The Wandjina

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In the rock-shelters of the far north-west, in the gorge country where the King Leopold and the Barnett rivers run, there are faces in the stone. They are large, and they look out. A broad pale head is ringed with a band of dark, and from the band the lines run outward like spokes; two great dark eyes are set wide, with a nose between them, and below the nose there is nothing. No mouth. The faces have been there a long time, and senior men go back to them when the heat builds before the rains, and they paint them again. This is not the conservation of a picture. It is the keeping of the world.

These are the Wandjina, the cloud and rain ancestral beings of the Kimberley, and the people who hold them — the Worrorra, the Ngarinyin, and the Wunambal — are the people the Wandjina made.

The beings who made the country and lay down in the rock

The Wandjina belong to a stretch of country in the western and northern Kimberley, the sandstone-and-savanna interior behind the Buccaneer coast, drained by rivers that gorge through ancient rock and flood in the wet. Three nations are joined as the keepers of the Wandjina law: the Worrorra (also written Woddorda) of the coast and islands, the Ngarinyin of the interior plateau, and the Wunambal of the Mitchell Plateau to the north, who in their own country call the chief of these beings Gulingi. Together with their neighbors they form what scholars have come to call the Wanjina–Wunggurr cultural bloc — a single law shared across distinct languages, the law of the Wandjina and of the great serpent-power that travels with them.

The creation-time in this country is named in the local terms — the Ngarinyin word often rendered in English as Lalai — and it is not a closed chapter of the past. It is the order that underlies the present, active in the kinship, the obligations, and the living vitality of places. In that time the Wandjina came. They moved across the unformed country; they made the land and the waters and the living things; they made the people and gave them the Law by which the people live. They set down the rules of marriage and conduct and ceremony, and they enforced them — those who broke the Law could be struck by the floods and the lightning and the cyclones that the Wandjina command. The bringing of order and the threat of the storm are the same power seen from two sides.

The Wandjina are not a single figure but a company of beings, each with its own name and its own place. A Wandjina belongs to a particular site, a particular shelter, a particular stretch of water; the image on a given wall is that being and no other, and the rights and duties that attach to it run to the people of that country. This is a cosmology of places before it is a cosmology of persons: the Law is mapped onto the land, written into the rock and the pools, and a person’s standing in it is a matter of which country he or she belongs to and what within it he or she is entitled to carry. To know the Wandjina is to know the country, and the two cannot be learned apart.

When their work was done the Wandjina did not depart to a sky-world. They lay down in the rock. Where each one lay, its image remained on the shelter wall — not a portrait made by a human hand alone, but the being’s own form left in the stone as the sign that it is still there, still present in that place. The deep waterholes of the country hold the same presence: the Wandjina are in the still pools as they are on the walls, and the two are not separate. To stand before the painted face is to stand before the being.

Wandjina figures painted in a rock-shelter on the Barnett River, Mount Elizabeth Station, western Kimberley — the broad haloed heads, the wide dark eyes, the nose, and no mouth. Photograph by Graeme Churchard, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The imagery is sacred to its custodians; reproduced here only as a long-published, publicly accessible record of a non-restricted site.

Traveling with the Wandjina, inseparable from them, is Wunggurr — also called Ungud — the serpent-power of water and earth and generation. Wunggurr is the life-force that lies in the springs and the waterholes and the tidal pools, the source from which living things are made; one of its forms becomes incarnate in the rock python, called Wanjad. This is the Kimberley’s own form of the water-serpent power that runs, under many names and shapes, across the continent — kin to the Rainbow Serpent of the wider tradition, though here it is its own being, bound to the Wandjina and to this country. The Wandjina bring the rain from above; the Wunggurr holds the waters below; between them the country is kept alive.

The mouthless rain-makers, and the freshening of the world

What the Wandjina are, above all, is the weather. They are the bringers of the wet — the monsoon that breaks over the Kimberley in the build-up of the late year and turns the dry country to flood and green. The halo that rings each painted head is read as the cloud and the rain and the lightning that the being commands; the great staring eyes are the eyes of the storm. The Wandjina are the makers of the rains, the keepers of the waters, and through the water the keepers of the fertility of the land and of its people. To have the rain at the right time, in the right measure, is to have life; and the rain is the Wandjina’s to give.

The country itself runs on this rhythm, and the Wandjina are its governors. The Kimberley year is not the four mild seasons of the temperate world but a long dry and a short, violent wet, with the build-up between — the months when the heat and the humidity climb and the sky thickens and the country waits. It is into that waiting that the repainting falls, and the timing is not arbitrary. The renewal of the images and the breaking of the monsoon belong to one calendar; the human act and the coming of the rain are two parts of a single seasonal turning that the Wandjina hold together. Where the rain comes the seed-grasses and the waterholes and the animals follow, and so the Wandjina are the source not of weather alone but of the whole annual return of plenty.

This is the meaning of the most striking thing about them: the missing mouth. The faces have eyes and a nose, and below the nose the surface is unbroken. The custodians give the reason plainly. The Wandjina have no mouth because, if they had one, the rain would never stop — the being’s power, loosed without limit, would drown the country. The mouthlessness is not an absence but a measure: it is the rain held in check, the storm bounded so that it gives life instead of taking it. A being so powerful, it is also said, has no need of speech; it does not say, it does. The face is the form of a force kept at exactly the strength the country can bear.

