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Bark Painting
Aboriginal bark paintings have a long cultural tradition, believed to extend back many thousands of years.
In northern Australia, paintings on bark shelters in the Kimberley and Arnhem Land were stylistically similar to rock shelter paintings. The Aboriginal bark paintings were used to convey and illustrate stories which were told to the clan when holed up in the shelter for long periods in the wet season. In Kimberly, the Aboriginal bark paintings by Lily karadada resemble ancient rock art Wandjina paintings which are themselves many, many thousands of years old.
Bark paintings with deep cultural and ritual significance still feature in the Aboriginal sacred ceremonies of northern Australia and they, along with some coastal inhabitants are the only indigenous Aborigines still making traditional bark paintings.
The process of making a bark painting begins with choosing a suitable stringybark eucalyptus tree, preferably in the wet season when the sap is rising and the bark is fairly supple and easy to grip. After finding a section of bark that is devoid of knots and termite damage, cuts are made top and bottom and after some encouragement by tugging and prying, a hollow open cylinder of bark is removed. The bark sheet is trimmed and a fire made ready, over which the bark will be cured to drive out any moisture. The bark is then flattened to the ground with feet and then held down with heavy weights to ensure that it doesn’t curl or warp.
The Aboriginal bark painters of Arnhem Land adhere to four basic pigments – red, black, white and yellow. The reds and yellows come from ochres, crushed and powdered rocks. White comes from pipeclay and black generally comes from charcoal. Sometimes natural fixatives are mixed in to bind the pigments and which includes wax, yolk of eggs, resins and the sap of orchid plants. The paint can then be applied to the bark with perhaps a rarrk design by using a wood comb, or with brushes made from human hair or even feathers.
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Bush Jewellery – Necklace
The women of Maningrida and surrounding homelands use a combination of locally found seeds, bone and shells to make a variety of jewellery including necklaces. earrings and bracelets. Many of the artists use complex patterns and designs to make their beautiful creations.
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Bush Jewellery – Necklace
The women of Maningrida and surrounding homelands use a combination of locally found seeds, bone and shells to make a variety of jewellery including necklaces. earrings and bracelets. Many of the artists use complex patterns and designs to make their beautiful creations.
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Bush Jewellery – Necklace
The women of Maningrida and surrounding homelands use a combination of locally found seeds, bone and shells to make a variety of jewellery including necklaces. earrings and bracelets. Many of the artists use complex patterns and designs to make their beautiful creations.
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Jima Jima (Waterlily)
Jimi jima is one of Tommy Gondorra Steele’s personal dreamings. It is similar to what is commonly known as a waterlily (monochoria australasica). Jimi jima is mainly associated with a waterhole named Yalija, but also other sacred waterholes in the Wurdeja area. Tommy’s painting of jima jima depicts the lily as it exists naturally in wet water areas at Wurdeja. They have an edible root, which is brownish and bitter when raw, but once roasted on coals it is deliciously sweet. They are only found in sacred waterholes in the Wurdeja area, including Yalija, and humans and spirits live off them. They are a bright blue flowering plant.
Tommy Gondorra Steele is the last male member of the Garnawula Niya clan. He lives at Wurdeja outstation, about four kilometres east of the Blyth River. He is the traditional owner of that area. Wurdeja is surrounded by a series of sacred waterholes and it is these waterholes, which provide the subject matter for Steele’s art.
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Mimih Spirit
Aboriginal people in the rocky environments of western and south-western Arnhem Land tell of the existence of tall slender spirits which they call Mimih. The name Mimih is well known throughout the top end of the Northern Territory. Aboriginal groups living in the rocky environments of western and southern Arnhem Land share mythology which relates to the beings known as Mimih. These groups include the Kunwok chain of languages, and also Rembarrnga, Dalabon and Djawoyn language groups. Other groups of people with familial and ceremonial links to rock country inhabitants are also familiar with the idea of the Mimih.
In recent years the Mimih has become a topic in the repertoires of some artists among the Kunibídji people, speakers of the Ndjébbana language and the traditional landowners of the Maningrida area. The people of western Arnhem Land believe that Mimih spirits live in a social organisation similar to Aboriginal people and that Mimih society existed before humans. Mimih are credited with instructing the first people with knowledge relating to survival in the rocky environment of the Arnhem Land plateau. Mimih are said to have taught the first humans how to hunt and butcher game and also how to dance, sing and paint. The song and dance style of western Arnhem Land Aboriginal people is still known today as Mimih style. This term is also used by Aboriginal people further to the east in Central Arnhem Land when describing the dance and song of their western neighbours.
