‘The Old People had Brooms’: Yanyuwa Women, Material Culture and Resistance

Abstract

This piece investigates the complex and multiple meanings associated with one piece of Australian Aboriginal material culture, a broom made by Yanyuwa woman Emalina Evans a-Wanajabi in the 1980s. Yanyuwa people constitute one nation of the myriad Aboriginal peoples of Australia, with Yanyuwa country being in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, in the far north of Australia.