and ceremonial traditions, Taripang / Dharripa / Trepang presents interconnected histories as they exist in the present and how they are commemorated, passed on to future generations and reinterpreted in new ways through art and ceremony. However, as an international collaboration this exhibition is one of a relatively small number that have presented works from both 'sides' of the present-day international border. Yet, there are not just two ‘sides’ here; there are many distinct groups of people in the region who were involved in the trepang industry.

Abazi and his many collaborators have successfully provided a window into this diversity of peoples; this is the exhibition’s real triumph. Different Aboriginal peoples, not limited to the Anindilyakwa, Iwaidja, Tiwi and Yolŋu represented in the artworks, had their own agreements (and disagreements) over the Makassans’ access to their land and sea country, and the Makassans themselves were multi-ethnic. Milingimbi artist Matthew (Teapot) Djipurrtjun’s bark painting First travelling story, Makassan (2024), for example, depicts flags belonging to an alliance of Yolŋu clan groups, who had a complex system of laws for the purpose of engaging with non-Aboriginal people.^[4] The middle section of the gallery contains works representing several of the seafaring cultural groups who were often among the crews that came here: the Bugis, Makassarese and Mandar from South Sulawesi—a reminder that the people we call ‘Makassans’ in Australia aren’t a single cultural group.^[5]

Taripang / Dharripa / Trepang does far more than just alerting people to ‘Australia’s first modern industry’.^[6] It presents living histories, compiled in collaboration with the owners of those histories, to introduce audiences to a general account of a period of sustained encounter between Aboriginal and Austronesian peoples. The realisation of this in a contemporary art space rather than a museum setting is evidence of the art world’s embrace of such living intercultural histories.