Ginger Riley Munduwalawala

The Artist, painted at Ngukurr, Northern Territory

Anthony W. Knight, Melbourne

Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne (catalogue number AK1956)

Private Collection, Melbourne

Deutscher & Hackett, Melbourne, Important Australian Aboriginal Art, March 18, 2020, lot 12

Tim Klingender, Sydney, acquired from the above in March, 2020

Thence by descent

Cath Bowdler, et. al., Colour Country: Art from Roper River, New South Wales, 2009, p. 91. 

Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, New South Wales, Colour Country: Art from Roper River, June 5 - August 2, 2009; additional venues:

Flinders University Art Museum, Adelaide, December 4, 2009 - February 14, 2010

Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, February 25 - April 11, 2010

Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, May 22, 2010 - July 12, 2010. 

Ginger Riley’s superlative colour sense sets him apart from other Indigenous Australian artists. His unique landscape manner, studded with icons of identity and place, is instantly recognisable…¹

Ginger Riley Munduwalawala reveled in color. His vison of the landscape is as unique as his style of painting that refuses to sit comfortably within any of the recognized genres of Aboriginal art. As a young man he was inspired to paint when he met Albert Namatjira (1902-59) the watercolor painter from Ntaria (Hermannsburg) in central Australia who, at the time, was at the height of his popularity. Namatjira was renowned for his ability to capture the light and atmosphere of inland Australia in a deceptively conventional European style of landscape painting: ‘I saw Namatjira painting his color country…and [I] saw my color country.’²

The recurring setting of Munduwalawala’s œuvre is his mother’s country at the mouth of the Limmen Bight River in the southeastern corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Munduwalawala described himself as a saltwater man. The region is dominated by a line of four prominent hills known as the Four Archers.

Bandian the King Brown Snake, Munduwalawala’s father’s mother’s Dreaming, metamorphoses into several guises, including that of the ancestral taipan, Garimala who, as in this work, is depicted as two snakes in the sky above the hills, and in the river; the inference is that snakes abound in this country. The Four Archers were created by Bandian as Garimala who lives in a saltwater lagoon near the Archers. Garimala travelled to Nyamiyukandji, a site linked to Munduwalawala’s own Dreaming of Jatukal the Plains Kangaroo, where he submerged and metamorphosed into a Rainbow Serpent, associated with the wet season.³

The Four Achers, clearly viewed in the middle ground of the painting, alternate with images of shark’s liver tree in the valleys: the so-called tree is a ceremonial object made from the liver of an ancestral shark and is associated with the artist’s mother’s Dreaming. ,

In Limmen Bight Country, the ancestor-inhabited landscape as depicted by Munduwalawala becomes an allegory for the artist’s identity, bringing together his paternal and maternal heritages.

¹ Judith Ryan, December 2001, https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/2558/ginger-riley-munduwalawala-a-seeing-artist/

² Judith Ryan, ‘Different from other mob: Ginger Riley Munduwalwala’ in Cath Bowdler, Colour Country: Art from Roper River, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, New South Wales, 2009, pp.39-40.

³ ibid, p.41; and Ryan 2001.