SKU: 40134500589

"Bush Plum Seeds" by Gracie Morton Pwerle

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"Bush Plum Seeds" by Gracie Morton PwerleSize: 200 x 110cm Acrylic on Canvas Commissions available, please reach out to art@creativenative. com. au Born on Utopia Station, c. 1956, Gracie Morton Pwerle is the daughter of well known artist MyrtlePetyarre and the sister of famous artists Gloria and Kathleen Petyarre. There is a rich artistic tradition that runs through Gracies family as well as the Utopia community. Not only Gracies aunties but her sisters, Mary, Rita, and Elizabeth, are also

Size: 200 x 110cm

Acrylic on Canvas

Commissions available, please reach out to [email protected]

 

Born on Utopia Station, c.1956, Gracie Morton Pwerle is the daughter of well-known artist MyrtlePetyarre and the sister of famous artists Gloria and Kathleen Petyarre. There is a rich artistic tradition that runs through Gracie’s family as well as the Utopia community. Not only Gracie’s aunties but her sisters, Mary, Rita, and Elizabeth, are also artists.

 Gracie Morton began painting in the late 1980s during the “A Summer Project”, where acrylic paints and canvas were introduced to the women of Utopia. Her artworks have been well received throughout Australia and overseas. Gracie is a senior traditional custodian of the Arnwekety (Bush Plum) Dreaming, and in accordance with traditional law she is responsible for ensuring the Dreaming, customs, and traditions associated with the Bush Plum are upheld. This responsibility was passed down to Gracie from her father and aunt.

 Gracie’s primary subject in her artwork is Arnwekety and through her artwork, she depicts the changing seasonal influences on the plant. Gracie creates a wonderful lyricism in her artworks, causing a three-dimensional visual effect that guides the observer through the soft outward-reaching fields of color. 

 Gracie’s artworks are represented in major private collections including the Holmes à Court Collection and her artworks are exhibited regularly throughout Australia. She has been a part of international exhibitions in China, Germany, Italy, and The Netherlands.

 Roseanne Morton Petyarre is an Anmatyerre woman from the Utopia region of Central Australia. Utopia is an old outstation located 270km northeast of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. She was born in 1984 and is part of a family of well-established artists, including her mother Gracie Morton Pwerle

The Story of the Bush Plum Dreaming

 Gracie’s paintings are borne from traditional knowledge and her confident approach to painting is evident in the way she assembles the images of the bush seeds, piling dots over each other to create a dense surface using a rich palette of color. Gracie’s subject matter is drawn from acute observation and memory. There is an intimate knowledge of country, blended with personal history and ancestral journey.

 The Bush Plum Dreaming Story is a big story that spreads right across the western and central deserts from Lajamanu and Warlpiri country to the Utopia homelands.

 The Bush Plum Dreaming or Creation Story from the Utopia region goes like this: In the Dreamtime, winds blew from all directions carrying the bush plum seed to the artists’ ancestral lands. The first bush plum of the Dreamings grew and bore fruit and dropped more seeds. Many winds blew the seeds all over the Dreaming lands.

 To ensure the continued fruiting of this plant each season, the Aboriginal people pay homage to the spirit of the bush plum by painting about it and recreating it in their ceremonies through song and dance. The patterns in the paintings celebrate the Bush Plum work on many levels: they represent the fruit of the plant, its leaves, and flowers and also the body paint designs that are associated with it during the ceremony.

 The bush plum is a popular variety of bush tucker that is only found at certain times of the year. It is found throughout most of the Utopia region and as far west as Lajamanu. Sadly, it has declined in abundance due to the grazing of introduced animals, particularly cattle and rabbits. The bush plum fruits in the summer after rain and is an important food source, even though not all the plum is edible. The plums can be collected when ripe and immediately eaten, or they can be dried and eaten later.

 When young, the fruit is green in appearance but as it matures, it becomes a purple-black color and is similar in looks to an olive. The plant can grow up to 3 meters high and has blue-green leaves and produces a creamy white flower, making it an attractive-looking plant.

