The Cross Art Projects. Artist Exhibition, Debra Phillips, A talker’s echo. 2023

A Yirrkala Cracker — 12 December 2014 to 24 January 2015

MULUYMULUY WIRRPANDA
RUBY DJIKARRA ALDERTON
MS M. WIRRPANDA 
WITH ROSE TIMBERY, LOLA RYAN & FIONA MACDONALD

1 — 22 December 2022 (+ by appointment from January 16)
Presented by The Cross Art Projects and Buku Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre

Digital Catalogue — RISE 3: Mangrove Thinking > Download as pdf

The exhibition RISE 3: Mangrove Thinking is part three in a series that flags sea-level rise and the ways that artists think with forms of art to make ‘invisible’ impacts of climate change visible. Mangroves, seagrass beds and coral reefs work together with tides and currents, rising and falling like lungs. The reefs protect the seagrass beds and mangroves and coasts from strong ocean waves, cyclones and tsunami.

RISE 3: Mangrove Thinking introduces the art of Muluymuluy Wirrpanda the younger sister of acclaimed artist Ms. M. Wirrpanda, a learned and generous mentor for many. The Yolngu sisters are elders of the Dhudi-Djapu clan of the Dhuwa moiety of north east Arnhem Land. Art by the sisters presents the beauty and fragility of the earth and its ecosystems: here, the interconnection of mangroves with molluscs in the tidal zone. The leaves falling from dense branches circulate nutrients; their art shares the knowledge.

Muluymuluy’s paintings have power and presence: created by a restrained use of the classic oche colours of yellow, white and black and striking compositions that highlight the complex architecture of roots and leaves. Roots form intricate arches, buttresses and tangled cables; counter-balanced by dense branches and canopy. The roots filter nitrates and phosphates from the streams and enable breathing in several ways down to small pneumatophores or snorkel roots.

Ms Wirrpanda was a revolutionary artist and key to many of the most prescient exhibitions of the past decade: the cross-cultural Djalkiri: We are standing on their names – Blue Mud Bay (Nomad, Darwin 2013 and tour including to UTS Gallery Sydney); Ms Wirrpanda and John Wolsley Midawarr/Harvest (National Museum of Australia, 2017) and Molluscs / Maypal and the warming of the seas at Geelong Art Gallery, based on James Bentley’s magnificent book for collectors and children, Maypal, Mayali Ga Wänga: Shellfish, Meaning & Place (NAILSMA, 2018). Her works are astoundingly beautiful and painterly.1

Will Stubbs’ essay Gathul-gärri / Into the Mangroves (2022) likens the joy of entering a cool forest to entering a cathedral. Artist Ruby Djikarra Alderton’s video shows a childhood of adventure and freedom playing amongst these magical trees and swimming in their golden waters.2 Ruby warns that the exquisite balance of the Gulf of Carpentaria’s mangrove ecosystem is failing. The ghostly death of the mangrove forests began along 1000km of the coast in late 2015 and continues. Sea-levels fell dramatically when the wet storm winds failed. Now the level is again dramatically rising. Rise and fall, rise and fail.

Coastal cultures depend on mangroves for food, fuel and medicines. Nypa palm fronds are used for thatching and basket weaving. Various barks are used for tanning and curing (trepang for example), pneumatophores make light rafts for fishing. The wood from yellow mangroves (Ceriops) burns even when wet. Across the north and the archipelago mangrove dyes are used as glorious golden and red colouring for traditional weavings and batik.

In Gamay / Botany Bay, the invading representatives of the British empire dismissed mangrove forests as swampy wastelands. During the First Fleet’s brief stay in 1788 Governor Phillip and some of the officers explored Cook’s River at the NW side of the bay. Lieutenant P.G. King reports, “we went up for about 6 miles, finding the Country low & boggy, & no appearance of fresh water…”. Phillip’s Journal (Chapter VI) complains about ‘dampnefs’ and calls the soil ‘unhealthy’.3

Historian Heather Goodall chronicles Sydney’s ambiguous anti-mangrove history: mangroves did not count as ‘bushland’ or as river views but fisherfolk knew the true value.4 The runways of Sydney Airport now obliterate the estuary of the Cooks River. Sydney’s First Nations people have always pushed back against dispossession and dismissal. Their artists are renowned for making tools, often incised or painted, such as shields, digging sticks, spears and boomerangs from the elbows of branches, especially hard-wood species, like the grey mangrove used for boat building. Shell-work was another exchange medium, with artists becoming expert collectors after most middens were burnt for shell lime to build the colony.

