Nangunyarri ('Number One') circa 1890-1971

Nangunyarri was not a Tiwi by birth and belonged to the Iwadja group on Croker Island in Western Arnhem Land. A buffalo shooting camp had been established on Croker early in the Twentieth Century where Nangunyarri worked until he was among a group of Iwadja who had gone to the Tiwi islands to shoot buffalo there. Adopting Tiwi culture, he was also an artist who carved figures in the Tiwi tradition. In this ironwood figure of an unidentified female, the breasts are made of resin.

WC

Lance Bennett’s accompanying documents read in part, “Nangunyarri was born about 1890 in the country known as Waak in the upper reaches of Coopers Creek, just north of the East Alligator River. His father worked in the timber-cutting camp set up at Malay Bay by the white buffalo shooter Joel Cooper. When Cooper made his 1905 assault on the buffalo, then teeming throughout Melville Island, Nangunyarri went along with his father. The base camp was at Paru, south-west Melville, just across the Strait from Nguiu where the Bathurst Island Mission was established in 1911.

In 1907 the artist’s father returned to the mainland but Nangunyarri stayed on and graduated from horse-boy to shooter. He went on raids of Aboriginal camps on northern and western Bathurst Island to steal young girls at gunpoint. On one raid he was heavily clubbed and bore the head-scars all his life.

In 1915 he paddled by dugout canoe to Trepang Bay on the Coburg Peninsula of the mainland. Here he worked gathering trepang and shooting buffalo. For many years thereafter he worked at a variety of remote locations south and east of Darwin on jobs such as shooter, skinner, water bearer on vegetable farms, and pig keeping. He was evacuated to Mataranka during the Second World War to work as a labourer in a wartime workforce.

In the early 1950s, his wife having died childless, he paddled by canoe from Gunn Point, north of Darwin, to Nguiu on Bathurst Island. He lived quietly at Paru, site of Joel Cooper’s former camp across the Apsley Strait from the mission until his death in 1971.

He was a friend and neighbour at Paru of the great pioneering Tiwi woodcarver Kardo Kerinaiua. Unable to sing at Tiwi ceremonies because of his heavy Iwaidja accent, he joined in dances until he became too enfeebled by age. At the Pukumani mourning ceremony for Kardo, Nangunyarri played the didjeridu as an Iwaidja tribute to his friend. He deeply admired the carving ability of Kardo and Tjipungaleialumi (Enreald) and the high quality of his own efforts surprised some Tiwi men and women who by the mid-1960s had thought Nangunyarri “proper old dummy now”. He loved children and gave his name to Nangunyarri Number Two who, in his own old age in the 1960s, came to be regarded as one of the finest painters in Western Arnhem Land.

Never assertive and always one to look for a quiet life, Nangunyarri had his own sense of humour and was a good and constant friend of Wamutikimi (Old Frog), the greatest spear-carver of all the Tiwi.

The artist has set out to carve a representation in miniature of a Pukumani mortuary post into which a human face has been carved. He had adventured into carving shoulders, breasts and arms, which are separated from the trunk. A ‘window’ aperture typical of full-sized posts serves to delineate the legs. The piece has been painted with traditional Tiwi ceremonial design.

This sculpture was carved from bloodwood for Bennett during one of his visits to the artist on Bathurst Island in 1966.”