Regional Stories
Belonging Rosemary Sayer
I saw the painting as soon as I stepped into the room. Aboriginal artist Loreen Samson’s canvas immediately took me back to my teenage years of arriving in the Pilbara. I saw her vivid salt ponds through the oval window of a plane when I was circling the Karratha Airport for the first time about to land and undertake the start of a new life. I felt the churn of nausea in my belly and my clammy hands at the remembered sense of unknowing contrasted with a great appreciation for a land that would come later. As I looked at the painting the two feelings rubbed against each other like two hands trying to get warm. This land would become my home, a place of belonging, but the first time I saw it I was bewildered and just a little frightened. For Loreen Samson, whose family insisted her work still be hung in the exhibition even after she passed away, capturing her traditional land on canvas became her life’s work in Roebourne, close to Karratha. I swapped my aisle seat with my mother so I could look out the plane window. The flying had been smooth but for the last hour she had been sighing and quietly saying ‘no’ under her breath in the hope that I wouldn’t hear her. What was out there? I looked through the oval and saw a red sandy desert for as far as I could see. I saw what looked like gullies where water may have once run. I closed my eyes and made the vision go blurry like it did when I forgot to wear my glasses. Now it looked like a patchwork quilt of different shades of ochre, brown, grey and black. It looked like Loreen Samson’s painting. I felt totally disorientated. Two hours before mum, dad and I had been sitting in the suburbs of Perth drinking coffee thinking things felt pretty much like our previous home in Tasmania; our home that had been left behind. Dad had searched out new job 59