Matriarch of the La Perouse community ‘Queen’ Emma Timbery (1842-1916), is famed for her intricate shell work, including heart-shaped ‘forget me not’ boxes and tiny babies booties. Her inspired followers include great grand-daughters Esme Timbery and Rose Timbery and Lola Ryan (1925-2003, Tharawal/Eora). They added temporal images such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge (opened in 1932) or maps of Australia that often subtly invert the status of sparkly ‘curio’ to ownership. Their installations are now heart-pieces of biennales or and next generation lynch-pin public artworks (by artists such as Esme’s daughter Marilyn Russell).5

Curated walks and artworks weave carefully around Sydney’s contested and diminished mangrove coastline and the deeper valleys of their estuaries: from the Northern Beaches and Middle Cove to the Badu Mangrove Walk at Sydney Olympic Park where you can recite artist Lorna Munro’s ‘Muru nanga mai/Dreaming Track’, a poem etched into the boardwalk as part of Red Room Poetry’s Poetic Moments project.

Mangroves, seagrass and saltmarsh are carbon machines. Blue carbon is a vital global resource for climate resilience, but rapid sea-level rise threatens to drown this valuable ecosystem.6 At Gamay/Botany Bay local rangers and conservationists have saved Towra Point Nature Reserve (Ramsar Site, listed 1984) and patches of mangrove and saltmarsh on Cooks River and Wolli Creek Valley. Grey Mangrove shrubs are again conspicuous. Walk the pathway and think like a mangrove.

Notes

Ms Wirrpanda’s thinking had a profound impact also on The Cross Art Projects, from her remarkable exhibition One Lore, Two Law, Outlaw: Dhakiyarr vs The King in 2007. [LINK TO EXHIBITION]
Prints by Ruby Alderton appeared beside her mother’s work, the late Ms Marika AO, in the exhibition Mother to Daughter: On Art and Caring for Homelands at The Cross Art Projects in 2015. [LINK]
The Journal of Philip Gidley King, Lieutenant, R.N. 1787-1790. Mitchell Library/SLNSW call number C115. The day of the entry was 19 January 1788. The party consisted of Captain Phillip, Major Ross, and Lieutenants Ball, Dawes, Long and P.G. King. Curator Ace Bourke says: The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay is a collage of information from various sources.
Heather Goodall, Rivers and resilience: Aboriginal people on Sydney’s Georges River, 2009, is a lens on cultural blindness and environmental historian Lynn McLoughlan on environmental battlegrounds.
Historical publications on La Perouse (AIATSIS, 1988). The great French navigator Lapérouse has a museum. Exhibitions include: Brook Andrews’ NIRIN Sydney Biennale, 2020 (an installation of Esme Timbery booties from the MCA collection); public artwork by Jonathan Jones and Esme Timbery at Barangaroo, Sydney; Tess Allas’s exhibition Shimmer (Wollongong Art Gallery, 2015 and touring to 2018) introduced shell-artists from around Australia.
Descriptions of Grey Mangroves and the other 3 species native to NSW: https://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/236234/mangroves.pdf

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. RISE 3: Mangrove Thinking — 1 to 22 December 2022

Muluymuluy Wirrpanda Wirrpanda, Gathul/ Mangroves, ochre on bark, 94 x 74 (6853-22)

Muluymuluy Wirrpanda Wirrpanda, Gathul/ Mangroves, ochre on panel, 61 x 51cm (7665-22)

