For a discussion of the contemporaneities within Australian indigenous art, see “Country, Indigeneity, Sovereignty: Aboriginal Australian Art,” chap. 6 in my Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2019), 156–97. Howard Morphy, Aboriginal Art (Phaidon, 1998), and Ian McLean, Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (Reaktion Books, 2016) are excellent introductions. See also Fred R. Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Duke University Press, 2002).
“Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Bark Painting from Yirrkala, Australia” is curated by Yolŋu artists from the Buku-Larrŋgay Art Centre, Yirrkala, Northern Territory, and curators from the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia. It will also include a six-screen video installation by Ishmael Marika and the Mulka Project, which is based at Yirrkala. The exhibition will open at the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in September 2020, and complete its tour at the Fralin Museum, University of Virginia, in January 2025.
In his exhibition “Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia,” at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, in 2016, Stephen Gilbert included a painting by Ganambarr, Mäṉa ga Dhukurrurru (1996), which depicts Wandawuy, a place where fresh river water and saltwater from the Arafura Sea converge into a turbulent but vital foam. This concurrence is a major symbolization of the unity-within-difference of the Yolŋu moieties. See Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, ed. Stephen Gilchrist (Yale University Press, 2016). “Everywhen” is a term coined by anthropologist William Stanner in a 1953 essay “The Dreaming,” in Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938–1973 (Australian National University Press Books, 1979), 24.
Edgar Wells, Reward and Punishment in Arnhem Land, 1962–1963 (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1982), 58–59; Anne E. Wells, This is Their Dreaming: Legends of the Panels of Aboriginal Art in the Yirrkala Church (University of Queensland Press, 1971), 41.
Wells, This Is Their Dreaming, x. Of course, exactly this was the self-evident purpose of the photograph. Wells was pursuing a policy of “contextualization,” of relating Christianity to Aboriginal cultural, social, and political contexts, that was emerging within the Methodist mission to Arnhem Land. It was not, however, fully embraced by the church hierarchy. See John Kadiba, “The Methodist Mission and the Emerging Aboriginal Church in Arnhem Land 1916–1977” (PhD diss., Faculty of Education, Northern Territory University, 1998).
See Jeremy Long, “Wells, Edgar Almond (1908–1995),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2019 →; Ann E. Wells, Milingimbi: Ten Years in the Crocodile Islands of Arnhem Land (Angus & Robertson, 1963); and Wells, Reward and Punishment. While at Milingimbi, Wells had arranged for Karel Kupka to design stained-glass windows featuring Yolŋu motifs gathering around a central cross. Aesthetically, a greater contrast to the achievement of the Yirrkala panels is difficult to imagine.
See Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 1991), chap. 3.
Howard Morphy, “Acting in a Community: Art and Social cohesion in Indigenous Australia,” Humanities Research Journal 15, no. 2 (2009) →. See section “The Bite in the Bark.”
Morphy, Ancestral Connections, 40.
It is worth noting that the clans still maintain that they speak different languages (as it is a defining feature of clan difference), whereas the linguists insist they speak different dialects.
These are the main Dhuwa clan groups of East Arnhem Land: Rirratjiŋu, Gälpu, Marrakulu, Dhuḏi-Djapu, Djapu, Ḏäṯiwuy, Ŋaymil, Djarrwark, and Golumala. The major Yirritja clan groups of the region are these: Gumatj, Wangurri, Munyuku, Maŋgalili, Maḏarrpa, Warramiri, and Dhalwaŋu.
See Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt, The Speaking Land; Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia (Penguin Books Australia, 1989), chap.1, for some such inferences. For a skeptical view, see Tony Swain, A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Introduction, chap. 1.
Of course, ceremonial exchange had been occurring for millennia. Sociologically speaking, the missions had already concentrated the clans into one large area. There were also some art precedents. In 1942, Wonggu Munuggur and his children made bark paintings for anthropologist Donald Thomson that explained major Dreaming stories, such as that of the Djan’kawu, including a painting of one of the sisters in half-human form. See “Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic,” Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 2009. Four years later, anthropologist Ronald M. Berndt encouraged Yolŋu to do crayon drawings of their Dreaming stories. The 365 resultant drawings, made in a five-month period by twenty-seven Yolŋu, are held in the Berndt Museum, University of Western Australia. Each of these precedents echo in the panels.
Wells, This Is Their Dreaming, 43.
Wells, This Is Their Dreaming, 41. Written for the general reader, in a story-telling style, this moment has some earmarks of apocrypha.
Wells, This Is Their Dreaming, 7–37, offers a detailed account of each section, as she does for the Yirritja panel, 39–71.
“Yirrkala Church Panels, 1962–63,” Saltwater, Paintings of Sea Country, The Recognition of Indigenous Sea Rights, 2nd ed. (Baku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre, 2014), 25. Sometimes named “The Island of the Dead,” Burralku is the place from which the Creator Beings of both moieties came, and to which the spirits of the dead return. Swain speculates that, for the Yirritja in particular, this mythical domain is in some sense coterminous with parts of Indonesia. See Tony Swain, A Place for Strangers, chap. 4.
