‘You have got to be brave to do this.’
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this article contains reference to deceased persons.
Tribute to Kwementyaye Purrurle Neale
The Mparntwe | Alice Springs arts community is mourning the loss of senior Arrernte woman Kwementyaye Purrurle Neale. Poet, performer and activist, Kwementyaye insisted on a biography that pronounced herself first as ‘a grandmother and a great-grandmother’. Family was, as much as anything else, her life’s work.
She told me once she didn’t regard herself as a poet but as ‘someone who puts her thoughts and feelings down in writing’. She was never in pursuit of the writer identity as she was in pursuit of words and writing and story. She was ever bewildered by readers’ responses to her work, often shaking her head at my delight in her turn of phrase.
I met Kwementyaye in the early 2000s, soon after I came to live in Mparntwe. There was an immediate connection between us, fortified by a shared love of literature and theatre and writing. Our creative collaboration began with theatre-making, our first show being a movement-based piece called ‘A Place’, first performed out the back of the old Watch This Space on George Crescent and later, in Adelaide, when we dumped a truckload of red sand in the middle of the city and declared it a theatre set. Kwementyaye went on to perform on many stages in Alice Springs.
Meanwhile she wrote. I was privileged to be often asked to read drafts of her work or sit alongside her while she wrote. She worked for hours on a piece for Mixtape Memoirs, a writers’ festival event where writers respond to a piece of music that holds some significance. She knew from the outset what she would write. At an early age she was struck by hearing Les Misérables on the radio. What had stirred her she would only fully understand years later, on seeing the stage show of Victor Hugo’s classic novel. She couldn’t fathom how a novel written in 1862 by a Frenchman could resonate so strongly with the experience of Australia’s Indigenous people. She heard the ‘beating of the drums’ as a call to activism that would carry across her life; a call to speak up, to question, to fight for justice for her people.
Across time, Kwementyaye would be published in a number of anthologies and journals including Voice from the Heart (1995) and This Country Anywhere Anytime (2010) and Australian Poetry Journal. In 2019 her poetry was featured in Arelhekenhe Angkentye: Women’s Talk, an anthology that came from the NTWF theme lyapirtneme, an Arrernte word to explain the phenomenon of things returning after a loss or absence.
In one of her many poems in the collection, ‘Waiting for Lyapirtneme’, Kwementyaye wrote about lyapirtneme as healing, ‘helping to take away the sadness, the loss of loved ones’. In her familiar style, the poem refers beyond the personal, to the historical wrongs – ‘the invasions, intrusions, the cruelty’ – expressing a deep longing for healing of the nation’s past, indivisible from her own.
Four years ago, at almost 80 years old, Kwementyaye embarked on her own original performance work, My History, Your History, Our History based on a piece she’d written years before while studying at IAD. I can see now how this sold-out performance was a denouement of a kind, a coming together of all the strands of her artistry and activism. She said what she needed to say and in doing so the fine membrane between the personal and political was made plain, making her presence in that small but packed room on Gap Rd, so incredibly powerful.
The following year Kwementyaye won the 2023 Pam Lofts or ‘Lofty’ award for her ‘significant contributions to community, art, and activism’, a fitting celebration of her impact on the community and cultural life of central Australia. The year after, she celebrated her 80th birthday, a different, more personal kind of celebration with family and friends. These celebrations hold extra poignancy now.
‘You have got to be brave to do this’ reads her epigraph at the start of the anthology of Arrernte women’s poetry. She knew the vulnerability of being a writer, of speaking your truth and sharing your own story. When I think of all she achieved, I see how truly brave Kwementyaye Purrurle Neale was. And I know, when it came to writing, she made others, including myself, brave also.
Rest in peace, in your beloved country, brave writer – my beautiful, brilliant friend.
Dani Powell
Dani Powell is a writer and performance-maker. Her novel Return to Dust (UWAP 2020) won the NT Chief Minister’s Book Award for Fiction in 2022. She was Artistic Director of the NT Writers Festival (Mparntwe /Alice Springs) from 2015-2021.