THE ANCESTRAL TIDE
YINGAPUNGAPU SAND SCULPTURES AT BLUE MUD BAY
Lamangirra Gumana
Datjuluma Guyula
Wulu Marawili
Baluka Maymuru (dec)
Galuma Maymuru (dec)
Mungurrapin Maymuru
Bandarr Wirrpanda
Opening Saturday 23 November, 2 pm
With opening talk by Howard Morphy (Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and founding Director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University.
Exhibition runs 23 November to 14 December 2024
The Cross Art Projects
In proud collaboration with Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre
Stuck between two great cultures who are oblivious to each other gives some odd perspectives. Like a cattle dog at a truckstop you can only squint up at these magnificent mindless machines as they move unpredictably around each other trying not to get squashed.
But sometimes insight comes and you can see an element that helps communicate what the different characters of these juggernauts are.
The Yolngu bury their own.
A simple statement but one that shows a stark difference.
A modern industrial person would not imagine that they could deal with the death of their mother without requiring either a priest, an undertaker or an excavator. But Yolngu do just that. They administer last rites, they dig the hole, they prepare the body, conduct the ceremony, inter the deceased and fill the hole.
These are all the elements common to most funerals but Yolngu mortuary is a vastly more complex and demanding affair than most. This exhibition is a window into that reality.
Three headlands protrude into Blue Mud Bay from its northern shore. Each one belongs to a different Yirritja clan. The easternmost is Djarrakpi (Cape Shield) belonging to the Manggalili people. Yilpara for the Maḏarrpa clan sits in the middle. And then the westernmost Garrapara (Mount Grindall) which is Dhalwangu clan land.
But although these places are owned, sung, danced and painted very differently they share a dark history. Each of these places are linked by an ancient event which was so terrible it continues to shape the landscape and human history.
The songs tell of an ‘ancestral tide’. These song poems of each clan tell slightly different versions on a common theme. Hunters engaged on an epic quest are suddenly struck by an overwhelming wave of water which causes their transition from the plane of life.
The mortuary ceremonies of each of these clans began when this wave poured over the country causing death and destruction. Until this very day these three clans commemorate this cataclysmic event with a canoe shaped sand sculpture.
This ceremonial zone is known as the Yingapungapu. It can only be sung into existence by learned spiritual practitioners and only special body handlers classified as gong-ngarrambiya can enter its confines. It holds the body of the deceased during its passage from death to renewed life as a spirit. It is from the watery realm that the spirit then re-enters this dimension as a newborn.
The longevity of this ceremony can only be guessed at. We do know that the current Gulf of Carpenteria was previously low lying wetlands. The end of the last Ice Age caused the overtopping of a low range called the Arafura Sill which stretched between the current Arnhem Land coastline and Cape York. This event clearly happened whilst Yolngu were in occupation of their current estates as their language family is connected to Queensland but not to any of their neighbours.
Is it coincidence that the mortuary ceremony of three groups whose land sits on that new coastline appears to commemorate a great ancient inundation? And if it is true that these artworks and songs are an oral record of a 12000 year old event can we comprehend the cultural discipline required to maintain that history?
Essay by Will Stubbs, coordinator of Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre
Lamangirra Gumana, Garrapara, 2017, bark painting, 37 x 109 cm (#1937-17)
Galuma Maymuru (dec), Yingapungapu, bark painting, 96 x 32 cm (#4204D).
Lamangirra Gumana, Garrapara, 2021, bark painting, 146 x 55 cm (#2796-21)
Galuma Maymuru (dec), Djarrakpi, bark painting, 41 x 142 cm (#4185X).
Datjuluma Guyula, Gunyan, 2024, bark painting, 82 x 48 cm (2804-24)
Datjuluma Guyula, Gunyan, 2024, bark painting, 101 x 43 cm (3781-24)
Datjuluma Guyula, Gunyan, 2024, bark painting, 82 x 58 cm (2912-24)
Datjuluma Guyula, Gunyan, 2022, bark painting, 69 x 43 cm (6366-22)
Datjuluma Guyula, Gunyan, 2022, bark painting, 68 x 38 cm (4957-22)
Bandarr Wirrpanda, Yambirrku, 2022, engraving on metal, 152 x 34 cm (#3298-22)
Mungurrapin Maymuru, Yingapungapu, 2023, bark painting, 100 x 39.5 cm (1838-23)
YINGAPUNGAPU | SAND SCULPTURE: EXHIBITION HISTORY
The exhibition The Ancestral Tide introduces seven Yolngu artists belonging to three Yirritja clan groups – Maḏarrpa, Dhalwangu and Manggalili. One artist, the late great Galuma Maymuru, has previously shown at The Cross Art Projects (in 2017 and 2021), and her precise work anchors the exhibition which features bark painting, drawing and video.
