Wandjina are the rain and cloud ancestors of the Worrorra, Ngarinyin and Wunambal peoples of the west Kimberley. In their accounts the Wandjina made the country, its water and its living things, gave the law, and then put themselves into the rock of particular places, where their images are. The images are strikingly consistent. A Wandjina is painted with a large head and upper body, great round eyes and a nose, and typically no mouth at all, surrounded by radiating lines or blocks of colour read as lightning and as the head of a thunderhead. Two explanations for the absent mouth circulate in the published record, that a being of such power has no need of speech and that a mouth would let the rain fall without stopping, and both are reported from custodians rather than proposed by outsiders.
Behind the individual Wandjina stands Wunggurr, a more diffuse life force present in water and in deep places, which the Wandjina manifest. Wunggurr is often compared in the literature to the Rainbow Serpent of other Aboriginal traditions, and the comparison is worth making carefully: the peoples of what is now called the Wanjina Wunggurr bloc hold Wunggurr as their own, and treating it as a local variant of a pan-Australian being reverses the direction of the evidence. The presence of a Wandjina in a place is understood to bind the monsoon to its proper season, which makes the images not records of a past event but working parts of the country's continuing operation.