Visual Art

Yolŋu power: the art of Yirrkala at the AGNSW is a must-see exhibition that displays an entire cosmology. By Djon Mundine.

Showcasing the artists of Yirrkala, East Arnhem Land

N. Marawili’s Garraŋali.

Credit: Estate of N. Marawili

At the beginning of time there was a village on a freshwater creek. Not far from here, the crocodile man used firesticks to make fire but burnt himself and dived into the water in pain, forever marked. He went out into the salt water and travelled along the coast westward, all the way to Murrwangi, the Arafura Swamp, and Gumugumuk (Cape Stewart), hundreds of kilometres to the west. The land of the Yolŋu.

The missionaries Wilbur Chaseling, Harold Thornell and Edgar Wells arrived at Yirrkala Creek, as part of a peace plan after the massacres of the 1930s, and established Yirrkala. Yolŋu power: the art of Yirrkala at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which showcases the art that followed, is a must-see exhibition that reflects how Macassans, prospectors, mercenary cattlemen, missionaries, misfits, murderers, corporate miners and political authority have brushed up against Yolŋu society.

The exhibition is a near complete array of an all-round cosmology of the world. The Yolŋu encountered, received and digested all these influences and reconstructed them in their own image or likeness. They met, engaged and yet kept their identity and direction. To never be overwhelmed is real and wise, a sign of power. In this show the artists embrace you, confident, unintimidated. They aren’t just fairytale people telling fairytale stories from fairytale places.

Here are eight galleries in this Aboriginal–Australian contemporary space, bursting with images in a myriad continuum of materials and forms, cleverly marking eight decades of unfolding expression, revelation and exchange that took place in our lifetime and country. The eight spaces reflect the structure of the mälk/skin system and circular time – the cosmology that overlies all living beings, climatic forces and land.

This exhibition is a directly personal story that evokes a relation to the viewer, the listener. It drips with loss and aloneness, a dreamlike state concerning a person and place, distant in time and space, but it’s audible and engaging, creating empathy. We don’t know where the story will travel but want to hear more.

Besides the eight rooms are several other spaces, such as the AGNSW’s Tank, which host 98 artists and nearly 300 artworks covering a period of 80 years. Eighty is 40 times two. God flooded the Earth for 40 days and nights. Moses fasted for 40 days and Jesus wandered in the wilderness for 40 days. It’s a number associated with testing and the hardships one must endure to become more spiritually aware.

So far away – so near. lshmael Marika’s surveillance camera work that introduces the exhibition, Wunya’Gali (The Other Side) (2017), was originally placed at Sydney’s Wynyard railway station, a seemingly live feed of Yirrkala villagers going about their daily lives thousands of kilometres away.

High up on the wall, facing us, stand 10 near life-size moving images of a young Yolŋu man. He is talking in 10 sign-language gestures – silently asking, are you brother, sister, mother, father? – so he can know your skin name, how you fit into the Yolŋu society, how he should speak to you.

The third room is a tour de force. Twenty-two large barks are displayed on an arced black wall showing motifs of miny’tji (body painting). My own reading of these compositions, normally applied to the body of men but also to women in some ceremonies, is that it’s an image of your soul, applied to be danced with, and ultimately a fleeting vision of the original creative spirit. Of course, you only allow certain people into your personal space to paint you with this image.

We get many missionaries, all with different ideas: they come and they go, we always remain.
– Narritjin Maymuru, 1963

In the early 1960s, when the threat of corporate mining was overwhelmingly close at Yirrkala on the Gove Peninsula, local Aboriginal artists took two actions. First, as suggested to the missionary Edgar Wells by Narritjin Maymuru, eight artists from each of the two moieties (halves of a whole) put down on two large masonite wood panels the complete creation stories from the Dhuwa and Yirritja moieties. These described the forming of the land and its spiritual relationship to the present-day descendants of the Wangarr (original creative beings). The two panels were placed behind the altar in the Yirrkala Church. Mithinari, Mauwalan, Mathaman and Larrtjanga were among the artists who created the Dhuwa panel. Narritjin, Nanyin, Mungarrawuy and Gawerin worked on the Yirritja panel.

