Wandjuk Marika was a Yolŋu leader, accomplished artist, teacher and land rights activist who, as a younger man, had helped to prepare the text for the famous 1963 Yirrkala Bark Petition to federal parliament. He learnt bark painting from his father Mawalan and later became a founding member of the Australia Council for the Arts, chaired the Aboriginal Arts Board and was recognised with an OBE.

His painting The Djang’kawu Sisters at Yalangbara represents an episode in the Djang’kawu creation story, the principal narrative of his and his father’s paintings. The two sisters are represented implicitly by the mawalan (digging sticks) with which they created waterholes and trees and by the birds they encountered on their journey. The painting also features the cross-hatched geometric miny’tji (clan design) specific to the artist’s Rirratjingu people, one of several Yolŋu clans to which the ancestral sisters gave birth.

Barry Patton, Tarnanthi Writer & Researcher