One of the most well-known Dja Dja Wurrung creation tales is The Story of Two Volcanoes, Tarrengower and Lalgambook. This story emphasises the integral role the local landscape plays in both ancient and contemporary history, as well as the spirituality and consequent identity of Dja Dja Wurrung peoples.

Dja Dja Wurrung identifying artists in The Torch program regularly incorporate the Australian landscape into their paintings. Checka often takes ‘inspiration from his surrounding landscapes which he incorporates into his compositions with traditional mark-making and motifs.’ His painting titled Ancestral Walkabout depicts ‘Ancestors looking down upon us’ he states. ‘It’s a representation of how big our country really is’.

J. Gray also paints the land itself. My Map of Australia combines all the elements of the landscape onto a single canvas. ‘The brown and white dots are the colours of the different clays throughout the continent. The green dots are the grassland, bush and rainforests’, they share. ‘The blue circles are waterholes and the ocean surrounding the country. The lines joining the waterholes together are the main river systems that flow through most of the land, the veins of the land’.

The artwork titled The Hunting Bush Snake by That Guy also depicts multiple elements of the Australian landscape but with a deep ancestral connection to it as well. ‘The dots represent country and our ancestors that have walked, hunted and shaped the land we walk on today’ he points out. ‘The landscape in the middle shows hunting techniques the ancestors and elders use to hunt food, in many places over the land that still get used today. You can see a lizard up the tree hunting for eggs as well as a snake in action’.

For these Dja Dja Wurrung identifying artists the very earth itself is integral to their creative expressions, and the severing of that connection due to incarceration can be both traumatic and creatively inspiring.

‘I’m home sick. I want to go home,’ laments D. Kerr (Yorta Yorta/Dja Dja Wurrung) in her work titled Home Sick. ‘This painting is the river land and bush, of home. I’ve been off Country for so long’, she shares, ‘I can’t wait until the time comes that I can return, to find some inner peace.’

From where they were born and grew up to where they currently live and paint on, the landscape is the foundation of these artists perceptions of themselves, connecting them to their past and helping ground them in their present.