Swain, A Place for Strangers, 32. The internal reference is to Nancy Munn, “The Spatial Representation of Cosmic Order in Walbiri Iconography,” in Primitive Art and Society, ed. Andrew Forge ( Oxford University Press, 1973), 197. See also Nancy Munn, Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society (Cornell University Press, 1973).
See Wells, This Is Their Dreaming, 37. In Central Arnhem Land, a parallel theme, the story of the Wagilag Sisters, is much elaborated in ceremony and in art, by Dawidi Birritjama and Paddy Dhatangu, for example. See The Painters of the Wagilag Sisters Story, 1937–1997, ed. Wally Caruana and Nigel Lendon (National Gallery of Australia, 1997).
Saltwater, Paintings of Sea Country, 25.
Furthermore, having given the people language, lore, kinship behavior, and the designs for ceremony, “Banatja is a very special name for the Yirritja people. He is said to be the ancestor for the Yirritja as Djankawu is for the Dua, for the senior men say that Banatja and Djankawu are equal in all things.” Wells, This Is Their Dreaming, xi.
Wells, This Is Their Dreaming, 48.
In 1948, the Berndts heard a version of this story in which Lany’tun is the father of Banatja, who became in turn a great religious leader and teacher. In this version he is killed by his disciples. See R. M. Berndt and C. H. Berndt, “Sacred Figures of Ancestral beings of Arnhem Land,” Oceania, vol. 18 (1948): 314. Cited in Swain, A Place for Strangers, 199.
See →.
See →.
“… as if done by the Dutchman Piet Mondrian.” Peter Nauman, “Old Masters: Australia’s Great Bark Artists,” reCollections 9, no. 2 (2013) →.
Howard Morphy, Aboriginal Art (Phaidon, 1998), 37 and 39.
See Natalie Wilson, “(Works of) Paradise and Yet: Stanley Gordon Moriarty, Tony Tuckson and the Collection of Oceanic Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales,” in Hunting the Collectors: Pacific Collections in Australian Museums, Galleries and Archives. ed Susan Cochrane and Max Quanchi (Cambridge Scholarly Publishing, 2014), 221–42.
For a similar reading of this painting, see Henry Skerritt, “New Lines of Flight: Bark Painting as Contemporary Encounter,” Art Guide Australia (January–February, 2014): 61–66 →. There are many resonances across these cross-cultural spaces, the pursuit of which would take us too far off course. Four come to mind immediately, one each for the kinds of spatial and temporal projections we have been considering. A concurrent instance of cross-cultural convergence: Margaret Preston’s later works, notably in this case her painting of 1942 Flying Over the Shoalhaven (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra). A subsequent Yolŋu collective enterprise, this time out of Ramingining: The Aboriginal Memorial 1988 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra). This was at least as ambitious as the church panels, was arguably more monumental, and has been, to date, more consequential. A later compilation of stories across a territory, a chronicle of dispossession, of mourning: Spirit Dreaming through Napperby Country, a scroll-like painting made in 2008 by Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri for filming by Geoffrey Bardon (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). And a gesture of historical retrospect, in a spirit of coevality: Kunwinjku man Gabriel Maralngurra’s series of paintings made in the 2000s, about the visits to Oenpelli made a century earlier by one of the founders of the discipline of anthropology, Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer. On this last, see especially, Henry Skerritt, “Seeing Through Spencer: Gabriel Maralngurra’s Paintings of Baldwin Spencer,” Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association, 14, no. 1–2 (2015): 106–19.
See →. This does not mean that they were seen and understood by all who saw them. Liberal Party Treasurer Joe Hockey, currently Australia’s ambassador to the United States, recently admitted to having never heard of them. See Will Stubbs, “A Short History of Yolgnu Activist Art,” Artlink, June 1, 2016. The economic future of the Gove Peninsula within the global economy is destined to diminish considerably, as Rio Tinto closed the aluminum mine in 2014 and plans to cease extracting bauxite in 2030. See →.
Ian McLean, Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (Reaktion Books, 2016), 110.
On this expanded sense of “coevality,” involving a shared possession of the same temporality based on an exchange between equals, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (Columbia University Press, 2002).
These reflections were triggered by the experience of attending the “Postnational Art Histories Workshop,” hosted by Wukun Wanambi at the Baku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre, Yirrkala, June 10–15, 2019. I am indebted to Wukun and the coordinator of the Centre, Will Stubbs, and to the conveners of the workshop, Ian McLean and Charles Green of the University of Melbourne, my fellow workshop participants, and to the artists who work at and show through the Centre and who made us balanda welcome. I especially thank Ian McLean, Howard Morphy, Henry Skerritt, and Will Stubbs for their close and insightful reading of this essay and their many helpful suggestions.