 The bush plum also plays an important part in Warlpiri Dreaming and ritual practices involved in Yilpinji, Love Magic. When a girl falls in love she goes to her female relatives and is instructed on how to attract her man as a lover. She weaves a belt out of her hair while singing Yilpinji songs imbuing the belt with magic. When the man approaches she entices him with her charms until he comes under the influence of her allure. She reveals the belt as his ardor grows and persuades him to place the belt around her waist. As he does, he falls under her spell and they go off together as a couple. Together they eat bush plums and hunt for food.

 Other important Warlpiri, on learning of their tryst, follows them and confront them as a couple and also eat the bush plums. In this way, the group recognizes their relationship and acknowledges that it is an appropriate match. They are now recognized by all as a couple.

Just like the artists from which Belinda learned, she possesses an innate sense of color. This style of work has often been compared to that of the 19th-century Impressionists; reminiscent of the color fields used and their immediate emotive quality.

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SKU: 40134500589

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Jeff Gardner
Massapequa, US
★★★★★ 5
Marxism summarized
Not having read much of Marx’s writing I found this work to be an interesting summary of Marx’s thought and objectives. This work provides a different understanding of Marx and his objectives compared to what I have heard of Marxism both when Marx’s work is referenced in theoretical contexts and (supposedly) put into practice.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2022
B
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BBR
Cuba, US
★★★★★ 5
Facts
Format: Paperback
Very good short book
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Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2025
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T. Graczewski
Bozeman, US
★★★★★ 5
Little Giant
Format: Paperback
“Did any other leader in the twentieth century do more to improve the lives of so many? Did any other twentieth-century leader have such a large and lasting influence on world history?” This is how Ezra Vogel concludes his massive 700-page tome, “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.” Indeed, who else in history has raised more people out of poverty? There may be no definitively right answer, but Vogel makes a convincing case that Deng Xiaoping has a better claim than anyone else. While lengthy, this book is an easy read and provides fascinating insights and lots of detail on how Deng and his forward-thinking policies turned China from a backward, poverty stricken basket case in the wake of the disastrous Cultural Revolution to an economic superpower in a single generation. It has been a revolution every bit as astonishing and impactful to world history as the Japanese Meiji Restoration of the late nineteenth century. Vogel’s narrative focuses mainly on the years from Mao’s death in 1976 to Deng’s retirement in 1992. Deng’s quite eventful first 65 years of life are covered in just 45 pages; China’s dramatic growth over the two decades since his retirement receive a mere 20 pages of attention. This book could have been called the “Deng Restoration,” the decade-and-a-half period when the Chinese leader blazed a new path, normalizing Chinese foreign relations and assiduously laying the political and economic groundwork for China’s improbably rapid rise from a self-isolated Third World Country into a global leader in manufacturing and burgeoning superpower just beginning to stretch its legs and demand its rightful place in the sun, to paraphrase Bismark. What struck me most about Deng’s leadership and policies, besides their remarkable success, was their consistency – and authority. His power was strictly personal, not positional; Deng was never chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, nor Premier of the Chinese government. Rather, he was something else, the “preeminent leader,” officially only vice chairman of the party and chairman of the Central Military Commission. Aging and hard of hearing, he rarely attended Politburo meetings. Yet, “it is doubtful that anyone [other than Deng] had the combination of authority, depth and breadth of experience, strategic sense, assurance, personal relationships, and political judgment needed to manage China’s transformation with comparable success,” Vogel writes. When he came to power in the late 1970s, he had very firm ideas on what needed to be done, plans that Vogel claims matured in Deng’s mind during his long and humiliating five year exile in Jiangxi working at a tractor factory during the Cultural Revolution. First, stability and unity were paramount in Deng’s plans, according to Vogel. He knew that the economic transformation China must go through would be wrenching and tumultuous, and he believed that only the Communist Party, with its discipline and order, could effectively manage the change. He had to maintain a delicate balance between encouraging innovative thinking and freedom of expression while maintaining the unquestioned rule of the Communist Party. In 1978, Deng formulated the Four Cardinal Principles, essentially four red lines that could not be crossed in China (socialist path; dictatorship of the proletariat; leadership of the Communist Party; Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought), and