Dr. Djambawa Marawili

Painted at Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala in 2006 (catalogue number BLA 356)

Annandale Galleries, Sydney, consigned by the above in 2006

Private Corporate Collection, Hong Kong, acquired from the above in September, 2006

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Biennale of Sydney, Zones of Contact, June 8 - August 27, 2006

History, cosmology, society, culture, authority, identity are all themes that pervade the art of Dr. Djambawa Marawili. Here is the artist in the guise of Baru, the ancestral Crocodile, the master of fire in a painting that may be considered a self-portrait. From Yathikpa on the shores of Blue Mud Bay in eastern Arnhem Land, with his burning clap-sticks Baru propels flames out to sea, to a sacred rock where fishermen harpoon dugong. The rough seas also take the lives of two ancestral fishermen, capsizing their boat.

Variations on the Madarrpa clan pattern of rows of sinuous linked diamonds transform to suggest a dangerous place of raw energies, where waves churn and heave, where freshwater meets salt–a metaphor for the coming together of opposing forces and their interdependence, as in the moiety systems that underpins Yolngu life and society.

Through this image we gain some understanding of the endurance of Aboriginal society and the efficacy of the transmission of traditions. The sacred rock, several miles out to sea and now submerged beneath the waves, is a Fire Dreaming site that was once above the waves, dating the Dreaming at least to the last glacial period when sea levels were lower than today.

Djambawa Marawili is a leader of the Madarrpa clan in northeast Arnhem Land. A trail-blazing artist with an extensive exhibition history in Australia and abroad including the exhibition Madayin which toured the United States, closing at the Asia Society Galleries, New York, recently.¹ Previously, Marawili participated in the 3^rd Moscow Biennale in 2009, and the Istanbul Biennale in 2015, and Metamorphosis / Yathikpa, 2006, was exhibited in Marawili’s installation and performance piece at the Biennale of Sydney in 2006.

For a related work by the artist on the same theme and painted in the same year, see Metamorphosis/Djirikitj in McCluskey, P. et al., Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art: Kaplan & Levi Collection, Seattle Art Museum and Yale University Press, Seattle and New Haven, 2012, pp.84-5.

¹ See the catalogue of the exhibition: Wukun Wanambi, Kade McDonald, Henry Skerritt (eds.), Maḏayin: Waltjaṉ ga Waltjaṉbuy Yolŋuwu Miny'ti Yirrkalawuy (Eight decades of Aboriginal Australian bark painting from Yirrkala), Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and DelMonico Books, New York, 2022. The exhibition was organised by Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in partnership with the Buku Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala. It opened at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire and travelled to: the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington DC; the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach; the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; and the Asia Society Museum, New York, from September 3, 2022, to January 5, 2025.