Russell Saunders talk about the mural for the Taree Universities Campus

Manning River Times

Russell and Raechel Saunders create a mural for the Taree Universities Campus

Transcript

00:00 Gojiruku. My name is Uncle Russ. I'm a strong Buripai man. I'm here in my own country, Buripai

00:11 country. With me and my daughter, I sat down and we planned a painting, a mural for the

00:18 university and this mural is about Buripai country. We refer to this place today as the

00:28 Mening Valley, but my people named it Jari, Jari Bit, place of the sandpaper fig. And

00:37 Buripai means place of big hollow. We now refer to this place, like I said, the Mening

00:44 Valley. So our people named this country thousands of years ago before European people came to

00:52 this country 260 years ago and started naming this country. So in this mural, it's about

01:02 the valley, about the Buripai, place of big hollow. And in this painting, you'll see it

01:09 is surrounded by the mountains right around. If you ever had the opportunity to go up in

01:17 a convoying area or up in the mountains of behind Landsdown and look back down the escarpment

01:24 back towards the sea, you'll see it is surrounded by the mountains. What we use to do this mural,

01:31 I'm not a fan of painting murals on just straight on walls. So when I was asked to do this mural,

01:38 I said, let's get something that we can paint on and put it on the wall, screw it on the

01:43 wall. And if some changes come, we can move it. So the mural is actually painted on steel

01:51 and it's big sheets of steel there that is painted on. And the paints that we used after

02:02 painting the ceiling and doing the proper preparation for it is acrylic. We use acrylic

02:10 through the paint. The story, well, the story came from me. I sort of got there after I

02:18 laid it all out, these three big sheets, and started doing a bit of chalk work, scribbling

02:25 down a few little things. And as I started, the idea just grew from there. And we just

02:33 started bouncing off each other, me and my daughter. And my daughter's great at doing

02:38 young people. I'm more of an old person look. I get that wild look about like my reptiles,

02:45 my animals, like my koalas look like they're going to eat you. Whereas my daughter's koalas

02:52 are young, happy, cute little things, like people like to think they are. So my daughter,

03:01 I allowed her to do the figures, people and the birds. I'm more into the symbols, the

03:09 design. So I was doing the river and stuff like that and doing my symbols and my daughter

03:15 was putting in the other parts into it. And then we incorporate with the beautiful dot

03:19 designs and the symbols around it. And it all come together. It just grew from that

03:25 idea from the mountains to the sea of sharing our story about Budapai and what Budapai means.

03:35 You'll see a man again pointing towards the centre of the mural and there's a black cockatoo,

03:42 the big black yellow tail cockatoo. Well, he is another mission to us. Whenever our

03:47 elders would say, "Oh, Uncle, Aunt, there was about four or five black cockatoos just

03:52 flew over your house." And they would say, "Oh, well, it must be four or five days of

03:58 rain coming." So that was more of our rain warning, telling us there's rain coming, the

04:04 black cockatoo. And Balinga, the magpies, they were another story, our dreamtime story

04:13 that has been passed down in our country here. And it's been here for years. The old Commonwealth

04:21 Bank, as you know, in the main street, our murals are still there today. And that's been

04:26 over well over 70 years that I can remember anyway. It's my life that's been there. But

04:33 this has been there for thousands of years from our people have told this story and they

04:37 have heard this story and put it on the walls there. So that's the two, the Balinga, the

04:42 magpie and they're singing there together, happy because they got their colour. And then

04:49 you'll see some symbols there of people on land, footprints moving off in different directions.

04:56 Again, centred back to the river, coming back to the water where a lot of our food is gathered

05:02 from. We love our fish. We love our crabs and prawns and we're seafood eaters. We're

05:10 fresh water, saltwater people. And we moved this land, we moved across this land and we

05:16 lived and hunted together and told our beautiful dreamtime stories to our grandkids and to

05:23 our kids that pass it on today. Marong Moo.

05:27 (chewing)

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