Despite the usual descriptions of Mimih as being benign towards humans, sometimes however they are attributed with mischievous and dangerous qualities, capable of kidnapping and even killing humans. ‘Clever’ men, or Aboriginal men with supernatural powers, sometimes befriend the Mimih and are taught their songs and dances and shown their secret places. The Mimih are like people using the same kinship terms and speaking the same language as the local Aboriginal group. They live in families like humans and it is said that some of these Aboriginal men with mystical knowledge have spent time living with them in their camps.
Mimih are however, terribly thin, having necks so slender that a stiff breeze would be fatal. For this reason they emerge only on windless days and nights to hunt. As soon as a breeze develops, the Mimih are said to run back to their rocky caverns and disappear inside.
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Mak and Djattal for Kunj drive (for museum collection)
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Wurum (Fish Increasing Spirit)
Aboriginal people throughout Australia undertook rituals, which were designed to result in the increase of various natural species. The Rembarrnga people of Central Arnhem Land tell of the spirit being Wurum who had a human form and carried fish in dilly bags. He is sometimes depicted with fins called konno on his legs and arms suggesting a transformational human-fish nature.
In order to create an abundance of certain fish species, Rembarrnga people would draw an image of Wurum on the side of a tree. They would then call out the following invocation; Deny ngarra-jalman ngarr-mangara, ‘We want to get fish’. Following this they would sleep for a night and then it is said that there would be an increase in fish.
Wurum is associated with a site called Kukaddjerre in Balngarra clan estate south of Maningrida. The Wurum also has a further function.
Burruwal described the paperbark Wurum he constructed as the ‘true’ or original form. This suggests that the more solid wooden carving may have been a later innovation. The artist told that ‘in the early days’ these paperbark figures would be placed, standing upright, around a mortuary site for two distinct purposes; to watch and ward off evil spirits, and to signal to people the presence of a mortuary location, so they could find or stay clear of it.
The ability of a contemporary artist like Burruwal to make these highly traditional paperbark figures – a relic of a bygone era – underscores the intimate spiritual links Burruwal has to his personal ancestry.
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Mimih Spirit
The mimih spirit exists in a realm that runs parallel to and mirrors many facets of human life, also demonstrating the deep sense of time and place understood by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Such spirits feature importantly in relation to Aboriginal spirituality, cosmology, social and moral tales as well as ritual. As is true with the multiple mediums employed by artists of West Arnhem Land, the development of artistic style and form is in line with an awareness by the artist that the work produced is predominantly made for a broader audience. Whether show in a national or international context these works communicate and exist in a particular space that is cross-cultural and simultaneously so particular to the Arnhem region.
The mimih sits within a complex and important pedagogical and religious body of knowledge which links Kuninjku people to their distinctive escarpment homelands. Young Kuninjku artists, or apprentices, employ the mimih as an important exercise for the practice of the rarrk technique, as it could be achieved on a smaller surface area before, being attempted in larger scale, on pieces of bark. The mimih serves a purpose for those young artists first learning to carve in a social space of sharing and innovating. The initial mimih manifestation was a large form that almost mirrored the anatomy of a human and at this stage the sculptures have been likened to morkuy carvings visible in eastern Arnhem Land. Contemporaneously, mimih are depicted in a refined, slender, even emaciated form with a broad range of facial expressions giving both individual character to, and denoting the potential volatility and humour that mimih spirits are notable for in their interaction with bininj (humans). The sculptures are frequently carved from the thin trunks of softwoods such as kapok (bombax ceiba or cottonwood) kurrajong, beach hibiscus or leichardt and are painted with earth pigments for their colouring and design.
A leading figure engaging the spirit in visual storytelling was Crusoe Kuningbal, a Kuninjku man, who while traveling was familiarised with carving styles from the east of Arnhem at the mission in Milingimbi pre-dating World War II. This showing a notable connection and interaction of different language groups across such space. As well as travel and the development of art forms being informed by cross cultural dialogues within northern Aboriginal language groups. The mimih became a valued inclusion in performance and public ceremony by Kuninjku people like Kuningbal. At times these ceremonies were performed for extended language groups in the local region.
Now a familiar and broadly depicted figure of iconography, it is important to acknowledge the development of this quite recent sculptural tradition. The depiction of this particular spirit being, once used as an addition to the sharing of song cycles and ceremony, has since been elevated to a prominent form and subject of contemporary sculpture. Variation in the creation of mimih acts as an indication of the individualism of each artist and their stylistic markers. Additionally significant to note is that in the space of the past thirty years the mimih has begun being produced by multiple language groups residing in the Maningrida area including the traditional owners of Maningrida, the Ndjébbana, speaking Kunibidji as well as Gurrgoni people who have strong ties to Kuninjku.
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*Maningrida Arts & Culture acknowledge the work of many academic and non-academic voices when writing on this topic, it is important to note Luke Taylor, who’s broad research has informed this text.