A parliamentary committee led by Kim Beazley Sr visited Yirrkala in 1963 in response to earlier protests about a proposed bauxite mine and were shown the newly installed church panels. Beazley suggested that it was symbolically appropriate to use art as a medium of communication. Two small moiety-specific bark paintings, one carrying a petition on paper, framed with totemic designs, the other a large, simple, male dancing figure, Wuyal the honey man, with another petition on the reverse of the bark, were then created.

These artworks show how art can make real change. Their petitions led to a parliamentary inquiry into Aboriginal land rights. It concluded that although Yolŋu belonged to Country, in a Western sense the land didn’t belong to them. This was seen as particularly ridiculous and another committee of inquiry led to the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, which gave Yolŋu veto rights on mining, and duties paid when it didn’t happen. Unfortunately this didn’t reverse the mining that had already started. Yolŋu challenged this decision, demanding reparations from the government for ignoring their rights. Earlier this year, in a significant decision, the High Court ruled that the Commonwealth is liable for compensation for the impact of mining on native title rights in the region.

At the time of the Bark Petition, a film crew recorded a teenage boy, G. Yunupingu, singing of the first tractor arriving for the Yirrkala mission garden. It was such a popular school song and dance that even a decade later, in 1979, when I played it one morning at Milingimbi Art Centre, grown men dropped everything and leapt into the “tractor dance” they’d created as schoolchildren.

By then, Yunupingu had reached the powerful yet possibly uncomfortable position of chairman of the Northern Land Council, uncomfortable in signing off on the Ranger Uranium Mining Agreement, for which he was named Australian of the Year. I met him here and there – he was a major player and I just a minor observer – but I felt connected when he and family took part in the ritual for Paddy D., my mentor-teacher’s funeral at Ramingining in the 1990s.

Dream is a shadow … of something real – Like if my family is in trouble, from dream they send me a message.
– David Gulpilil, The Last Wave, 1977

Tobitj is a small muscular spasm, a tic, through which an ancestor or other faraway or dead family member speaks to you. There are other forms of these messages: unusual weather, a rare sighting of a natural species or a visitation in a dream. Yolŋu people live very seriously in the real world and defend their rights in this world but listen to ancestors in magic-realism consciousness. Their work reflects this reality.

Across the Pacific, four years after the presentation of the Bark Petition to federal parliament in 1963, Gabriel García Márquez published his magical realism novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. It told the story of seven generations of another family and village of brown people. It tells of the history of its coming into being and the generations following: their challenges, successes, achievements, revelations and sorrows in a place and people attacked by invaders physically, socially, psychologically and intellectually.

Yolŋu power is a similar story, a real-life sequential struggle of persistence and bravery, of the power of knowing who you are in the face of conflicting waves of attack on your sovereignty and your personal identity.

As Márquez’s family saga metaphorically embodies the history of Colombia and the complete commentary on the history of Latin America, Yolŋu power embodies the history of race, Indigenous relations and the Australian nation with a visual language as exquisite as the Book of Kells or a Gutenberg Bible, with beautifully overlaid text, shimmering, poetic stories of laws, lores, morality – and sometimes the awkward, clumsy, pressured life of a people.

Yolŋu power: the art of Yirrkala is showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until October 6.

ARTS DIARY

EXHIBITION Sydney Contemporary 2025

Carriageworks, Gadigal Country/Sydney, September 11-14

LITERATURE Emerging Writers Festival

Venues throughout Naarm/Melbourne, September 11-18

MUSICAL In the Heights

Home of the Arts, Yugambeh Country/Gold Coast, September 12-21

TEXTILES Tasmanian Flora

Lightbox, nipaluna/Hobart, until October 5

SCULPTURE Terracotta Warriors: Legacy of the First Emperor

WA Museum Boola Bardip, Kaurna Yarta/Perth, until April 22

LAST CHANCE

THEATRE Circle Mirror Transformation

Wharf 1 Theatre, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until September 7

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 6, 2025 as "A village on the creek".

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