Muluymuluy Wirrpanda, Gathul/Mangroves, ochre on panel, 2022, 61 x 51 cm (each), from L to R: (7119-22), (7045-22), (7664-22), (7306-22), (7665-22), (7071-22), (6997-22), (7233-22), (7531-22), (6979-22)

(L to R): Muluymuluy Wirrpanda, Gathulŋur (In the mangroves), 2022, ochre on bark, 113 x 54 cm (6947-22), Muluymuluy Wirrpanda, Gathul/Mangroves, ochre on bark, 2022, 107 x 74 cm (6728-22), Muluymuluy Wirrpanda, Gathul/Mangroves, ochre on bark, 2022, 86 x 64 cm (6832-22), Muluymuluy Wirrpanda, Gathul/Mangroves, ochre on bark, 2022, 100 x 42.5 cm (7351-22)

Muluymuluy Wirrpanda, Gathul/Mangroves, ochre on bark, 2022, 102 x 34.5 cm (7352-22)

Muluymuluy Wirrpanda, Gathul/Mangroves, ochre on bark, 2022, 134 x 46 cm (7407-22)

Rise 3: Mangrove Thinking, The Cross Art Projects 2022 (Installation)

(L to R on wall): Lola Ryan, Untitled, approx. 2000, shells on tile, size (framed). Rose Timbery, Shell Frame, 2000, shells on wooden frame, 30 x 35 cm (illustration by Fiona MacDonald after William Fernyhough, Mary, Botany Bay Tribe, 1836). Lola Ryan, Harbour Bridge, approx. 2000, shells and fabric on board, 16 x 37 cm.

Muluymuluy Wirrpanda, Gathul/Mangroves, ochre on panel, 2022, 61 x 51 cm (7306-22)

Muluymuluy Wirrpanda, Gathul/Mangroves, ochre on panel, 2022, 61 x 51 cm (7664-22)

Muluymuluy Wirrpanda, Gathul/Mangroves, ochre on panel, 2022, 61 x 51 cm (7045-22)

Muluymuluy Wirrpanda, Gathul/Mangroves, ochre on panel, 2022, 61 x 51 cm (7119-22)

Ruby Alderton, Mayang, 2011, video, (part of The Mulka Project), 3:31 mins

Gathul-gärri / Into the Mangroves
Essay by Will Stubbs

This exhibition is an invitation to enter the mangroves. Not to ‘go’ to the mangroves, but to ‘enter’ them.

Words can’t describe the intensity of the sunlight in Arnhem Land. In places like Sydney the sun hits at a glancing blow, at an angle, but at the Equator it is a direct hit. The light is so bright it feels like a sound ringing in your ears, drilling through your eyes.

Those eyes are permanently squinted. Your view is always squashed. To try and stop the light from burning a hole in your mind.

And then BANG! You step through a gap in the fringe and the temperature plunges. The clamour of the light is silenced, and you realise you can open your eyes.

At first you are blind. Just like stepping from bright sunlight through the door of a medieval church.

Your eyes can’t quite believe what they are seeing. The intricacy of the buttressed shapes arcing away into infinity support an endless colonnade of pillars. These columns are what is holding up the darkness. . .

In other places mangrove ‘swamps’ are what cling to the edges of industrial storm drains or dog parks. They are so misused that you can see through the straggle of trees to the built landscape beyond. Where they are thick enough, they are used as rubbish dumps with broken glass and tyres growing in the mud. In Arnhem Land however, they are cathedrals: rich smells and the clicking music of hidden life.

Harvesting the fruits of the mangrove is the particular obsession of Yolngu women. Their knowledge of what lies within and under the trees and the mud is incredible. For, as beautiful as what can be seen is, there is hidden treasure everywhere—for those who can crack the code.

One example only of the hundreds of delicious foods on offer is Dhän’pala. The King, or more likely Queen, of shellfish in East Arnhem is one that sustains many people and anchors many hunting trips. Found by feeling with feet or combing with hands, knife blades or rakes or sometimes spotted as cryptic lips just poking free of the mud or as a hole or crack in the surface of the mud indicating a subsidence below where she has moved.

