Starting from yarns over cups of tea, the creative process behind Menang’s cultural map has been grounded in consensus, creating a space to hold multiple perspectives.

Although Mapping Menang began in 2025, the relationships that underpin it date back to CAN's 2018 Place Names Albany project. Place Names Albany culminated in the creation of Noongar Boodja, a documentary exploring Menang Noongar placenames, stories and culture, made by young people from Albany with Noongar Elders.

And so the creative process for the Mapping Menang project began with conversations with Menang Elders with whom we had connected during that project and others in the Great Southern region.

Central to the Mapping Menang project is the creation of a community-led cultural map of Menang Country, informed by oral histories, intergenerational community knowledge and archival research. This process has been facilitated by the Mapping Menang team – Producer Nduta Gathoga, Creative Producer and Whadjuk, Balladong and Wilman Noongar artist and independent curator Zali Morgan, Executive Producer Michelle White and Noongar Cultural Advisor Geri Hayden, with support from artist Tegan Jenkins, designer Rebecca Lyon Augustus and The National Trust of WA’s Leanne Brass.

In one-on-one conversations over cups of tea, CAN team members outlined the creative possibilities for a map, and Elders shared their ideas about what the map might represent and what it might look like.

This team of Elders then became ambassadors for Mapping Menang, spreading the word to the rest of the community so effectively that over 60 people turned up for the formal information session to introduce the project to the broader Menang community.

Guided by that first group of Elders, CAN then invited an Elder from each of the families represented at the information session to an Elders-only consensus meeting. The invited Elders then selected the area that would be covered by the cultural map, which locations were significant and needed to be represented on the map, and which stories they would like to share about those places. 

One of the most challenging elements of this process was collectively deciding who would create the iconography that speaks to each location. What made consensus possible was that the meeting was grounded in creative practice, creating a space in which it was possible for participants to hold multiple truths.

Once consensus was reached, creation of the map began during cultural mapping workshops facilitated by the CAN team and attended by Menang Elders and community members. Pencil was put to paper, then pencil to canvas, and finally paint to canvas.

Though many of the Elders involved in the project didn’t believe they were artists, with gentle encouragement and guidance from the team, they began to draw and paint their individual stories and icons of significance. 

By the end of the 2025 workshops, the backdrop of a large-scale canvas map had been painted with an outline of the ocean and the land, ready for the iconography representing stories of the 11 locations to be added in 2026.

Depicted in colours chosen by community members to represent Country and touched by the hand of every project participant, this outline captured the transition from the turquoise clarity of the shallows to the inky intensity of the deep; starkly contrasted by the land’s granite tones. 

You’ll be able to read all about the completion of the map and the audio-visual recording of Elders’ stories in the next instalment of this blog, coming soon!

Top photo: Menang community member Sarah Williams, painting the map // Credit: Ann & Tom Photography Videography

Mapping Menang is produced by CAN in partnership with The National Trust and is supported by Lotterywest and the Federal Government through the Indigenous Languages and Arts program, and the City of Albany’s Albany 2026.