he never waivered from them. In fact, his most controversial and unpopular decision – the military crackdown at Tiananmen Square in 1989 – was taken precisely because the protests were openly challenging the Four Cardinal Principles. Although he was an ambitious reformer, he was a Communist first-and-foremost. When his two top lieutenants and official heads of party and state, respectively, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, were seen as going soft on dissidents, he had them unceremoniously cashiered. It was the outpouring of love for Hu at his death in 1989, along with frustration at how he had been treated by Deng and the Party, that sparked the Tiananmen protests, a movement that became truly dangerous when Zhao resigned rather than acquiesce to Deng’s call for martial law. Second, vast improvements in science, technology and education would be the cornerstone of Deng’s policies. Vogel describes Deng as obsessed with the importance of education and the critical role in advanced technology in China’s future. At roughly the same time that Deng formulated the Four Cardinal Principles to guide political discussion in China, he also developed the Four Modernizations, the areas in which the government would concentrate efforts to learn, grow and improve: 1) science and technology; 2) industry; 3) agriculture; and 4) defense. Again, Deng and the Chinese government remained steadfast in pursuing these objectives even when they led in politically sensitive directions, such as dropping class background from college admission criteria and instead relying solely on meritocratic entrance exams; encouraging thousands of students to study overseas, especially in Western countries, exposing them to potential “dangerous” ideas; establishing special economic zones (SEZ) along the coast to promote capitalist investment and trade, even though they encouraged graft and corruption; and the dramatic downsizing of the People’s Liberation Army to create a more highly educated and technologically savvy armed forces. “Deng was unique in that he pushed doors open far wider – to foreign ideas, foreign technology, and foreign capital – than his predecessors, and he presided over the difficult process of expanding the opening despite the disruptions it caused,” Vogel writes. Third, Deng was adamant that China must be fully engaged in world affairs. He was very much his own foreign policy strategist and built his policies around a few basic objectives. Above all, Soviet expansion must be stoutly resisted. Deng went to war – “Deng’s War,” Vogel says – with communist neighbor Vietnam in 1979 to “teach Hanoi a lesson.” Namely, that China refused to allow Vietnam to become a hegemonic power in Southeast Asia while serving as the Soviet’s “Cuba in the East.” China’s month-long invasion captured five northern Vietnamese provincial capitals at the cost of 25,000 PLA soldiers killed in action, according to Vogel (that is, China lost half as many men in one month in Vietnam as the US did in a decade!). Next, Deng sought to normalize and improve relations with the Western world, an objective he largely achieved, although the backlash from Tiananmen Square was sharp and prolonged. Finally, Deng desperately wanted to consolidate Chinese territory in his lifetime, achieving peace and stability in Tibet, reintegrating Hong Kong, and, most important of all, reunifying with Taiwan. The last goal was one of Deng’s great disappointments, although he did successfully prevent the Reagan administration from formally recognizing Taiwan and worked to reduce arms shipments to the island nation. “Under Deng’s leadership,” the author writes, “China truly joined the world community, becoming an active part of international organizations and of the global system of trade, finance, and relations among citizens of all walks of life.” Finally, Deng was a political virtuoso, albeit of a distinctly communist variety. Deng was well-described by US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance as “remarkable… impatient, feisty, self-confidently outspoken, direct, forceful, and clever.” Standing just five-feet-tall, with limited formal education and a lifelong habit of using a spittoon even when negotiating directly with world leaders in the West, Deng was nevertheless a man of immense natural ability and innate political instincts. Unlike the “mercurial” Mao, who Vogel describes as “ranked high among world leaders” in megalomania and lust for power, Deng was personally humble, wanting nothing more than to serve his country and then be forgotten. Upon his death, he donated his corneas for eye research, his internal organs to medical science, was cremated and had his ashes scattered into the sea. There would be no “Cult of Deng” if he had anything to say about it. A deeply and sincerely committed communist, he was nevertheless open-minded and had no use for communist dogma. He was highly opposed to Mao’s revolutionary radicalism, yet sensitive to charges of being the “Chinese Khrushchev.” He quickly worked to overthrow the so-called “Gang of Four” after Mao’s death, but steadfastly espoused a flexible, results oriented approach to reform. “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, just so long as it catches mice,” he liked to say. He used his liberal approach to outmaneuver and then oust Mao’s handpicked successor, the middle-aged cipher Hua Goufeng, who stumbled badly in 1977 when he penned an editorial claiming that future