It is a fist-sized clam with many names. The typically ugly English common name is ‘Mud Mussel’/Geloina oviformis (with previous scientific names including Gelonia coaxans and Polymesoda erosa). It is also known in Yolngu matha as Dhäkururru, Räwiya, Rrungundhanganing, Yiwaḻkurr, Yuwaḻkurr and Rägudha. Rägudha means kneecap. This maypal (shellfish) belongs to the Dhuwa half of the world.

The group will emerge from the forest following ancient pathways with hundreds and hundreds of shells in buckets, bags and pockets. And then the feasts will begin.

There is a technique where a small fire is constructed using a specially chosen size and type of kindling around a stacked pyramid of Dhän’pala, so that lighting one match will cook and open as many as thirty at a time.

Hidden aside these treasures are Djiny’djalma or Nyuka, appetisingly named ‘Mud Crabs’ by English speakers. Yolngu women trek for kilometres atop the network of buttress roots anchoring the mangrove forest in the sweet black mud. There is a rhythm to the mud which a buried mud crab disturbs. Their holes, which are often wedged into hidden sections beneath the trees, are visible only to the trained eye. Then begins the task of extracting the crab with massive vice like pincers, from their deep dark wet hole—usually with bare hands!

During 2022, Muluymuluy undertook a lot of ceremonial duty in the homelands. When she returned to Yirrkala the bark season had finished. She ended up using offcut boards and embarked on a theme of mangroves. Since then she has continued painting mangroves on bark as well. It should be understood that these paintings are not still lifes. They are an ode to the activity of being within this magic world.
Each work is unique and derives from different themes. From the trees themselves, and their roots and the seeds, to an esoteric reference to the endless list of shellfish which the knowledgeable can find, such as warrapal, dhuṉ’ku or bunybu.

Muluymuluy is the younger sister of famed artist Ms. M. Wirrpanda who collaborated with her adopted wawa (or classificatory brother) John Wolseley for over a decade before her death in early 2021. She was a passionate champion of Yolngu ecological knowledge including a particular interest in illuminating the myriad of edible shellfish found in the waters, beaches, floodplains and mangroves of Arnhem Land. Her poles in this show are a standout example of this genre.

Acknowledgements

Mangrove Thinkers: Buku-Larrnggay Mulka (Will Stubbs, Dave Wickens); MangroveWatch (Norman Duke and Jock Mackenzie); Royal Botanical Gardens (Sophie Daniel and Paul Nicholson); Gujaga Foundation and Raymond Timbery; colleagues Ace Bourke, Lyndall Bourke and Jasmin Stephens. Local Museum Curators: Alison Wishart, Bayside Council; Georgia Keep, Local Studies Librarian, Randwick City Council; Randwick Historical Society (Hazel). The Cross Art Projects: Belle Blau, Simon Blau, Phillip Boulten, Susan Gilligan.

References

Doug Benson, Danie Ondinea and Virginia Bear, Missing Jigsaw Pieces: the bush plants of the Cooks River Valley, Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, 1999.

James Bentley, Maypal, Mayali Ga Wänga: Shellfish, Meaning & Place, a Yolngu Bilingual Identification Guide to Shellfish of North East Arnhem Land NAILSMA, 2018.

Norman Duke, (14 March 2017), ‘Large-scale dieback of mangroves in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria: a severe ecosystem response, coincidental with an unusually extreme weather event’, Marine and Freshwater Research. [online], vol. 68, no. 10, pp. 1816-1829. At: http://www.publish.csiro.au/mf/MF16322

Marcia Langton, ‘Sovereignty: 65,000 years of ancestral links to land’, NIRIN 22nd Biennale of Sydney 2020. Excerpt at https://www.atns.net.au/understanding-sovereignty

Ian Tyrrell, River Dreams: The people and landscape of the Cooks River, UNSW Press, 2018.

RISE 3: Mangrove Thinking — 1 to 22 December 2022

A Yirrkala Cracker — 12 December 2014 to 24 January 2015