Mulkun Wirrpanda was an Indigenous Australian community leader and artist from Yirrkala. Coming from a family of artists, her work focuses on botany surrounding her homelands.

Life

Ms. Wirrpanda was part of the Dhudi-Djapu clan with her homeland at Dhuruputjpi. Her father was community leader Dhakiyarr Wirrpanda,^[2] who was involved in the Caledon Bay Crisis.

Ms. Wirrpanda was featured in the film Dhakiyarr vs the King, which focused on her father’s disappearance from Darwin and her family’s reconciliation afterwards. She was shown preparing armbands for her family’s ceremonial performance in Darwin while recounting the events that lead to his arrest. Her father killed policeman Albert McColl, who was searching for other yolngu who had killed Japanese fisherman in Caledon Bay. Seeing that McColl had apprehended his wife and child, Dhakiyarr killed McColl. Her father was set to receive the death penalty yet was later released. He was never seen again, leading Ms. Wirrpanda’s family and others familiar with the case to believe he was killed shortly after his release.

Most of Ms. Wirrpanda’s life was spend in her homelands near Yilpara, Dhuruputjpi, and Gangan, as she was an early leader of the homelands movement in Arnhem Land. She was married to Madarrpa clan leader Wakuthi Marawili, with whom she had three children. Her two daughters, Yalmakany and Gurrundul, are senior rangers, and her son, Borrak, is a lawman.^[3] By kinship, current Madarrpa leader Djambawa Marawili is also considered her son. In her community, Ms. Wirrpanda was regarded as an important elder and ceremonial leader, which was a rare position for a woman to hold in yolngu law.^[2]

Art

Ms. Wirrpanda’s artwork largely focuses on edible plants and natural species as well as the Dhudi-Djapu miny’tji relating to her land near Dhuruputjpi. She explores these subjects through various mediums including bark painting, ceremonial poles, weaving and prints.^[2]

Ms. Wirrpanda produced a series of exhibitions surrounding botany and plant life in the miwatj region with British painter John Wolesely. This partnership began through "Djalkiri: We are standing on their names," a collaborative project between yolngu leaders and ethnobotanists to generate prints showcasing their land through different perspectives.^[4]

Working with the Yirrkala print space, Ms. Wirrpanda contributed to a 2010 exhibition of string figures (matjka) in recollection of anthropologist Frederick McCarthy’s record of string figures in arnhem land as part of a 1948 expedition.^[4]

Midawarr | Harvast

Since 2009, Ms. Wirrpanda worked with British painter John Wolesely to paint the plant life in Arnhem land. They met every Midawarr (harvest) season for several years to create more than 80 works and multimedia focusing on yolngu knowledge and sustainable living practices, documenting more than 30 species. Their various exhibitions included various bark paintings, larrakitj (ceremonial poles), prints, watercolor, and mixed media.^[3] The main exhibit launched at the National Museum of Australia in November 2017 and coincided with the release of the book, Midawarr | Harvest, which functions as a modern botanical guide for yolngu and Australian communities.^[5]

Wolesely met Ms. Wirrpanda when he was invited by the Nomad art gallery to meet yolngu painters and paint the land with them. Developing a strong relationship, she adopted Wolesely as her “wawa” (brother) and named him Langgurrk. Ms. Wirrpanda was passionate about educating her community and future generations about healthy living, saying to Wolesely, “I'm going to paint lots of these plants, and one of the reasons I'm going to paint them is my people are dying because they're eating the wrong food”. She identified the overwhelming presence of junk food as a major problem for aboriginal communities and aimed to make this book readily available to the community and youth as a tool for knowledge.^[6]

Ms. Wirrpanda collected edible plant life and natural species around the bush to paint with Wolesely, and their project highlighted the different styles of painting between their skill sets and perspectives. Wolesely described his approach as “full frontal” in which a subject’s outside appearance was the focus,^[6] but it also existed to produce a dialogue of overlapping systems and ideas.^[7] On the other hand, Ms. Wirrpanda honed in on a subject’s inner essence with respect to how it moves and has its being. In yolngu belief systems, sacred designs (mint’jyi) are bestowed to all aspects of yolngu land and plants, but artists only have authority to paint designs relating to their own moiety, clan, and ancestors. To accommodate plant life that didn't belong to her identity, she developed an “ordinary” method of depicting them, saying, “I had to let the plants tell me what their secular identity or character was. By the way they grow or the way they look or express themselves. They gave me their rhythm or their pattern.” In doing so, Ms. Wirrpanda skirts around sacred designs by alluding to them without evoking their ancestral essence. This new approach, coupled with working alongside Wolesely’s western perspectives, allowed her to probe the outer limits of yolngu systems.^[7]

Exhibitions

• Djalkiri: We are Standing on their Names^[8]

• Midawarr|Harvest: The Art of Ms. Wirrpanda and John Wolesely^[3]

• Gurrutu: The Art of Mulkun Wirrpanda^[9]

• Solidarity: Inscriptions for the Future

• Matriarchs: Motherlines of the Yolngu and Tiwi Islands

• Mother to Daughter: On Art and Caring for Homelands

• A Yirrkala Cracker

• Yirrkala, After Berndt

• Mulkun Wirrpanda / Fiona MacDonald: More Than Honeyed Words

• Barrupu Yunupingu/Mulkun Wirrpanda: Fire, Water, and Honey

• Mulkun Wirrpanda - One Lore, Two Law, Outlaw: Dhakiyarr vs the King^[10]

Collections

• National Gallery of Australia^[11]

• National Gallery of Victoria^[1]

• National Gallery of New South Wales^[12]

• Gallery of Queensland^[13]

• Monash University^[14]

• Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection^[15]

References