Burrungkuy

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For weeks before the rains the heat in the Top End builds with nowhere to go. The floodplain woodland stands still under it, the billabongs shrink and the storms gather along the escarpment, and the country that will soon be a sheet of running water is for now a dry, cracking ground. In the old pattern of the year this was the time to move up off the plain into the stone — into the deep overhangs at the base of the red sandstone walls, out of the coming weather, onto high ground that the wet would not reach. One of those walls is Burrungkuy, an island of rock standing clear of the lowland in the south of the country the world now calls Kakadu. Its shelters have been a refuge in the wet for a very long time, and their walls carry the painting of the people who took refuge there — among it one of the most recognized images in all of Aboriginal Australia, the figure of the storm-maker himself, laid down on the rock again within living memory.

The stone country and its Country

Burrungkuy — long written on the maps as Nourlangie, an anglicized fragment of a longer Bininj name, Nawurlandja, that the early Europeans could not hold whole — is an outlier of the Arnhem Land escarpment, a great mass of sandstone that has broken away from the main plateau and stands by itself above the floodplain. The upper formation is Burrunggui; the lower part, where the painted shelters are, is Anbangbang. The rock itself is the Kombolgie sandstone, a hard quartz-rich stone laid down by braided rivers something on the order of 1.7 billion years ago and now among the oldest exposed surfaces on the continent. To the geologist that is the headline fact, the deep antiquity of the stone. To the people whose Country this is, the headline is otherwise: the rock was shaped in the creation period, the time the English calls the Dreaming, by the ancestral beings who traveled this land, made its forms, and set down the Law by which life here is to be lived.

This is the Country of the Bininj and Mungguy — Bininj the word the people of the western stone country use for themselves, Mungguy the term for the southern groups, the two together the traditional owners of this part of Kakadu. Among the language groups of the area are the Gun-djeihmi or Gundjeihmi speakers in whose Country Burrungkuy lies. They have held this land across a span the documentary record now reckons in tens of millennia: the Aboriginal occupation of the Kakadu region runs back, on the evidence accepted by archaeologists, more than fifty thousand years — a continuity of people and Country that belongs to the oldest living religious tradition on earth, the deep-time inheritance of the Aboriginal Australians of which this Country is one keeping. The Dreaming is not, in their understanding, a set of stories about a vanished past. It is the order in which the world was made and in which it continues — ever-present, in the land underfoot, in the beings who remain in the places they made, in the Law the paintings hold. The phrase “Dreamtime,” a translation that came in with the nineteenth-century ethnographers and that suggests something safely long ago, sits awkwardly against this; the Dreaming is now, as much as it was the first time.

What can be set down here is the public account — the figures painted in the galleries that the traditional owners have opened to visitors, the meanings explained on the interpretive boards they have approved, the seasonal frame any attentive person on the Country can learn. Much of Aboriginal religious life is restricted: knowledge held within particular groups, men’s or women’s, opened only to those brought through the proper ceremony and not for outsiders. The deeper substance behind the paintings — the songs, the ceremonies, the law they belong to — is not a thing to be reconstructed from the outside, and it is not attempted here.

Burrungkuy (Nourlangie), an outlier of the Arnhem Land escarpment, Kakadu National Park. Photograph by Peter Robertson, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The shelter and the wall

The heart of the place is the Anbangbang shelter, a long overhang at the base of the wall where the rock leans out far enough to keep the rain off a sweep of dry ground beneath. When archaeologists excavated it in 1981, they found that people had used the shelter for a very long time: the deposits showed first occupation more than six thousand years ago, with occasional use reaching back perhaps twenty thousand, and a marked intensification of use within the last eight hundred to twelve hundred years, when the nearby lagoon — the Anbangbang Billabong that lies at the foot of the rock — had fully formed and the country around it grown rich in food. The shelter is not a monument set apart from daily life. It was a place people lived: cooked, slept, sheltered from the storms of the wet, and painted.

The painting is the reason the wider world comes. The walls of the Anbangbang gallery and the other shelters of Burrungkuy carry images stacked across thousands of years and many styles — the slender, animated figures of the older “dynamic” manner, hunting and running; the great X-ray paintings in which fish and wallaby and barramundi are shown not as the eye sees them from outside but with the backbone, the organs, the lines of fat and flesh laid bare inside the outline, the way the body is truly known to one who has caught and cut and shared it; and the large ancestral beings who dominate the main panel. There are even, at the related Nanguluwur shelter nearby, paintings of a sailing ship with anchor and dinghy — “contact art,” the record in ochre of the strangers who arrived by sea, the Macassan traders from the north and later the Europeans, set down on the rock by people watching their world begin to change.

X-ray style rock art at Burrungkuy (Nourlangie), Kakadu National Park. Photograph by pixculture, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The X-ray manner is worth pausing on, because it is the visual signature of this whole region of the stone country, and because it carries a way of seeing. To paint a fish with its skeleton inside is not a stylistic flourish; it is to render the creature as it is fully known, inside and out, to people for whom the animal is at once food, relation, and a figure of the Dreaming. The painting is an act of knowledge, not of decoration — and, made on a surface where the ancestral beings themselves are present, it is also an act of keeping that knowledge alive in the rock.

The place cannot be read apart from the cycle of the year that drives people into it. The Bininj reckon not two seasons but six, each named and each read off the land, the sky, and the behavior of plants and animals. The long build-up before the rains, when the heat thickens and the first afternoon storms walk along the escarpment, is Gunumeleng — the time, in the old pattern, to move up off the flooding plain and into the shelters of the stone. The violent monsoon that follows, the country turned to running water and vivid green, is Gudjewg. It was Gunumeleng that brought people to the overhang at Anbangbang, out of the weather and onto dry ground, and it is the storms of Gunumeleng and Gudjewg that the figure on the wall above them makes. The shelter, the season, and the painted storm-maker are a single system: to live under this rock is to live inside the calendar that Namarrkon governs, and the panel is in that sense a record of the very weather that drove the painters beneath it.

