Ngarra minytji (Ngarra ceremony design)

This work is attributed to Mildjingi clan leader, Makani Wilingarr (born around 1905 and died 1985). The Melbourne-based anthropologist, the late Professor Donald Thomson, collected this work during his travels across Arnhem Land in northern Australia. It is one of four Mildjingi paintings in a larger series of ceremonial body designs produced between January and June 1937 that replicated the sacred body designs painted for Ngarra, a sacred men's ceremony. He witnessed these ceremonies and photographed a group of senior men with this painted on their bodies. Thomson described this as 'extremely conventionalised' and commented that it was 'only painted on the last day' the ceremony. The design relates to sacred sites in the sea off the coast of central Arnhem Land associated with a totemic ancestor important to the Mildjingi clan. The triangular shapes at the bottom represent the tails of two saltwater fish protruding from rocks under the ocean. The square and rectangular forms are dali, the holes and cracks between these sacred rocks. This work is one of around 70 bark paintings collected by Donald Thomson between 1935 and 1937 and in 1942. A large proportion of these are truly magnificent and important works; and this is without question one of the finest paintings in the Donald Thomson Collection on long-term loan to Museum Victoria from the University of Melbourne.