Mungurrawuy Yunupingu

Mungurrawuy Yunupingu, of the Yirritja moiety, was a senior cultural leader of the Gumatj clan in Yirrkala.[1]

Born in 1905, Mungurrawuy was a politician and one of the most significant painters of his time. Mungurrawuy Yunupingu was the most prominent Gumatj artist active during the mission days in Arnhem Land.[2]

In 1978, H.C. "Nugget" Coombs, the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, described Mungurrawuy as "an impressive figure – tall, massive, bearded, powerful. He has seven wives and thirty children. These, no doubt, are measures of his status in his community."[3]

Many of these children would go on to have significant careers as artists, musicians and political leaders, most notably his daughters Gulumbu Yunupingu and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu, and his sons Galarrwuy and Mandawuy Yunupingu, who have both been Australians of the Year.

During his career as an artist, Mungurrawuy Yunupingu drew upon ancestral narratives in his paintings and wood carvings. He is known to be one of the artists who spearheaded the “episodic” manner of painting, where stories are painted in a series of panels to show how they unfold over time.[4] While he painted traditional stories and concepts, his innovation greatly diverged from common single-paneled 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 paints tend to be broad-shouldered and have elongated bodies.[2]

Mungurrawuy was involved in most of the significant moments in Yolngu art history of the twentieth century. He produced a number of fine crayon drawings for the anthropologist Ronald Berndt after he arrived in Yirrkala in 1946 and in 1948 created a large number of paintings for Charles Mountford and the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land.[5]

Between 1959-1962, 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."[6] 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.[7]

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.[2] It is suspected that Mungurrawuy was quite young when he last interacted with Makassans, since the Australian Government banned other countries from using the resources found on Australian coasts in 1906. However, he did remember meeting Makassan people and for Berndt’s crayon drawing commission, he drew his famous Port of Macassar.[8]

In the late 1960s, Mungurrawuy was commissioned to produce a series of painting on masonite board to commemorate events involving the ELDO tracking station at Gurlkurla by Geoff Woods, who was employed as the base manager at a nearby weapons research centre. One work of these works, Space Tracking Station (1967), was subsequently acquired by the South Australian Museum and included in the exhibition Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia at the Asia Society Galleries in New York City in 1988.[9] 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.

On February 18, 1963, the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced the opening of bauxite mines in the Arnhem Land reserve without consulting Yolngu leaders. Furious at the lack of transparency the Australian government held for the Yolngu people, clan elders came together to paint the famous Yirrkala Church Panels, which documented the Yolngu claim to the land through ancestral stories. Consisting of two four meter tall sheets of masonite, eight elders of the Dhuwa moiety (including Mawalan Marika, Wandjuk Marika and Mithinarri Gurruwiwi) painted one sheet with their major ancestral narratives and clan designs, and eight elders of the Yirritja moiety, including Mungurrawuy Yunupingu, Birrikitji Gumana and Narritjin Maymuru, painted the other sheet with Yirritja designs. This was the first significant political claim to the land by Aboriginal Australians, accompanied by physical documentation in the form of the church panel paintings.[4] This would lead to the creation of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions of 1963 and the high court case Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd.

• Art Gallery of New South Wales[10]
• Art Gallery of South Australia[11]
• Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia[12]
• National Museum of Australia[1]
• Saint Louis Art Museum
• Berndt Museum of the University of Western Australia

• 1965: Australian Aboriginal Bark Paintings 1912-1964. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England.[13]
• 1988: Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia. The Asia Society Galleries, New York.[9]
• 1993-4: Aratjara: Art of the First Australians. Europe, 1993-1994. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany; Hayward Gallery, London, England; and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark.[14]
• 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.[8]
• 2013-2020: Old Masters: Australia's Great Bark Artists. National Museum of Australia, Canberra; National Taiwan Museum, Taipei City; Sichuan Museum, Chengdu; Shenzhen Museum, Shenzhen; Shanghai Natural History Museum, Shanghai; National Museum of China, Beijing.[15]