Discover the Bush Hen Dreaming story, a sacred women's ceremony from the Anmatyerre people of the Utopia Homelands in Central Australia. Learn its meaning, its connection to Country, and the delicate paintings that keep it alive today.
Origins of the Bush Hen Dreaming
Bush Hen Dreaming, sometimes called Bush Turkey Dreaming, belongs to the Anmatyerre people of the Utopia Homelands, roughly 350 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs. It is one of the many Women's Dreaming stories held across this Country, a body of ancestral knowledge passed from grandmother to mother to daughter, expressed through ceremony, body painting, song, and, in more recent decades, through acrylic painting on canvas.
Traditional stories and ceremonies enacted by Aboriginal people draw on every element of the natural world, and Bush Hen Dreaming is a clear example of this. It follows the ancestral journey of the Bush Hen, a ground-dwelling bird also known regionally as the Bush Turkey or Bustard, as she travels across Anmatyerre Country in search of her favourite food. Her journey, and the site where it ends, remain central to women's ceremonial life in the Utopia region today.
What Is the Meaning of Bush Hen Dreaming?
At its heart, Bush Hen Dreaming is a story about food, Country and the responsibility of women to maintain both. The Bush Hen Ancestor travelled across the land in search of the bush tomato, the small yellow fruit of the native solanum plant, known in the Anmatyerre language as arkityira. These fruits are found scattered widely across Anmatyerre Country, and the Bush Hen's search for them traces a path that is still remembered, sung and painted today.
It's worth noting that "bush turkey" is used loosely across different parts of Australia. In this story, it refers to the Bush Hen or Bustard, a large ground bird of the desert plains, and should not be confused with the Australian brush-turkey, a mound-building rainforest bird found on the east coast, an entirely different species with no connection to this particular Dreaming.
Like the Wandjina of the Kimberley or the Water Dreaming of the Warlpiri, Bush Hen Dreaming is not simply a myth from the past. It carries living instructions about food, about Country, and about the ceremonial responsibilities that belong specifically to Anmatyerre women.
The Creation Story
In the Dreaming, the Bush Hen Ancestor moved across Anmatyerre Country, always searching for the ripening bush tomato plants that sustained her. Her journey passed through significant sites across the Utopia Homelands before ending at a place known as Artenya, near Mosquito Bore.
At the heart of this Country lies a dry waterhole, a sacred site reserved exclusively for women. It is here that the Bush Hen Dreaming track comes to rest, and it is here that Anmatyerre women from the Eastern Utopia homelands still gather to hold ceremony in her honour. Using ochre gathered from the land, women paint traditional designs onto their bodies with their fingers, performing the song and dance cycles that were first sung by their grandmothers and great-grandmothers, keeping the memory of the Bush Hen's journey, and the location of her sacred site, alive across generations.
This is a story inherited within families. As one senior Anmatyerre woman has described it, Bush Hen Dreaming belongs specifically to her own family line, tracing back through her grandfather to the Country known as Artenya, the very site where the Bush Hen's journey ends.
Bush Hen Art: Timeless Legacy
The paintings that bring Bush Hen Dreaming to a wider audience translate ceremony and Country into a visual language built almost entirely from fine dotting. Artists working in this Dreaming build up dense fields of small dots across the canvas to represent the arkityira, the bush tomato fruits themselves, scattered as they would be found growing wild across the desert floor.
At the centre of many Bush Hen Dreaming paintings sits a circular motif representing the sacred waterhole at Artenya, with tracks leading toward it from every direction, the paths walked by the Bush Hen Ancestor, and by the women who continue to visit the site for ceremony. The overall effect is delicate and rhythmic rather than bold or graphic, reflecting both the fine texture of scattered bush tomato fruit and the quiet, women-only nature of the ceremony the painting represents.
As with the rock art of the Wandjina in the Kimberley, these paintings are not simply illustrations of a story from the past. Each time the Dreaming is painted, the site, the ceremony and the responsibility that comes with them are renewed and passed forward.
