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YingarnaKunwinjku people in western Arnhem Land have many ancestral figures that continue to play a role in their lives today. Some of these ancestors are linked with fibre forms.
The creator ancestor Yingarna is of great importance to Kunwinjku people as she is responsible for the creation of the Aboriginal people and their distribution in the area. She originally came from the east carrying baskets. At each place she journeyed she left a basket or removed children from them that became the people from that area. Jill Nganjmirra, one of the artists in the exhibition, recalls one of the stories. ‘My grandfather told me this story. All these dilly bags that she carries on her head that is all the people, in different tribes and languages.’ Her actions are known through the handing down of stories from one generation to the next. In addition to this oral history there is a visual one recorded in the rock art.
As an ancestral figure Yingarna has different physical forms, resembling a human female or the shape of a rainbow serpent. At Injalak Hill behind Injalak Arts and Craft Centre, there are many paintings in rock ledges dating back thousands of years ago. It is here that she is depicted as a human like figure carrying 15 baskets. All of these have horizontal bands of colour very much like those made in the past 100 years. Several artists today from Gunbalanya paint the story of Yingarna in her various forms on both bark and paper. Thompson Yulidjirri is the most senior Kunwinkju artist who paints Yingarna in a way that resembles her appearance in the rock art. In his painting you can also see the children or people that she left at each of the places she visited. Thompson Yulidjirri told his story about Yingarna to Sally May and Gabriel Marlngurra in 2004. ‘Yingarna, she was a serpent, she was a rainbow serpent, carrying all that dilly bag [baken] that woman. She had the woman and all them boys inside the dilly bags, and she dropped a few here, she went east, and then around south, just around the top end here. And then Alice Springs somewhere and then I don't know, that's where she disappeared somewhere. She taught them language and clan and every dilly bag she would leave places like here.’ The text here is adapted from May, S & Murphy, A 2005, ‘Some Baskets are special ones’, Twined Together: Kunmadj Njalehnjaleken, Hamby, L ed. Gunbalanya, Injalak Arts and Crafts. p.25 |
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