When we go out to get tjanpi we fill the car up with tjitji (kids) and minyma (women), all the family mob, and put in our shovel, wana (digging stick), wayatjarra (billy can), some water, sugar, tea leaf, pannikin or milk tin or something, and a little bit of mai (food) and we are ready, and we get excited, and the kids get excited too; and papa (dog) and all come. We love to get out bush. We love to go for a ride and to feel the country shaking us and to think about what we might find. We know we’ll get some tjanpi (grass)but who knows what else we might get in that tjanpi place. We might look around for tinka (goanna) or maku (witchetty grub) or dig up some shining honey ants or it might be urunpa (bush lolly) season. We like to spend time with family in country and show the little ones the different foods to get and the family places to look after. We like to walk around in our country, feel it. That country is walytja (family) for us.
When we have got all the tjanpi we need, we light a fire and make a dinner camp and sit around and have tea and put the kuka on the fire and share out all the bush tucker and talk together about different, different things. It’s the same way when we make tjanpi work, sitting around with family and sharing stories. Sometimes joking around, sometimes talking seriously, but always sharing stories. Family is where we learn from each other and how we hear all the news.
When we are doing Tjanpi work we are working for our families.
- Jennifer Mitchell, Tjanpi weaver, 2006
Tjanpi Desert Weavers is a bush based enterprise. Collecting grass is the impetus for a whole variety of other bush activities, including gathering foods and caring for country.
Many of the grasses women collect to make baskets and sculptures are familiar to them and their families as seed bearing grasses used to make damper in the early days. Other grasses were used to make bush spoons, build wiltjas (shade shelters) or fashion footwear. On a trip to collect tjanpi women will also collect bush medicines such as irramangka irramangka, bush tobacco, mingkulpa, or leaves and barks to make bush dyes for colouring raffia.
While out bush women and children dig deep holes, loosening the earth with digging sticks and excavating the soil with metal cups or old empty tins, to look for goannas, rabbits and honey ants. Witchetty grubs can be found in the roots of certain trees and at different times of the year certain plants yield sweet nectar that can be sucked straight from the branch.
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