Taku Rosie Tarco
Born about 1935
Juwaliny language group, Nangkarti skin group
Fitzroy Crossing Community
Mangkaja Arts
I was only a kid, what you call a little manga [girl]. I went travelling and left my Country. We walked a long long way. I had to leave my mother behind.Everyone was leaving the Country then. We came out of the desert at old Billiluna. We came this way, through the Canning Stock Route. People cried when they sat with me because I was so skinny. I had no mother to look after me, poor thing. And now look at me. I’m the fattest one!
Taku was born at Japingka. During a period of intense drought, which lasted from 1956-1964, she travelled north along the stock route with Nada Rawlins’ family to Billiluna, Moola Bulla Station and eventually Fitzroy Crossing.
Jilji
2007, by Rosie Tarco
acrylic on canvas, 118×89 cm
Mangkaja Artists
National Museum of Australia
Too much jilji [sandhills] in our Country. Up and down, up and down. Kartiya [white people] get sick of it.
The Canning Stock Route runs through hundreds of kilometres of rugged sandhill country. The long, reverberating lines in this painting represent the high red sandhills, or jilji, that dominate much of the Great Sandy Desert.
