Narritjin Maymuru devoted his adult life to promoting the significance of Yolŋu culture to Europeans through his own art and by encouraging his contemporaries to collaborate on major public works of cultural, social, and political significance. An instigator of the Yirrkala Church Panels and the Bark Petitions, Maymuru was one of the first Yolŋu to consider himself a professional artist in the public domain. He produced paintings of extraordinary complexity by incorporating a wealth of iconography, layers of interpretation, and visual puns in the best tradition of Yolŋu art.

Ostensibly, this painting represents the site of Djarrakpi organized along a template of rectangles. It depicts Guwak, the ancestral Koel Cuckoo of the Maŋgalili, sitting atop the sacred Marawili cashew tree, located at the head of the lake at Djarrakpi on Cape Shield. The St. Andrew’s Cross spiders—whose X-shaped web is a model for the string ceremonial breast girdles worn by Yolŋu women—flanking the tree hint at the presence of female ancestors called the Nyapililŋu, who transform lengths of string spun from possum fur into sand dunes.

On another level, the painting expresses the relationship between two Maŋgalili sacred sites: Djarrakpi and the Wayawu River, home of Ŋyukal the Kingfish, which is shown here decorated in a design representing yoku, the bulbs of an edible freshwater plant that grows in the river. Finally, because Guwak died at Djarrakpi, the Marawili tree is also regarded as a force connecting the living and the dead: cicadas and possums run up and down the trunk as messengers from one world to the other.

From Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art. Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2012.

– Wally Caruana