Wooden pokerwork snake sculpture

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Type: Sculptures
Materials: Wood
Collection: Archdeacon Anne Ranse collection
Accession number: 2017.0031.0012

Description

A hand carved brown-black Purnu or wooden snake sculpture or figurine with a raised triangle shaped head and a non-coiled body. It has pokerwork or pyrographic motifs on the upper side of the body. The design consists of groups of two to four transverse lines at intervals, alternate areas between groups of lightly burnt lines and other alternate areas with no design. The underside of the snake is smooth and has no design.

Anne Ranse is a nurse and midwife whose first two jobs were nursing at Coober Pedy in outback South Australia, from 1969, and at Ernabella, an Aboriginal town in the north-west of the same state, between 1972 and 1977. Currently, she is a deacon with the Anglican Church in Canberra. At Ernabella, where most of this collection originated, Ranse developed close relationships with many of the Aboriginal women living in the area and many of the items in her collection were gifts from them.

About the collection

The Anne Ranse collection comprises art and craft items, including batik fabrics, pokerwork sculptures and the less common stone animal carvings, and a few weapons from Ernabella as well as a small number of Aboriginal stone implements, correspondence and personal items. Anne Ranse is a nurse by training who worked at Ernabella, in north-western South Australia, between 1972 and 1977. She developed close relationships with Aboriginal women there and they gave many of the items in this collection to Ranse. The art and craft items are also important as examples of works produced at Ernabella over a relatively short period. Ranse’s copy of "Handbook of Medical Treatment" is symbolic of her work as a nurse in remote places like Ernabella and Coober Pedy where she had worked earlier. The correspondence relates to important people associated with Ernabella - Charles Duguid, Winifred Hilliard and Purki Edwards. Donated by Archdeacon Anne Ranse

Read live from the Museum's Collection API (12/11/2026, 6:53:33 am). Record last updated by the Museum 2025-02-23. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.