Canoe-shaped sand sculptures are found at permanent sites reserved for burial ceremonies on Blue Mud Bay on the Gulf of Carpentaria. The central canoe shape denotes a Yingapungapu ceremonial funeral ground. As the sites of several permanent Yingapungapu are now threatened by rising sea levels, The Ancestral Tide joins the RISE series of exhibitions at The Cross Art Projects on the impacts of coastal inundation.
The iconography of Yingapungapu is complex and brings into play many different stories. Will Stubbs locates The Ancestral Tide as both ancient ceremony and contemporary cultural resistance. The Yingapungapu isolates the body (and the people associated with it) from the rest of the community. In painting a major theme relates to death and decay: maggots, sand crabs and birds eat the flesh, and the tide washes away all trace. Meandering parallel lines represent tide marks. In figurative works, paintings within paintings insert references to ancestral events that occurred near the yingapungapu.
The works’ collective power also derives from the use of material that simultaneously depicts and embodies the landscape of monsoonal northern Australia: bark is stripped from tree trunks therefore the formats are always vertical. The ochre colours are both symbolically and literally earthy.
Through artworks Yolngu people curate their representation. A Yingapungapu exhibition was central to the opening of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra in 2006. Anthropologist Howard Morphy argued in his catalogue essay ‘Sites of Persuasion’ that exhibition-making reflects an ongoing campaign to protect Yolngu rights in law and maintain their autonomy and control over land and way of life. At the time Howard and Francis Morphy were helping prepare the Blue Mud Bay Native Title Claim to recognise Indigenous ownership of the waters over the intertidal zone.
Yolngu, having secure tenure over their land have successfully gained rights in the sea as an indissoluble part of their inheritance. They succeeded in the Blue Mud Bay case when in 2008, Australia High Court decided that it was illegal for the Northern Territory Fisheries Act to allow licenses to be issued for fishing in waters that fell within the boundaries of land covered by the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act. The Blue Mud Bay case is one of the most significant for Aboriginal landowners since the High Court’s Mabo decision and affects 80% of the Northern Territory’s coastline.
Considerable Yolngu control is also exercised over collections and curating collections. In exhibitions taking place outside state or federally funded institutions the sale and terms of exchange of artworks is mediated via the Aboriginal owned Art Centre and its board. Exhibitions educate the outsider into the beliefs and value systems and are a means to obligate outsiders into commitments and cycles of exchange.
The museum world view of uncontaminated “authenticity” has been soundly defeated by decades of exhibitions on northern Australian trade with Makassans, a significance referred to by Will Stubbs as the dance of two civilisations—post-colonial Indonesia and colonial Australia—essential to understanding the Aboriginal cultures of Arnhem Land.
The latest grand cycle of exchange is the exhibition Madayin. Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala (Kluge-Ruhe Museum and Buku-Larrngay Mulka, 2024) currently at the Asia Society Museum in New York (ends January 2025). The Madayin exhibition layout was led by senior artists Wukuṉ Waṉambi and Djambawa Marawili.
READING
Howard Morphy, ‘Sites of Persuasion: Yingapungapu at the National Museum of Australia’, Book Chapter, Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Edited by Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, 2006.
Madayin. Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala, exhibition catalogue, Kluge-Ruhe Museum and Buku-Larrngay Mulka, 2024. Website: https://kluge-ruhe.org/exhibition/madayin/
BIOGRAPHIES
Lamangirra Gumana
Lamangirra Gumana lives and works in Gäṉgan, a remote homeland in the Blue Mud Bay region of north-east Arnhem Land. She has long assisted her husband, Gunybi Ganambarr, with his work. Several years ago, she began working under her own name and emerged as an innovative artist experimenting within the inherited designs of the Dhalwangu clan.
