The Yuu Group

The Yuu Group is a special project led by four Anangu women who have been working together for years, creating innovative ways to use the strength of Anangu culture to resist domestic and family violence. Below is a collaborative tjanpi artwork they created which tells the story of how Anangu lived in the past, when the women were children, with families sleeping in a windbreak – a yuu. The scene illustrates that, without a yuu, a fi re can grow out of control. The work that the Yuu Group does calls community to act like a windbreak, to keep the fire under control and protect families.

“We created a scene from traditional times, the times when people had strong protection in the form of windbreak. These two people are strong and looking after their children really well and they have the right size fire. These two in the past, they lived without violence. With that small fi re they lived well and they looked after their children well. Now-days we are all surrounded by violence. The fire has become huge. When the fi re burns too high, the protective windbreak is burnt. That is what violence is. This is what we made to express our thinking and feeling about this. If you have the right size small fi re, that’s the right way to live when you are looking after all the members of the family and it is a good life. That small, low burning fi re is the right help that young people need. So, if you have the right thinking, strong, good thinking, you understand things and you keep that fi re the right small size then there will be no violence and you’ll live together looking after those children and all the other extended family members.”
- Yuu Group member

Funding support was provided by the Department of Human Services, the Department of Social Services, and the Paul Ramsay Foundation.