"A breasted ontology": Australian Central Desert Peoples and the inscribed female breast

If you are a woman who has not been able to breastfeed - which is never any individual's fault - you may find this article, which focuses on the celebration of breastfeeding and a woman's breast, quite painful to read. You might even want to skip it for now. There is an article about the grief of not being able to breastfeed here.

Professor Jennifer Biddle encounters Australian First Nations' representations of the female breast in contemporary art

The Australian First Nations Peoples, traditional custodians of the lands upon which I live and work, are the oldest continuous cultures on Earth.

Professor Jennifer Biddle, an anthropologist with a background in linguistics at the University of New South Wales, wrote about First Nations' women's contemporary representations of breasts on canvas in her 2006 essay Breasts, bodies, art: Central Desert women's paintings and the politics of the aesthetic encounter.

In an online conversation, Professor Biddle explained to me that this particular essay was published early in her career. Today, she and her colleagues work differently, she explained, in close collaborations guided by First Nations People - collaborations which decline to accept the gaze of an anthropologist looking in, no matter how carefully. Nevertheless, this early-career essay has been celebrated by Australian feminists as a seminal contribution which contested the dominant, white, European, and masculinist cultural perceptions of the female breast.

In the essay, Professor Biddle reflects on what she refers to as First Nations' women's "breasted ontology". With this phrase, she's referring to the way works of art by certain First Peoples made sense of their relationship with the world around them through a particular experience of the female breast.

Professor Biddle's responses to Central Desert art which included women's breasts

Here, I summarise key elements of Professor Biddle's 2006 essay, and quote from it in italics. Referring to the breasts represented in Central Desert women's art, Professor Biddle writes

"For these are fecund breasts; breasts that drip, seep, weep ... Breasts are productive and reproductive in a far more active way than western notions of 'lactation' suggest ... What makes these painted-up breasts generative is that they repeat an initial Ancestral imprintation of country."

Amongst the Warlpiri and Anmatyerr/Alyawarr, who are Central Desert First Peoples, the long, flat, post-menopausal breast (shaped something like a eucalyptus leaf) has been from the beginning of time a sign of ceremonial power and potency. During sacred women's-only ceremonial performance, the downward pointing nipples of a woman who is no longer of child-bearing age remain the centre-point of ancestral imprintation. Similarly, in breastfeeding, the nipple is the centre of fecundity and sacred power, out of which the milk flows into the baby.

Central Desert women explain that ochre makes Country and Ancestors visible in breast painting. Professor Biddle reflects that ritual performance emphasises the weight, the downward undulations, the quivers, shudders, and haptics (or slapping sound) of mature women's breasts as they dance.

Discussing Warlpiri preparations for women's-only ceremonial rituals, she writes:

• "Kuruwarri signs are put and re-put. Ochre will be dragged and re-dragged on breast ... The aim is ... that the kuruwarri, the Ancestral force, enters the body and ‘feeds’ the woman. The rhythmic, repetitious marking and re-marking literally press the kuruwarri mark in. ... What is 'inside' is brought 'out'... In short, a certain embodied expression of Ancestral presence is effected ... it is through the productivity of the breast that one ‘becomes’ ancestor, ‘becomes’ country."

• "For the aim ... is, after all, the care of country, as part of a larger series of what have been described as generalised ‘increase’ ceremonies in which the livening up of country — rejuvenating, re-vitalising, ‘feeding’ certain places, species and persons accordingly — occurs. ... The literal imbibition of nipple, skin — the physical ‘latch on’, mouth to breast, the ‘blind recognition’ of empathetic bonding, shared intentions, synchronous movement, mirror imaging; the pleasures, intentions, and sentiments of the mother’s body ... [The mother remains] throughout her life indebted to, defined by and in relation to the bodies of others — and specifically here, the materiality of country as breast, country as body."

Professor Biddle comments that First Peoples' understanding of the relationship between human and Country is of mutuality and a two-way interdependence, and is seen to be like the relationship between mother and baby. It's true that Country nurtures the People, but it's equally true that the First Peoples nurture the Country.

"Country is starving without care. Country is figured as infant. Country can only remain fertile, productive, if in fact it is looked after, tended to, cared for, fed, properly. And that means work. Ritual, ceremony, what Warlpiri call in English ‘business’, is a labour of lifelong attachment." [p. 19, 20]

What we might take away from Professor Biddle's essay

We in late capitalist societies have lost a sense of the bigger meaning of breastfeeding and the way the simple, repeated, physical act of feeding a baby from our body also acts mythically, to remind those around us of life's deeper dimension.

That is, feeding baby from our body reminds other people that caring for the Earth and for living things is fundamental to the nature of our humanness. If we don't generously nurture the broader community of life on this Earth, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren - living on a planet of extreme weather events, poisoned rivers and seas, mass human migration, genocide, and catastrophic loss of species - will want to know why we, their ancestors, did not care.

The Earth and also the Universe (which birthed the Earth and every atom in our bodies) continue to feed us in every new moment that presents itself to us - moment after moment after moment.

This is what you are reminding the humans around you as you breastfeed your baby. You are reminding others how to relate to - how to love and celebrate - the very essence of life, which is an unimaginably powerful upwelling of renewal and nurturance.

Acknowledgements

My son's partner Marisha, one of the developers and a key coder who built the possums.org website, enjoys some of the extraordinary First Nations art exhibited in the Queensland Art Gallery during a visit to Australia.

Recommended resources

Acknowledgement of Country and of ancestral breastfeeding on Country

Selected references

Biddle JL. Breasts, bodies, art: Central Desert women's paintings and the politics of the aesthetic encounter. Cultural studies review. 2006;12(1):16-31.

Festival of the Breast. Blog by Dr Janelle Trees