The art centre notes, Garraparra is a coastal headland and bay area within Blue Mud Bay. Here a sacred burial area for the Dhalwangu clan is located and a dispute was formally settled by Makarrata (a settling of a serious grievance and sealing of the peace). Garraparra has been rendered by the wavy design for Yirritja saltwater in Blue Mud Bay called Mungurru. The Mungurru is deep water that has many states and connects with the sacred waters coming from the land estates by currents and tidal action. Other clans of Blue Mud Bay that share similar mythology of the Yingapungapu, i.e. the Maḏarrpa and Manggalili also paint the deeper saltwater – the Mungurru as such. From freshwater the waters migrate to Mungurru the mighty undifferentiated Yirritja saltwater ocean that plays at the horizon which receives and unifies all the Yirritja coastal saltwaters in one. It is from here that the water (soul) transmogrifies to vapour to enter the ‘pregnant’ Wangupini (Wet Season storm clouds) which carry the life-giving freshwater back to the start of the cycle.
Datjuluma Guyula
Datjuluma’s works here reference her mother’s country at Djarrakpi at the base of Cape Shield, the northern perimeter of Blue Mud Bay. This Manggalili country is also site of one of the Ancestral burial grounds called the Yingapungapu. A metaphor for the action of cleansing the body is utilised by the Manggalili in their sacred paintings by way of depicting Mirriya or Gunyan the sand or ghost crab picking the bones of a fish carcass on the beach. This group of paintings show the totemic Mirriya which feeds on the Ancestral remains of the parrot fish Yambirrku. The miny’tji or sacred clan design for the sandscapes of Djarrakpi both adorn and surround the crabs. In traditional mortuary ceremony for this clan the last act is to catch and eat Yambirrku and dispose of the bones in the ceremonial sand sculpture for the crabs to pick clean overnight.
Datjuluma Guyula’s parents were both significant artists and she is forming a strong visual identity as a powerful artist in her own right. Her mother(’s sister) Naminapu Maymuru-White is a well known Manggalili artist who is famous for her paintings of the Milngiyawuy, Milky Way. Naminapu and her family were part of the thriving artist’s school which developed around her grandfathers Narritjin and Nanyin Maymuru. Her father Waratjima Guyula was part of a small number of Djambarrpuyngu clan members who lived around Yirrkala. Datjuluma is married to Djawa Yunupingu senior Gumatj clan leader and younger brother of the late Mr G. Yunupingu one of the most senior Gumatj Clan leaders.
Wulu Marawilli
The artist is the eldest son of Barunga Statement artist Marrirra Marawili’s second wife. He was born and spent his whole life at Yilpara with his own family and after his father’s death in 2018, has taken on his artistic mantle. He recently moved to Yirrkala and began to intensify his art practice through bark painting memorial poles and etched metal.
As a senior ceremonial leader much of his time is taken with presiding over the lengthy and intricate funeral and circumcision rituals which are almost constantly ongoing in the region. He is the eldest of Marrirra’s children. Marrirra himself was the son of legendary warrior/leader Mundukul.
Baluka Maymuru (deceased)
The late Baluka is the son of Nanyin Maymuru (1918-1969) the elder brother of Narritjin, one of Yirrkala’s most famous artists. Baluka was himself an important artist and also head man of the Manggalili clan and revered as an exemplary Yolngu elder dedicated to his onerous ceremonial responsibilities. His gifts as an artist are reflected in two awards, nineteen years apart, in the same category (three dimensional) at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in Darwin. His work presents the magnificent landscape at the northern entrance of Blue Mud Bay, a place that is subject to the rich Manggalili ancestral history, first brought to the public fore in the art of his fathers, Narratjin and Nanyin. In June 2000, Baluka was elected chairman of the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka artist committee, a position he held until his resignation in 2003. His paintings are made with painstaking care, meaning that he produced only a few works every year.
His words are recorded in Madayin, the exhibition catalogue produced by Kluge-Ruhe Museum and Buku (2024): “I’ll just tell you about yingapungapu (burial ground). That is more in the open and appropriate to talk about. I won’t talk about Ngärra’ (senior men’s Law). That maḏayin is sacred Law. That is the Law for those places where sacred closed ceremonies and men’s business take place; that is where the sacred Law stands. In those places, a person’s actions must be sanctified, so no children, or women, or Yolngu who are not connected to that Law are allowed to enter. Authority resides in the djunggayi (ceremonial manager). Yes, only the djunggayi is to speak. And only those certain people who have been chosen must take care of that sacred business. We must ensure that this authority is respected here at Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre.
