Gregory Pryor and Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama, “Ngalak Wonga,” (detail), 2025, oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas. each panel 21 x 15 cm. photo: the artists
Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama and Gregory Pryor explore trauma and renewal by rendering their simultaneous spiritual encounters with the Marri tree on Noongar Country.
With a heavy heart, I sought refuge in Noongar boojur, the sentient surface of the earth and all it embodies. The small bushland reserve on the outskirts of Undalup, now called Busselton, exists on Wardandi country. It radiates and echoes the spirit of my ancestors, connects to the present, and provides a window for the future. It’s a place to simply be, and to feel.
As I alighted from my car, the familiar and comforting scent of eucalyptus embraced me, and I felt lighter already. I began to tread the well-worn path, dodging honkey nuts to avoid twisting my ankle on these robust wooden seed pods. This preoccupation took centre stage until, not 20 metres in, I felt compelled to stop and turn around. I had walked past a large marri tree, colloquially known as a redgum (Corymbia calophylla), one I had walked past many times before, and never really noticed. I cast a glance at her admiringly and then turned to continue on my walk. She called even louder to me, imploring me.
…great rivulets of deep crimson gum, running from fissures in her bark like bloody waterfalls, launching from the trunk toward the ground and splattering all over the dried leaf litter
I walked back to the marri and truly saw her for the first time. She was the visual embodiment of my inner grief and trauma: great rivulets of deep crimson gum, running from fissures in her bark like bloody waterfalls, launching from the trunk toward the ground and splattering all over the dried leaf litter. It looked like a murder scene, and I was transfixed by it.
I stayed with the marri for twenty minutes, experiencing a maternal and spiritual bond, walking around her girth and listening. Katitj is the Koreng Noongar word for both listen, and to know, as it is through listening that knowledge comes. I sat at the foot of her trunk and felt the leaves and sticks, and saw how the gum had fused them together, drying hard and shiny. I took many photos and collected some of the fallen leaves, as if to capture the comfort that I was experiencing from them.
Later, I shared this encounter with Greg, and to my great surprise, he had also had an experience with a marri tree in a remnant of Country on Whadjuk boojur. The encounters were very different, but both spoke to us as the stimulus needed to start our visual and written communiqués. I wrote first, exploring and articulating the visceral and spiritual encounter, and the messages Mother Marri was gifting me. It was an act of empathy and care, letting me know that I was seen and understood. Mother Marri knew.
Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama “Ngalak Wonga” (detail), 2025, oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, each panel 21 x 15 cm photo: the artists
As Jen related, the Marri tree that provided my simultaneous encounter was also one that I had walked past many times. There was no blood on the ground, but on this day, I looked up into the canopy for some reason. To my amazement, a scene not dissimilar to the depictions of the garden of Eden was before me. The upright mother trunk of the Marri was long dead and looked pale and ossified. Wrapped tightly around this pillar like a serpent was a mature regrowth that had sprouted from below, where the lignotuber ensured that this tree would not die. A massive burl hung asymmetrically from the apex of the regrowth like the head of the serpent.
Gregory Pryor and Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama, “Nglak Wonga,” 2025, oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas. 87 x 800 cm. each panel 21 x 15 cm. photo: the artists.
We reinforced the alignment of our writing in the layout of Ngalak Wonga, where they occupied the two central rows of the work, with a row of images at the top and the bottom of the grid. Some of the images emerged like riffles from the trunk of the text and others operated more like tributaries, feeding the stories through colour and their visual composition.
In making an A5 artwork as an adjunct to the handwritten poem on canvas of the same size, there was no question that the collected leaves had to be a part of it. They could not be imitated. The sharpened gij, a spear made fit for purpose, that I had felt lunging into my flesh was replaced by an embroidery needle, a tool that I could be in control of. Wanting to affect some form of healing, or mending, I set about stitching the leaves to red satin fabric with gold thread, finding beauty in their form and promise. It was a resurrecting act, and a reframing of the narrative I lived with.
In this same mode of making, across the fifty panels of Ngalak Wonga (us talking and listening), I have used different coloured sands, shells, small stones, broken glass, feathers, and marri bark. Each imbues a sense of place and space, of Country and connection, reminding us of the interrelationship between all things. Each element carries the quiet insistence of creation and recreation: to begin again, to make it new, to heal by hand.
Gregory Pryor, “Ngalak Wonga,” (detail) 2025, oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, each panel 21 x 15 cm, photo: the artists
A critical component of this cathartic healing was the decision to write all the text by hand. Jen has had much experience as an educator at different levels and so decided to rule her lines and write with a liquid chalk Posca pen. The Noongar words she had been researching were coloured and later compiled into a glossary.
Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama, “Ngalak Wonga,” (detail), 2025, oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas. each panel 21 x 15 cm. photo: the artists.
I employed a very familiar way of writing upper-case text with a brush, which stems from my time in China studying calligraphy. Chinese standard or regular script is considered the clearest and most legible style of calligraphy and is also used in official documents and legal texts. A component of learning calligraphy is understanding the different strokes that occur in the ‘block’ of space each character occupies. Writing in upper case letters also gave me a ‘block’ to work in, rather than the visual peaks and troughs that occur when employing upper and lower case text.
Gregory Pryor, “Nglak Wonga,” (detail), 2025, oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas. each panel 21 x 15 cm. photo: the artists.
Writing with a brush also slows down the delivery of thoughts onto a surface, allowing for subtle variations in pressure, spacing or slant that can further inform the reader’s experience of the text and the meaning within. The need to charge the brush with paint regularly adds a further element and variation. Words that are written with a full brush are often fat and opaque, and as the brush is slowly depleted, the words become leaner and more transparent to the point where they start to disintegrate with the drag of a dry brush. These later words that emerge from one charge of the brush also more readily reveal a dialogue with the surface they are written on, and at times can even suggest they have emerged from within this ground, rather than being laid on the surface.
This contrast of approaches in the hand-written texts found an inversion in the tone of our writing. The cathartic encounter so viscerally articulated in Jen’s first text has been aligned with my more meditative observations. Our two online meetings every week continued to provide ways these two voices could commingle, and quickly the work became self-generating. The stories and images were not necessarily associative, as the complexities of our worlds and lived experiences would play out in multiple panels. More direct responses that may have been prompted by a single word or colour in an image sometimes appeared later, as the trajectory of our stories was rarely linear.
In exhibiting the cumulative dialogue along a ten-metre white wall, the canvases became a garland in themselves—given for a time to those in the community who will view them and make connections to their own stories. The meaning of the work shifts with each viewer, the emotions they feel, the images that speak to them, the memories and stories they’re reunited with. Our co-creation now extends to the community, becoming part of a much larger conversation: a cyclical and reciprocal garland of respect, listening, and shared making. Mother Marri remains too, steadfast and true. Any future encounter with her will bring us back full circle.
“Ngalak Wonga” was shown in the exhibition Huddle, at the Ellenbrook Arts HQ, October 17 – November 27, 2025.
About Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama
Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama is an artist, writer, and educator whose work is deeply informed by her Wardandi and Koreng Noongar heritage from the southwest of Western Australia. She uses creative practices, including hand-written text and mixed media, to explore interconnectedness, cultural resilience, and renewal, often engaging with Noongar Country. She is also a writer and academic who has published research on Indigenous knowledges.
About Gregory Pryor
Gregory Pryor writes from Eden Hill, a suburb of Boorloo, Perth, Western Australia on Wadjuk Noongar boojur and close to the Derbal Yerrigan or Swan River. He is an artist and writer and the academic lead in visual arts at Edith Cowan University.
