Rona Bin Hitam Garra Gangji (Shell Skeleton) Bag Charm
Bag Charm Artwork Story:
In Baard Language and Culture there is a distinction between the creature that lives in the shell and the Shell skeleton. The Garra Gangji is what’s left over when you eat the animal inside, or the animal dies and the Garra Gangji washes up on the beach. We collect live shells to eat and keep the shell skeletons.
Rona Bin Hitam
Artist Bio:
Rona Bin Hitam is a Goolarrgoon Baard Woman from the northwest region of Baard Country north of Broome which stretches from the tip of Swan Point to the Border of Pender Bay.
Rona comes from strong family knowledge of living on that Country, growing up with her grandparents near Lombadina where she would help them with hunting, maintaining and using the stone fish traps, and Bungojrrding (Fish poisoning with yams) during the wet season. Her grandparents would come to Broome for ceremony and Rona would hang out at Streeters Jetty with friends, snacking on unguarded dried pearl meat, drying on lines on the decks of the pearl luggers.
As a teenager Rona worked with her aunts and uncles harvesting trochus shells off the reef to trade in Broome. They would boil the shells in 44-gallon drums before extracting the meat, draining and drying their skeletons on corrugated iron on the beach. These shells were a major global export for Broome and the peninsula region used for button manufacturing in Europe and North America. Rona’s incredible photographic memory helps her to draw her designs of Gaarn Ganji (Shell skeletons) as well as gum leaves and flowers from the spear tree used by Baard people.
Rona has a love of rock and roll and always brings her cheeky sense of humour to the studio. She is also an excellent fisherwoman.