Yingapungapu means burial ground. And it also means a place where we throw bones or flesh. We bury it in that particular ground and it becomes rotten. It becomes rotten, it’s true. We collect all the eggshells and the bones and flesh of the fish, and they are thrown into that burial ground. There are three yingapungapu where scraps are thrown. Yes, there are three clan groups that hold this ritual: my clan group, Manggalili, is the third, but my grand- mother’s clan group, Dhaḻwangu, has the first yingapungapu. This ritual is practiced in Bäniyala [by the Maḏarrpa clan], in Garrapara [by the Dhaḻwangu clan] and in Ḻunggutja. So, there are actually four yingapungapu, if you include mine:Ḻunggutja, Djarrakpi, Yilpara/Bäniyala and also Garrapara. And these three groups—Manggalili, Maḏarrpa and Dhaḻwangu—all sing of the same saltwater.”
Galuma Maymuru (deceased)
The late Ms G. Maymuru was instructed by her father the great artist Narritjin Maymuru (1922–82). Her works contemplate death here on earth or the complex mortuary and belief system that is “everywhen”. (W.E.H Stanner, ‘The Dreaming’, 1953). His colleague, anthropologist Howard Morphy writes: “To Galuma, art is an act of memory and a process of transmission, in which she passes Manggalili law on to new generations of her clan. Equally, it is a spiritual and aesthetic exploration of her homeland.”
She grew up at Yirrkala Mission and then lived either at the homeland centre of Yilpara or at Dhuruputjpi in her husband Dhukal Wirrpanda’s Dhudi Djapu clan country, close to her own Manggalili clan lands. She was the community’s schoolteacher, before becoming a full-time artist in 1999. Her multi-layered work recreated ancestral beings in the landscape at Djarrakpi, and emphasise the transformational nature of the spiritual world, with figures appearing from and disappearing into a background pattern of Manggalili clan designs that represent the moving surface of the rivers, sand and sea. The magnificence of her work was seen in the exhibition Approximately Infinite Universe: Naminapu Maymuru-White & Galuma Maymuru (2021) and the exhibition Art of Memory, Fish and Crabs (2017) a juxtaposition of two epic series of artwork by Jacqueline Gribbin and Galuma Maymuru which set up a threshold where art, science and Indigenous Law overlap. Both exhibitions held at the Cross Art Projects.
Mungurrapin Maymuru
Father is the famous artist Nanyin Maymuru. A busy artist during the 1980s he has taken up painting again. He is an important community member who is a ranger, lay preacher, a football coach, and a ceremonial leader.
Bandarr Wirrpanda
Bandarr is from a family of significant Yolngu artists. His father is Dhukal Wirrpanda, and his mother was the late Mrs G. Maymuru, both respected for their intricate bark paintings and sculptures. Bandarr depicts various miny’tji (sacred clan designs) from both his mother and father’s clans including his mother’s Manggalili designs which represent the moving surface of the rivers, sand and sea. Bandarr is an Indigenous Ranger of his homelands around Dhuruputjpi and is involved in sacred and secret ceremonial matters.
Bandarr has been exhibiting since the 2006 ‘Young Guns’ exhibition at Annandale Galleries, and has adopted a metal etching practice, using reclaimed road and other signs and discarded industrial metals from the landscape of bauxite mining, and infusing the work with sacred clan designs known as miny’tji. The practice of using reclaimed metals extends the Yolngu peoples longstanding history of metal use. This history dates back to initial contact with the Makassans who traded metal with the Yolngu for its precious utility in the production of spearheads and other weapons/tools.
Howard Morphy
Howard Morphy is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at The Australian National University. He previously held the chair in anthropology at University College London, following 10 years as a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. He has written extensively about Indigenous art including his general book Aboriginal Art (Phaidon, 1998). His most recent books include Museums, Infinity and the Culture of Protocols (Routledge, 2020), and Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value (eds Howard Morphy and Robyn McKenzie), (Routledge 2022).
In proud collaboration with Buku Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre