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Kulyakartu Wilyamitimiti

“Wilyamitimiti, man eater, only self. He been walk around Kulyakartu area. Marlkarri (dead) kukurrpa (kind of devil), he been have a plenty people in dreaming time, cook him up, eat him eat plenty in the night time. He been living in a cave. Lightning from Kaljali (Jaramarra spring), my jila (ancestral snake) from another place, jila place. From yapu (hill) that lightning been shut him up. [He] tried to get up, nothing. Rain been come.” 

– Wokka Taylor

The term jukurrpa is often translated in English as the ‘dreaming’, or ‘dreamtime’. It refers generally to the period in which the world was created by ancestral beings, who assumed both human and nonhuman forms. This painting depicts a Warnman jukurrpa (dreaming) story of Wilyamitimiti, a sole man eating devil living in the Kulyakartu area who would hunt for his victims at night. Eventually Wilyamitimiti was forever entombed in a cave by rocks falling during a lightning storm sent by the ancestral snake, Kaljali, from the north of Martu country. 

Categories: Shire of East Pilbara (Martumili Artists)

Name: Wokka Taylor

Language: Manyjilyjarra

Community: Parnngurr

Biography:

Wokka was born in the late 1940s at Kaljali waterhole in the Kulyakartu area; flat, grass Country in the far north of the Martu homelands and close to the Percival Lakes region. He is the middle brother to fellow Martumili Artists Muuki Taylor and Ngalangka Nola Taylor. Both Muuki and Wokka are highly regarded cultural leaders, and Ngalangka a skilled translator and cultural advisor. 

In his youth Wokka’s family seasonally travelled between the Kulyakartu and Percival Lakes regions depending on the availability of water and the corresponding cycles of plant and animal life on which hunting and gathering bush tucker was reliant. Generally they lived in Kulyakartu during the wet season, when its' claypans filled with rain, and the Percival Lakes during the dry season, when they could rely on the area’s many permanent soaks. They continued to live a pujiman (traditional, desert dwelling) lifestyle until being collected from Balfour Downs Station and taken to Jigalong Mission in the 1960s. They were one of the last Martu families to leave the desert. 

At Jigalong Wokka married Kanu (Karnu) Nancy Taylor (dec.); the pair were inseparable through to her passing in 2019. From Jigalong the couple lived and worked together on several cattle stations throughout the Pilbara. Eventually they relocated with their family to Parnngurr Aboriginal community as foundational community members during the ‘Return to Country’ movement of the 1980’s. Wokka continues to live in Parnngurr today.

Wokka paints his ngurra (home Country, camp), the Country he walked as a young man; its animals, plants, waterholes and associated Jukurrpa (Dreaming) narratives. His work has been exhibited widely across Australia.

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