The Anbangbang gallery: the ancestors on the wall

On the main panel at Anbangbang the ancestral beings stand large among the animals. Highest in the recognition of visitors is Namarrkon, the Lightning Man — the maker of the violent thunderstorms of the northern monsoon, drawn encircled by a band of lightning that runs from his hands over his head and down to his feet, with stone axes growing from his head, his elbows, and his knees. With those axes he splits the heaped cloud, and the split is the lightning; the blow is the thunder. He is the engine of the year’s turn, the one whose first storms announce that the long dry is breaking, and he is also a keeper of the Law, the power behind the order the ancestors laid down. The whole seasonal world of the Top End is, on this wall, written in a single figure. (Namarrkon is treated in full in his own entry; here he belongs to the place, one of the powers held in the Country and shown on its rock.) Beside him stand Barrkinj, his wife, and Namondjok, another ancestral being held to dwell in the sky and to be seen only at night.

Elsewhere on the Burrungkuy walls is Nabulwinjbulwinj, a being of a darker kind — a dangerous spirit who, the public account relates, strikes women down with a yam and then devours them. He is painted in a posture of menace, and he is named on the boards as one to be wary of: the galleries do not show only the benevolent and the creative but the whole population of beings, helpful and harmful alike, who belong to the stone country and whose presence the paintings affirm. Among the older layers, too, are the Namandi or mimih spirits — the tall, thin tricksters of the rock who, the people say, taught the first humans to hunt and to paint, and who live still in the cracks of the escarpment.

To stand before these figures is to stand inside the Bininj cosmos rather than at a viewing distance from it. The beings on the wall are not illustrations of a belief held elsewhere; they are present in the Country, and the painting is one of the ways their presence is kept up.

Painted shelter at Burrungkuy (Nourlangie), Kakadu National Park. Photograph by Kgbo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

A painting both ancient and living

The most arresting fact about the Anbangbang gallery is that its present surface is not old at all, and that this is exactly as it should be. The figures a visitor sees today — Namarrkon among them — were laid down in the wet season of 1963–64 by Nayombolmi, also written Najombolmi and known to white Australians as “Barramundi Charlie,” a senior Badmardi man and the most prolific rock artist known anywhere, credited with something on the order of six hundred paintings across some forty-six sites of western Arnhem Land before his death around 1967. He worked with companions; only those recognized as artists, and authorized to do so, were permitted to paint on such a wall.

Najombolmi did not invent the figures. He renewed them. In this tradition a painting is not a finished object to be preserved untouched but a living thing whose power can be kept up by being painted again, so that the ancestor it shows stays present and potent in the rock. To paint Namarrkon afresh is to keep Namarrkon’s force in the Country. The act has a particular weight in Najombolmi’s case: he had lived and hunted across this land his whole life, and had seen it pass into the orbit of buffalo shooters and pastoral leases and the apparatus of the wider Australian state. The scholarly reconstruction of the event — drawing on the testimony of those who knew him, including the recollection of the work as his father’s painting — frames the return to the wall as among other things an assertion that the Country and its powers were still there, still owned, still to be honored, whatever was happening on the plain below. The result is a panel that is at once thousands of years deep and made within living memory: ancient and present in the same surface, which is precisely the logic of the Dreaming made visible.

Reception: a landscape held for nature and for culture

Burrungkuy lies within Kakadu National Park, and the story of how it came to be so held is the story of the wider reckoning between Aboriginal Australia and the settler state. Most of the land of Kakadu is owned by its Aboriginal traditional owners and leased to the Commonwealth to be run as a national park, jointly managed by the owners and the parks service — a model in which the Bininj and Mungguy remain the proprietors of a Country visited by hundreds of thousands of people a year but theirs to keep, and theirs to decide what of it is shown and what is not. Where a site or a story is closed, it stays closed; the open galleries are open by the owners’ consent.

The international recognition followed. Kakadu was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1981 and extended in 1987 and again in 1992, and it stands among the small number of properties anywhere listed for both natural and cultural values together — under criteria that honor at once its great wetland and escarpment ecosystems and the living cultural landscape they hold. Its rock-art sites, Burrungkuy and the neighboring Ubirr among the most celebrated, were cited as evidence of one of the longest continuous human occupations and artistic traditions on earth, an unbroken record running back through tens of millennia. The listing names not a wilderness emptied of people but a Country shaped, named, painted, and still inhabited by the people who made it — a recognition, rare among the world’s protected places, that the nature and the culture here cannot be separated, because in the Bininj understanding they never were.

The recognition cuts against a long grain. For most of the colonial period the Aboriginal world was met by the settler society with dispossession and, at best, with the kind of distant cataloging that filed the paintings under “primitive art” and the owners under a vanishing race. The repainting of the Anbangbang wall in 1964, the handing back of the land into Aboriginal title, the joint management, the World Heritage citation of a living tradition — these belong to a slow turning of that grain, in which the authority over the Country, and over what its paintings mean, returns to the people who hold it. Burrungkuy is not a relic. It is a wall that has been kept up for as long as anyone has lived under it, by the people who own the storm-maker painted on it, in a Country where the rains still come each year exactly as Namarrkon brings them.

Burrungkuy (Nourlangie) from the Barrk walk, Kakadu National Park. Photograph by Travelstine, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

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