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Mandjabu

Kuninjku people traditionally make two sorts of conical fish traps. One called Mandjabu made from milil a vine. And another smaller one called manyilk Mandjabu, made from the grass manylik. The milil conical fish trap is bigger and stronger and used in tidal reaches of creeks to catch large fish. the smaller and lighter manylik trap is used in freshwater flowing creeks to catch smaller fish and freshwater prawns. Traditionally only men were involved in the construction of the large fish traps, but smaller children were used to crawl inside and assist.

Categories: Maningrida Arts & Culture

Name: Samantha Malkudja

Language: Kuninjku

Community: Maningrida

Biography:

Samantha Malkadja learned to weave from her mother Frewa Bardaluna, a master fibre artist who had numerous exhibitions with leading Australian commercial galleries.  Samantha’s work is distinguished by her soft tonal range, strong sense of design and intricate technique. Samantha makes panels and 2D sculptures which depict local fish and animal species and often yawkyawks, female water spirits.

Samantha predominately uses gun-menama (pandanus spiralis) in her works. To prepare the pandanus the inner leaves of the plant are collected using a hook. Each V-shaped leaf is first split in half along its spine. After removing the sharp spines, the two surfaces of the leaf are then split away from other. After this preparation, the pandanus is boiled in a billycan with plant materials to dye the fibre. Like her contemporaries, Alison only uses natural dyes and achieves enormous variation. Common colours in her work include:

- barra gu-jirra: the soft, white and fleshy end of the pandanus leaf imparts green to the fibre.

-  mun-gumurduk/ gala (Pogonolobus reticulatus): a bright yellow root that is crushed and put in a billycan with the fibre and boiled. It creates yellow when boiled once and deep orange hues when boiled multiple times.

- ngalpur (Haemodorum brevicaule): a bright red root which yields a range of purply red to brown colours.

- Baluk: ashes of certain plants are added to the boiling billycan with the fibre and dye plants to alter the colour that is imparted to the fibre. The fruiting body of gulpiny (Banksia denanta) is burnt and the ashes added to other day plants to make the colour pink. 

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