Mungurrawuy Yunupingu

Mungurrawuy Yunupingu (1907–1979), known mononymously among his people as Mungurrawuy, was a Aboriginal Australian artist and leader of the Gumatj clan of the Yolngu people of northeastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. He was known for his bark paintings and for his involvement in the Yirrkala church panels and the Yirrkala bark petitions of 1963.

Early life Mungurrawuy Yunupingu was born in 1907 at Melville Bay, on the Gove Peninsula in northeast Arnhem Land, of the Yirritja moiety.

Art career

Mungurrawuy was one of the most significant painters of his time. He was the most prominent Gumatj artist active during the mission days in Arnhem Land. While he painted traditional stories and concepts, his innovation greatly diverged from common single-panelled narrative paintings. His painting style can be described as a well-balanced mix of colours dominated by the use of yellow ochre. The human figures he painted tend to be broad-shouldered and have elongated bodies.

Between 1959 and 1962, Mungurrawuy produced some of his largest and most significant works for the collector-donor Stuart Scougall, who along with the Art Gallery of New South Wales' assistant director, Tony Tuckson, commissioned a series of monumental bark paintings from the artists of Yirrkala to lay out the major ancestral narratives of the Yolngu clans. Scougall described these works as "the first time such a collection of bark paintings was made in a pictorial ballad sequence whereas other collections have been essentially sporadic, of a piecemeal nature." The majority of these works are now held in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, however a small number of works commissioned by Scougall can be found in other collections around the world, including the Saint Louis Art Museum. Mungurrawuy also established a strong relationship with the collector and art dealer Jim Davidson.

Aside from ancestral stories, he also produced several paintings depicting the interaction of Yolngu with the Makassan people, who were seafarers that seasonally visited the northern Arnhem Land coast to harvest trepang, or sea cucumbers. Another work, Man Landing on the Moon (1969), which depicts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's Moon landing is held in the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia.

Other roles Mungurrawuy was a senior cultural leader of the Gumatj clan in Yirrkala,

Their efforts to engage the government in discussion about the use of their land were not met with success. Mungurrawuy called all the clans together for a week-long bunggul, to be held on his Country at Gulkula. This was a significant and rare event, called to honour the animals and the land, to remind people where they stood, and to engender unity among the clans. This would lead to the creation of the Yirrkala bark petitions of August 1963 (to which Mungurrawuy was a signatory

The Yirrkala panels were discarded by the church in 1974, but were salvaged by the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre in 1978. On 27 February 1998 they were unveiled by prime minister John Howard, and were described by Yolŋu leaders as "Title Deeds which establish the legal tenure for each of our traditional clan estates". Historian Clare Wright, in her 2024 book about the Yirrkala bark petitions, reports that he had 11 wives and 43 children by 1963, at the age of 58. His sons included Djalaliŋba, Garamali, and Galarrwuy, and one of his daughters was Djerrkŋu. Garamali was his eldest son, "a colourful character who always wore a cape, and often a top hat", and liked to carry a machete as well as a spear. He was killed by a Djapu man in a relatively rare clan dispute some time after the bark petitions had been presented to Parliament. Other offspring included Mandawuy, Barrupu, Dhopiya, Djakanngu (Dorothy), Gulumbu, Nyapanyapa, Ranydjupi, and Nancy Gaymala Yunupingu. Many of his children would go on to have significant careers as artists, musicians, and political leaders.

Mungurrawuy did not speak English, but his son Galarrwuy took a keen interest in the proceedings around the mining claim, and acted as interpreter for his father. Father and son went to great lengths to protect a sacred banyan tree on Gumatj country, successfully, when Nabalco arrived to build their aluminium plant. Yirrkala mission teacher Ron Croxford reported that it was Mungurrawuy who had taught him the depth of the Yolngu connection to their land: "Mungurrawuy didn't just own the land, he was the land".

He died in northeast Arnhem Land in 1979. Art Gallery of South Australia Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia National Museum of Australia Saint Louis Art Museum Berndt Museum of the University of Western Australia

Significant exhibitions

1965: Australian Aboriginal Bark Paintings 1912-1964, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England 1988: Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia, Asia Society Galleries, New York City 2013-14: Yirrkala Drawings, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Berndt Museum of Anthropology, University of Western Australia, Perth; Charles Darwin University Art Gallery, Charles Darwin University, Darwin 2013-2020: Old Masters: Australia's Great Bark Artists, National Museum of Australia, Canberra; National Taiwan Museum, Taipei; Sichuan Museum, Chengdu; Shenzhen Museum, Shenzhen; Shanghai Natural History Museum, Shanghai; National Museum of China, Beijing

Footnotes