WEST KIMBERLEY PLACE REPORT - Department of Sustainability ...

wurnan ensuring members of Wadoy marry the sisters of Junkun and vice versa. The
wurnan also requires people to share their resources with one another, and a man is
said to be following the wurnan when he honours his responsibility to look after his
wife's family. In its expression as a regional sharing system and trade network, men
pass items (both sacred and secular) to men whose local countries are 'side by side'
with theirs in the wurnan. The passage of trade goods along the wurnan is viewed as
the passage of goods in space from Wanjina to Wanjina (Blundell et al. 2009).
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'Wodoi and Djingun, one a colourful and one a grey Nightjar Man, symbolically
defined and enacted the basic, and the most important social law, the Law of Wunnan.
The marriage and sharing rules in this law ensured sound breeding, peaceful sharing
of resources and cultural knowledge' (Mowaljarlai and Malnic 1993, 143)
* * * *
In order to maintain their traditions and sustain the ongoing cycle of life, members of
the Wanjina-Wunggurr community engage in a range of ritual practices established in
the Lalai. While members of the Wanjina-Wunggurr community believe that the
Wanjina 'put' themselves onto rock surfaces as paintings, they also believe that as the
human descendents of these Wanjina, it is their duty to maintain the 'brightness' or
'freshness' of the paintings by 're-touching' them with charcoal and pigments
(Mowarjarli and Malnic 1993; Redmond 2001; Blundell and Woolagoodja 2005;
Blundell et al. 2009). By keeping the paintings 'fresh' the world will remain fertile –
the annual rains arrive, plants and animals will reproduce, and child spirits will
remain available in whirlpools and waterholes throughout the Wanjina-Wunggurr
homeland.
Referring to Western views of the Wanjina paintings as ‘art’, the late Ngarinyin man,
David Mowaljarlai has written that:
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'Rock pictures… should be seen not as art, but as images with energies that keep us
alive. They were made during the Dreamtime, and it was necessary that the
community…look after the images so that life on earth will continue' (Mowaljarlai
1988, 8).
* * * *
By maintaining the paintings, senior men contribute their share to the maintenance
and reproduction of an ordered world (Blundell 1982). Visits to these places also
provide an opportunity for Traditional Owners to pass on their distinct cosmological
and religious belief system to the next generation. Capricious and harmful spirits who
also have their paintings at Wanjina rock art sites are a constant reminder of the
disorder that failure to follow traditional laws can bring (Blundell et al. 2009).
Contemporary works of art also provide the Wanjina-Wunggurr society with a vehicle
to maintain and transmit their belief system to younger members of their society.
There is a rich ethnographic record of the religious beliefs and traditions of the
Wanjina-Wunggurr people including the practice of re-touching Wanjina images,
beginning in the 1920s with Reverend J. R. B. Love who observed two senior
Worrorra men paint a 'fresh' Wanjina over some very faded paintings (Love 1930,
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