Betty Muffler: Healing Coutry
Betty Muffler is an artist and healer – her paintings, drawing and weavings are imbued with her connection to Country.
Image credit: Betty Muffler, Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country), 2020, ink on paper. 122 x 152 cm. Courtesy the artist and Iwantja Arts, Indulkana
Betty Muffler, an Anangu Pitjantjatjara woman from remote South Australia, knows the power of finding hope through adversity. Her childhood memories are layered with sadness and grief. When the world went into lockdown last year, Muffler began painting, and healing. Healing herself, her people and her Country.
Muffler, now in her 70s, is a survivor. She lost many members of her family in the aftermath of the 1950s British atomic tests carried out on Aboriginal Country at Maralinga and Emu Field in South Australia. She is a Ngangkari, a spiritual healer who has special abilities and a reputation throughout her community as one of the best Ngangkari in the lands.
Muffler’s story begins on her Country in remote South Australia, 800 kilometres north-west of Adelaide, part of the Woomera site where a series of British nuclear tests were conducted in the desert from 1956 to 1963. Maralinga, the place, is a word that translates to thunder in the language of the Iwaidja people from Garig/Port Essington on the Cobourg Peninsula in the Northern Territory. The settlement was established by the British government from 1838 to 1849, with a plan for it to be a trade route for the East India Company through to Southeast Asia. But the weather was deemed too unpredictable as the wet season brought with it the maralinga (thunderous) monsoonal rains. The name Maralinga is also an eerie coincidence – the Iwaidja people were lucky that their Rainbow Serpents, spiritual beings, would appear each year to ...Subscribe to read this article in full