policy “will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave” (the so-called “Two Whatevers”). Deng had different ideas – and they would prevail. Although he a had clear vision for where China should go conceptually, Deng honestly admitted that he had to “grope for stones as he crossed the river” the entire time, never knowing for certain which approach was best, but always open to learning-by-doing. “Don’t argue, just push ahead,” was a favorite mantra. His SEZ experiment at Shenzhen was controversial, but ultimately successful beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. And unlike Dahzai, Mao’s experimental ideal collective community, Chinese leaders and others flocked to Shenzhen out of genuine interest rather than political expediency. Twenty-first century China is Deng’s China. If the sun is setting on the American century and rising in the East, no one man had more to do with it than Deng Xiaoping, a man Vogel believes may be one of the greatest men in his nation’s long history. “The transition from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban society and the spread of common national culture are among the most fundamental changes that have occurred in Chinese history since the country’s unification in 221 BC,” Vogel declares, and it was mainly the work of one little, unassuming man from a small village in Szechuan.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2014
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Verified Purchase
Steven Peterson
Charlottesville, US
★★★★★ 5
An important biography of one of the major figures in China's transformation
Format: Paperback
A wonderful biography of Deng Xiaoping. There is more emphasis on the later as opposed to earlier years of his life. He was a survivor, having been purged twice by Chairman Mao Zedong. But Mao was not to be finished with Deng--keeping him on the backburner in case he needed his skills later on. The book provides background for his ultimate leadership of China. Deng was "taken down" during the Cultural Revolution, an enormous upheaval of Chinese society orchestrated by Mao. Deng and his family were essentially "exiled." When the time came for Mao to recall him and address excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Deng was slowly put back into harness for a short period of time. The time came when, again, Mao began to distrust Deng and even put the cold shoulder to Zhou Enlai, Mao's long time lieutenant. After a brief exile, Deng was again readmitted into a leadership role. The book then goes on to outline how, through political acumen and skills at coalition building, slowly became the # 1 leader, leaving Mao's successor out of power. The book has several areas where it explores Deng's career as leader. His role in upgrading the state of science and education is one focal point. There is a nice discussion of his reaching out to other countries to bring China up to speed in modernizing its economy, its military, and so on. The book also considers economic his economic policies, as Deng tried to jump start China's economy, based on fairly rapid growth (with the risk of inflation). His tactics to do this are described well. There is also discussion of his role in the military. He knew that the army was too large, too many senior officers had outlived their usefulness, and the war technology was not up to modern armies. How he was able to make progress in these (and other) sectors is fascinating. The book also addresses what appear to be some difficult choices that suggest some problematic decision making by Deng. His invasion of Vietnam is portrayed by Deng as a major factor in addressing Vietnam's aggressiveness. I think that the book's author might have had a somewhat more critical take on this event. Too, there is Deng's decision to bring the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to Beijing to put down the Tienanmen Square protests. After his retirement, his successors became, in Deng's mind, too cautious with the economy. There is a fascinating tale told of how he used his political skills to get China on a pathway toward more rapid growth. It shows Deng as a wily political figure, who even in his eighties could bend events toward his desires. All in all, a detailed biography, overall well done, of one of the most important figures in the late 20th century. The book might have been even better with a more critical assessment of Deng's work at some points. Still and all, an important work.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2015
M
Verified Purchase
Mars Attacks!
Natrona Heights, US
★★★★★ 4
Great book, so-so cover.
Format: Paperback
I must say, it is a top quality door-stop. My girlfriend gave me this book about six months before she left because she found it super informative, but I have to say that I knew how I would use it from the start. I mean, the weight of this thing could be easily understated by 0.2 to 0.3 lbs... The muted blue palette over the cover is an unobtrusive way to make sure the door stays open by just the right amount without it being too heavy or tough on hardwood floors (like a brick or a big rock). Why not five stars? The guy on the cover seems to creep out my cat. Maybe they should have put Mr. Bean or some other comically expressive figure on the cover rather than some random Thai guy...
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Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2026

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