Ngapulara Ngarngarnyi Wirra (Our Family Tree)

Adam Goodes, Angie Abdilla, Baden Pailthorpe, 'Ngapulara Ngarngarnyi Wirra (Our Family Tree)' (detail), 2022. Tracker Data Project, Immersive installation, 2 x 4K video projections with surround sound (exterior space), and 2 x HD videos with stereo sound, wall text (interior space). Dimensions variable.

Tracker Data Project

Adam Goodes, Angie Abdilla & Baden Pailthorpe MOD, University of South Australia, Adelaide, February-November 2022

What is the link between ancient Aboriginal knowledge systems, biometricdata, the direction of the wind, satellite surveillance, AI and a very oldsacred wirra (tree) deep in Adnyamathanha Country?

The link runs through Adam Goodes and his deep ancestral connections. For the past four years, we, Adam Goodes, Angie Abdilla and Baden Pailthorpe, have been slowly and consciously working with Adnyamathana Custodians and Yarta (Country) in an effort to navigate some of the most complex questions of our time.

Every AFL game Adam Goodes played, his body was tracked 10 times per second via a global network of satellites and a small device on his back.

Whilst this surveillance is standard for all AFL players, the origins of Marngrook, its requirement to have a spatial consciousness spanning 360 degrees and the historical and ongoing surveillance of Aboriginal people in Australia means that the tracking of Aboriginal footballers has a vexed cultural and political significance. During the most intense phase of racism which Adam endured, he escaped the AFL season and the intense scrutiny of the media to return to his Adnyamathana Yarta. While there, he was called by an ancient ancestral wirra (red river gum tree, pronounced ‘widda’). The entanglement of Adam’s biometric data within the metaphysics of Aboriginal knowledge systems has remained invisible, until now.

Adam’s phenomenal spatial awareness and his kinship connections are linked to and rooted in an alternate cultural and scientific paradigm. Multiple traces of these patterns were recorded in his data when he played yet remained invisible due to the Western epistemology of sport science. This is not new or unique to sport—as Bruce Pascoe points out, the ancient Greeks saw the space between stars in the night sky as empty, whereas Aboriginal peoples’ observations of the night skies reveal celestial articulations which are full of life and an alternate philosophy of science born from the dark spaces between stars. The key difference between Western and Aboriginal peoples’ paradigms is that the latter is centred by deep and complex relational interconnections, rooted by Country (earth, waterways and skies combined) and kinship systems.

Adam Goodes, Angie Abdilla, Baden Pailthorpe, 'Ngapulara Ngarngarnyi Wirra (Our Family Tree)' (detail), 2022. Tracker Data Project, Immersive installation, 2 x 4K video projections with surround sound (exterior space), and 2 x HD videos with stereo sound, wall text (interior space). Dimensions variable.

The Tracker Data Project exhibition, at the Museum of Discovery (MOD.), reveals the cultural knowledges within Adam’s AFL data through the Adnyamathanha kinship system—a system based on two moieties with specific characteristics: Ararru (North Wind) and Mathari (South Wind). Adam belongs to the Ararru moiety.

In order to symbolically return Adam’s AFL data to Country, he chose (and was chosen by) a significant wirra more than 500 years old, on Adnyamathanha Yarta. Both Adam’s AFL data and our 3D scan of the wirra have a three-dimensional form called a point cloud, not dissimilar to stars in space. Within our artwork, Ngapulara Ngarngarnyi Wirra (Our Family Tree), Adam’s data sits underneath and around the wirra. They nourish each other. Both are animated by two simulations based on the characteristics of Ararru and Mathari winds, representing the basis of the Adnyamathanha kinship system.

The duality of these two winds connects and balances everything for Adnyamathanha people: physical, spirit and human worlds combined. Within the artwork’s installation, the Ararru and Mathari winds swirl through both the physical space and through the digital space of Adam’s data and the wirra. Together, they create a third liminal space that is completed through the embodied experience as you enter the wirra. The sound of the wind and the physical form of the wirra were recorded on Adnyamathanha Country under the guidance of Traditional Custodians, Aunty Glenise Coulthard AM and Uncle Kingsley Coulthard.

Inside the wirra, Adnyamathanha Custodian Uncle Terrence Coulthard tells the Yura Muda (creation story) of Ikara (Wilpena Pound) in Yura Ngawarla, the Adnyamathanha language, with aerial footage of Adnyamathanha Yarta (country) playing on two screens. The voice of Adam Goodes echoes the Muda in Yura Ngawarla. We used machine learning to translate the Adnyamathanha creation story into the sound of the Ararru (North) and Mathari (South) winds by programming their characteristics into an algorithm. This creates a sonic connection between the interrelationship of Country and kinship systems that can be felt with your body throughout the space.

Exhibition view, Invisibility, Museum of Discovery (MOD), Adelaide, featuring Adam Goodes, Angie Abdilla, Baden Pailthorpe, 'Ngapulara Ngarngarnyi Wirra (Our Family Tree)', 2022, Tracker Data Project, immersive installation, 2 x 4K video projections with surround sound (exterior space), 2 x HD videos with stereo sound, wall text (interior space), dimensions variable.

In an Aboriginal worldview, trees represent an important connection between land, water and sky—reaching deep into the earth channelling water as they reach up into the air, connecting the elements and spaces between both. The wirra in this artwork is more than 500 years old, it connects not only earth, water and sky, but also past, present and future. It was a seedling hundreds of years before Arthur Phillip, Captain of the First Fleet, was even born.

As the first missionaries arrived violently on Adnyamathanha Country (Flinders Ranges, South Australia) this wirra was already a massive, majestic, fully mature giant. As a silent witness to so much history, it forms a physical connection to Adam’s Adnyamathanha ancestors who lived the old ways next to this wirra until approximately 1930. Today, it still stands tall as a symbol of Adnyamathanha resilience.

(L-R): Adam Goodes, Angie Abdilla andBaden Pailthorpe on Country, 2021. Photo: James Alberts

This artwork shows the interconnection and interrelationship of Country and kinship systems developed over millennia. It invites you to experience Adnyamathanha Culture with your body, it asks you to listen to the lyrical beauty of Adnyamathanha Ngawarla (language) and the sound of the wind, and it asks you to consider the sophistication of Aboriginal traditional knowledge systems.

ADAM GOODES, ANGIE ABDILLA & BADEN PAILTHORPE WOULD LIKE TO THANK: The Adnyamathanha Yarta, Adnyamathanha Elders and ngarngarnyi (families) for sharing, teaching and providing guidance with the Yura Muda and Yura Ngwarla. In particular: Aunty Glenise Coulthard AM (Arraru), Uncle Terrence Coulthard (Mathari), Uncle Kinglsey Coulthard (Mathari), Kristian Coulthard (Arraru), Umeewarra Media Radio Station, Port Augusta

Exhibition: Ngapulara Ngarngarnyi Wirra (Our Family Tree), February - November 2022, MOD, Adelaide