Djambawa Marawili takes top Telstra Aboriginal art award

Djambawa Marawili’s culture-hopping artworks have been recognised with a prestigious award.

Djambawa Marawili in front of Journey to America, which has won the top Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. Picture: Amos Aikman.

When missionaries and other settlers arrived in Arnhem Land, they were fascinated by Yolngu patterns and asked locals to paint as many as they could.

In Djambawa Marawili’s ­retelling, the elders, who would become the region’s first recognised artists, were initially reluctant to share designs they had hitherto used only in ceremonies.

But as people versed in diplomacy through centuries of Asian trade, they were polite. They couldn’t speak English, so they spoke through art. “They had their patterns, and they painted to describe themselves,” Marawili says. “It’s a respectful way of meeting people.”

Several decades on, Marawili has won the top prize at the 2019 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards with his own diplomatic ­expression.

Marawili’s Journey to America reflects upon his travels to the US, where he studied some of the earliest known Arnhem Land paintings that now reside in top US collections.

For Journey to America, he has incorporated the Australian coat of arms and the Statue of Liberty as totemic elements alongside baru (crocodile) and water patterns that are part of his Madarrpa clan’s identity. “It’s time for them (non-Yolngu) to understand,” Marawili says. “In Australia, we’re both living, blackfella and whitefella. It’s time for us to understand (each other) and have good communication, instead of just looking and saying, ‘It’s just a beautiful, colourful pattern’. It’s time for us to know each other in our souls and our minds.”

Marawili’s work challenges outsiders to strive to communicate with Aboriginal culture like the Yolgnu learned to speak through art. It is a challenge ­reflected throughout this year’s NATSIAA show. Among the 68 other short-listed works is Kaylene Whiskey’s The Kungkarangkalpa Tjukurpa, which depicts the Dreaming story’s eponymous seven sisters as Wonder Woman, Cher, Whoopi Goldberg and other celebrities.

“These (NATSIAA) works are representing certain ‘other’ cultural influences that are no longer ‘other’ because they are now so much part of the fabric of everyday life,” says Rhana Devenport, one of the judges. “What we’re seeing here in this exhibition is an incredible flowering of innovation of storytelling.”

Sketches by the late B Yunupingu show ceremonial participants filming each other on iPads. Gary Lee’s Big Eye ponders Aboriginal curiosity about Africans. Lena Yarinkura’s Yok Djarngo ­rebukes her countrymen for ­allowing bandicoot populations to dwindle by not performing certain rituals.

Luke Scholes, indigenous art curator at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory that hosts the NATSIAA prize, says it aims to highlight the work of artists who are pushing boundaries. “Even 10 years ago, if you had have told me that the Statue of Liberty would appear on a bark painting from northeast Arnhem Land, I probably would’ve had a little giggle,” Scholes says.

“But here we are, and it is the winner of this year’s Telstra Art Award, and I think it’s an incredibly deserving winner.”