This massive commissioned artwork was created for a local resident of Port Lincoln who has been searching for a large, locally created indigenous painting for quite a while. The expression on his face when he first unrolled the canvas was absolutely priceless. Seeing people’s joy and captivation in response to what I have made for them is the best part of my job.

In ancestral times a large mother snake travelled down from the west to Juldi’kapi. From there it was followed by two men (the Wati Kutjara) who wished to kill it. They chased the snake south-east to Pedinga water-hole (Pedinga’kapi, thirty-five miles south-east of the Ooldea Soak). This granite water-hole was the snake’s camp. The natural basin-shaped depressions in the rock, averaging three feet in diameter, are said to be the nests of snakes. Here the Wati Kutjara speared the snake, wounding it severely. They left it thus, thinking that it would soon die, and returned to the west. The snake, however, managed to crawl on a little distance (about two miles) to the south to an ochre pan, named Mul’tan’tu. Here she rested, leaving the red, yellow and white ochre deposits found there. The red ochre symbolizes the blood shed by the snake, the white ochre the excreta; while the yellow ochre is the urine. The snake left this clay-pan and continued on to the north-east and then westwards to her camp.