Black As beauty, who needs Kardashians?

Web series Black As – featuring hair-raising hunting and driving stunts and comic ­videos by a quartet from NT’s Ramingining – has become an internet sensation.

The Black As crew, from left, Jerome Lilypiyana, Dino Wanybarrnga, Joe Smith and Chico Wanybarrnga have become social media stars.

Dino Wanybarrnga is not your average beauty influencer. A Yolngu Matha speaker from Arnhem Land, Wanybarrnga has emerged as an unlikely social media star, garnering 10.9 million views for his satirical TikTok beauty video and 4.1 million views for another TikTok video showing how he would rather eat mangrove worms than American chocolate bars.

Filmed on a mobile phone and titled Another Day in the Bush, Wanybarrnga’s beauty video skewers the “Get Ready With Me” genre of films in which ­female influencers share make-up and grooming routines with fans.

As the video begins, Wanybarrnga is sleeping outdoors on the ground. “I wake up, I rub my eyes and that’s it – I am ready,’’ he ­declares, deadpan. Dressed in his Ramingining Warriors football jersey, the prince of the low-to-no-maintenance beauty routine walks away. If he is running late, he skips the rubbing his eyes step.

Kim Kardashian, eat your heart out.

The Black As crew, from left, Joe Smith, Jerome Lilypiyana, Chico Wanybarrnga, Rami the dog and Dino Wanybarrnga.

Wanybarrnga is part of a cross-cultural quartet from Ramingining, 560km east of Darwin, whose rebooted web series, Black As – featuring hair-raising hunting and driving stunts and comic ­videos – has become an internet sensation. The series, which started out as an ABC iview show in 2016, has been reimagined by ­social video experts Totem Network and, with fresh content, is taking platforms such as Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat by storm.

Totem chief executive Steve Crombie told The Weekend Australian Black As’s audience reach has skyrocketed from 300,000 Facebook views in October 2021 to well over 100 million views since the revamped web series was launched late last year. “That’s bigger than any show in Australia,’’ Crombie said.

The series is partly funded by Screen Australia, and the producer believes it’s the most popular Facebook and TikTok project in which the federal funding agency has invested. “The reason why this project is so successful is because we used data (on audience behaviours) to inform how we create the content,’’ he said.

Crombie also attributed the remarkable popularity of Black As to the “aspirational lifestyle” of people who can live off the land, and its “extremely positive” message about cross-racial co-operation. Joe Smith, bush mechanic with the majority-Indigenous Black As group, is an initiated white man who was fostered, as a teenager, by an Aboriginal family.

Like Wanybarrnga, the other Black As members, Chico Wanybarrnga, Jerome Lilypiyana and Smith, speak Yolngu Matha. Their most popular Black As video, Hunting Crocodiles in Australia, shows the fearless foursome hunting crocs with homemade spears and has attracted 120 million views on Facebook since November 2022.

“If you include other platforms, it’s more,’’ Crombie said.

An image from the Black As web series.

Another video, Hunting Wallabies and Crocodiles in the Aussie Bush, has had 37.7 million Facebook views, while Making Spears To Hunt Crocodiles Using Australian Bush and Garbage! (3.9 million views) was uploaded only two weeks ago.

In this video, the Black As stars make a spear using bush materials and oven parts found at the tip.

The ensemble’s Top Gear-like driving stunts are also popular: They drive a ute with dodgy brakes, no doors or windscreen and in one episode, they tie a tinnie onto the vehicle’s roof. More than one million Facebook users have watched their video on How to Build A Car From A Rubbish Dump in Eight Steps.

The rebooted series was recently nominated for an AACTA Award. Despite their success, Black As spokesman Smith said he and his collaborators were still working at their day jobs or “just doing their normal thing in the community’’.

He works for an Indigenous housing company, which Dino Wanybarrnga may soon join, Lilypiyana lives on an outstation and Chico Wanybarrnga works at a Ramingining health clinic.

Making their wildly popular videos was “pretty much a hobby’’, Smith said, and hunting was “a natural thing for us if the cameras are there or not’’. While many of their stunts were dangerous, Smith saw “life as a risk’’. He added: “We sort of see the future potential of what we are doing.’’

Echoing this, Crombie wants to see Black As’s record-setting videos turned into a long-form television series. He said the web series’ global appeal demonstrated how “there is a huge opportunity to tell this extraordinary story to the world’’.