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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Lifestyle
Judith Nangala Crispin

The place that stayed with me: after a treacherous route through open desert, at Mina Mina I saw holiness

Judy on sacred Country, Mina Mina in Australia’s Great Sandy Desert, 2018.
Judy on sacred Country, Mina Mina in Australia’s Great Sandy Desert, 2018. Photograph: Judith Nangala Crispin

There are places on this Earth that still belong to themselves, places where very few people have stood. And some of those places are holy.

It was the summer of 2018 when we packed my old Hilux and a Troopie and set off from Lajamanu to Mina Mina. It had been Aunty Agnes’s idea. Although she’d painted this place for decades, she’d never set foot on Mina Mina, on her grandfather’s Country, in the jaws of Lake Mackay, Northern Great Sandy Desert.

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