Artists Who Create Bush Hen Dreaming Art
Bush Hen Dreaming is painted by a number of Anmatyerre artists from the Utopia Homelands, each carrying their own inherited right to the story and, with it, their own distinct visual approach.
- Abie Loy Kemarre: Born in 1972 at Utopia Station and based at Mosquito Bore (Iylenty), inherited Bush Hen Dreaming from her grandfather. She says simply, "This is my grandfather's story. This country is known as Artenya." Taught to paint from the age of nineteen by her grandmother, the celebrated artist Kathleen Petyarre, Abie Loy Kemarre is known for an extraordinarily fine, densely layered dotting technique that produces a shimmering, optical quality across the canvas. When she paints, each dot builds toward the arkityira, the bush tomato fruit the Bush Hen Ancestor searched for, while a circular waterhole sits at the centre of her compositions, with tracks leading toward it from every direction. Her work sits alongside her related Bush Medicine and Sandhills Dreaming paintings, all connected to the same Country and family inheritance.
- Genevieve Loy Kemarre: Born in 1982 at Boundary Bore, Utopia, paints Bush Turkey Dreaming (Arwengerrp) inherited from her father's Country on the western side of the Sandover River, which she shares custodianship of with her family. Where Abie Loy Kemarre's work builds a shimmering field of fine dotting, Genevieve favours bolder, more repetitive motifs to trace the tracks of the Bush Turkey as it moves across the land searching for seeds and bush tucker, making its way toward the nesting place and waterhole at the heart of her Country. The two artists' works, though connected by the same ancestral bird, reflect two different families, two different stretches of Country, and two quite different painting styles.
Bush Hen Dreaming sits within a much broader tradition of women's Dreaming stories from the Utopia Homelands, a region that has produced some of the most celebrated Aboriginal women artists of the past fifty years. For more on the artists carrying this tradition forward, and the closely related bush medicine Dreaming also painted by Utopia's women artists, explore our full range of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories.
Cultural Significance
Bush Hen Dreaming is, first and foremost, a Women's Dreaming, meaning both the ceremony and the specific knowledge attached to it belong to Anmatyerre women, passed down through the female line. The sacred waterhole at Artenya is a site of women's business alone, where ceremony, song and body painting take place away from men, maintaining a tradition of gendered ceremonial knowledge found across many Aboriginal Dreaming stories.
This story also reflects a broader truth about desert Aboriginal life: survival depended on an intimate, practical knowledge of where and when food could be found. The Bush Hen's search for bush tomatoes across Anmatyerre Country is, in this sense, both a sacred ancestral journey and a memory-map of a vital food source, two things held together, as they are in so much of Aboriginal Dreaming, within the one story.
Bush Hen Dreaming in Modern Times
Today, Bush Hen Dreaming continues to be actively practised, both through the ongoing ceremonies held by Anmatyerre women at Artenya, and through the paintings of artists who carry the story forward for a wider audience. As acrylic painting spread through the Utopia Homelands from the 1970s and 1980s onward, women's Dreamings like this one found a new form of expression that could be shared and appreciated well beyond the communities that hold them, without compromising the parts of the story and ceremony that remain rightly private.
For collectors and admirers of Aboriginal art, Bush Hen Dreaming paintings offer a genuine window into a still-living ceremonial tradition, one grounded in a specific family's Country, a specific sacred site, and a story of food, land and womanhood that continues to be sung and danced today.
Discover the Spirit of Bush Hen Dreaming Today with Mandel Aboriginal Art Gallery!
For those interested in Bush Hen Dreaming and the wider tradition of Utopia women's art, contact Mandel Aboriginal Art Gallery. Here, you can explore authentic paintings connected to this and other significant Dreaming stories, each accompanied by the story and provenance. Take your time to explore Mandel Aboriginal Art Gallery now to learn more about the Bush Hen Dreaming and the Anmatyerre women who keep it alive.