And because the rain is the Wandjina’s, and the Wandjina is present in the painted image, the image must be kept. With the approach of the wet — most often in the months of the build-up, toward December or January — the senior custodians return to the shelters and repaint the Wandjina: the white ground laid fresh, the dark band and the radiating lines and the great eyes renewed. At some sites the paint has been laid down so many times over so many generations that the layers number in the dozens. To the eye of an outsider this can look like the restoration of an old picture. It is not. The repainting is the maintenance of the being’s presence and therefore of the rain; the freshened paint is the call that brings the monsoon, and the rite is the upkeep of the world. To let the images fade would be to let the order they hold fade with them. This is among the reasons the Wandjina tradition has been called the longest-running sacred painting movement on earth — not because a single image is ancient, though the oldest are very old, but because the act of renewal has never stopped.

The repainting is also teaching. The right to paint the Wandjina is not a skill freely picked up; it is a custodial authority, inherited and conferred, carried by senior men of the relevant groups under the Law. The Ngarinyin elder David Mowaljarlai, who in his lifetime did much to carry his people’s knowledge into the wider world, described the training of the young in exactly these terms — the learning of body-painting for ceremony and of the renewing of the images on the rock as one continuous discipline. The image, the ceremony, the song, and the Law are not separate departments of a culture. They are one inheritance, and the repainting is the point where it is handed on.

What may be told, and what may not

Here the account must stop short, and say why. Much of the knowledge of the Wandjina is restricted. It belongs to the senior custodians and to those they have brought into it; the full content of the Law, the detail of the ceremonies, the meaning carried in particular places and designs, is not for outsiders to know, to record, or to handle. What can be set down here is the public framing — the framing the communities themselves have chosen to share with the world. Beyond it there is more, and the right response to that more is not to guess at it but to leave it where its owners keep it. The Wandjina are not a solved subject. They are a living law with living owners, and the owners decide what is told.

This is not an antiquarian caution. The three nations carry a recent and bitter history. Through the early twentieth century the Worrorra, Ngarinyin, and Wunambal were moved off their northern homelands through a series of forced relocations, ending in the community now called Mowanjum, east of Derby — a name David Mowaljarlai is said to have given the place, “settled at last,” after the long displacement. That the law survived the relocation, that the festivals and the junba — the song-and-dance ceremonies — and the repainting continue, is the survival of a people, not the persistence of a folklore. At the Mowanjum Aboriginal Art and Culture Centre, whose building is shaped so that from the air it reads as a Wandjina face, around a hundred and twenty artists of the three groups now work, and the annual Mowanjum Festival each July gathers the community to share its ceremony — one of the longest-running Indigenous cultural festivals in the country. (On the deep settlement of this continent and the catastrophe of the colonial centuries, see the Aboriginal Australians; on the missionary contact that shaped this history, Christianity.)

The image and its theft

The reach of the Wandjina has made its image a target, and the custodians have had to fight for it.

Because the painted face is so arresting, and because it has circulated in books and on postcards for a century, the Wandjina has been copied — reproduced and sold and tattooed and sprayed on walls by people with no right under the Law to make it at all. To the custodians this is not flattery and not free expression. It is the unauthorized handling of a sacred being by those who do not own it, and a breach of the Law that governs who may render the Wandjina and how.

The conflict came to a head over a sculpture. From the late 2000s a non-Indigenous artist, Vesna Tenodi, displayed and promoted Wandjina figures of her own making, including a large sculpture erected in the town of Katoomba in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales — far from the Kimberley, and in defiance of the wishes of the traditional owners. The Worrorra, Ngarinyin, and Wunambal artists, organized as the Mowanjum Artists Spirit of the Wandjina Aboriginal Corporation, approached the Arts Law Centre of Australia in 2010 for help. Australian copyright law offered little: it protects a particular author’s particular work, not a sacred being held in common by a people across generations. So the case was fought on other ground. The custodians argued that to create and display the Wandjina in breach of their Law, against the owners’ wishes, was a public expression of cultural and religious intolerance — and a Ngarinyin man, Gordon Smith Junior, traveled from the Kimberley to speak for his people before the court. On 21 June 2011 the New South Wales Land and Environment Court upheld the local council’s decision against the sculpture.

When further unauthorized work followed, the community took a step without precedent in Australia: in 2015 it secured a trademark over the Wandjina — the first time an item of Indigenous iconography had been protected that way in the country. A trademark is a blunt instrument for a sacred being, and the custodians and their advocates have said as much; the law still has no proper category for what the Wandjina is. But it was a weapon to hand, and they used it. The fight is summarized in cultural-heritage commentary from the Arts Law Centre of Australia and the WIPO Magazine.

Set the two pictures side by side. In one, senior men climb to a shelter as the clouds gather and lay fresh white paint on a face in the rock, so that the rain will come and the country will live. In the other, the same face is sprayed on a wall in a city two thousand miles away by a hand that does not know the Law and was never given it. The custodians draw the line between them with no difficulty at all. The first is the maintenance of the world; the second is theft. To honor the Wandjina is to honor that line — to know that this is a face one may look at, in the places and the ways its owners permit, and not a face one is free to take.

The rains still come to the Kimberley, in the build-up of the year, and the faces are still there in the rock, and the people who own them are still painting them.

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