Wandjina

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.

Wandjina images are maintained. A person with the authority to do so repaints them, and some panels carry dozens of superimposed layers, which is why the figures are simultaneously ancient and current and why dating them is difficult. To an outside eye trained on European conservation, repainting looks like damage to an original. In the tradition it is the opposite, because an unmaintained Wandjina is a neglected one and neglect has consequences for rain and for country. Style has shifted across the layers, with more recent figures stockier and some given eyelashes, so the panels record their own history of care. Who may do this is not open.

Authority to paint a Wandjina belongs to people of the three custodial peoples who have been through their own law, and the three peoples, represented together through the Mowanjum Aboriginal Art and Culture Centre near Derby, have stated that others may not use the image or the name without their permission. That claim has been argued publicly more than once when non-Aboriginal artists have produced Wandjina figures, and the custodians have pressed it each time. This atlas takes the claim as the operative fact. There is no Wandjina drawing on this page and there will not be one: it carries a marker recording that its imagery is restricted by the people who hold it rather than an emblem. Facts about the Wandjina, who holds them, what they do, how they are painted and by whom, are recorded freely. The image itself is not this atlas's to reproduce, and it is certainly not ours to invent.