Peter Marralwanga – A life history

This chapter will fill out the story that Namirrkki told with details that Marralwanga himself, his other children and extended family have told me over the years, as well as material from archival and written sources (Figures 4.1 and 4.2; Appendix 4).It is a selective history focusing on the way that Marralwanga developed a repertoire of subject matter and the development of the necessary linkages that allowed him to paint for the world art market.Some accounts of these episodes of his life were triggered as we visited certain places and he remembered stories from the old days.He often asked me to take out my notebook and write the story down.We could be walking across Country or hunting, and I would try and scrabble the notes together with fingers slippery with dust, animal blood and greasy fat from the cooking fire.At other times, Marralwanga and I motored across Country.He would fill his larrwa or long pipe with tobacco, light up and draw in the smoke with huge lungs and exhale to fill the Toyota cabin with sweet smelling pipe smoke.He would point out the window while we were driving, and I would try to remember enough to write it all down when my hands were free.More relaxed interpretations would come when he was quietly painting and we sat on a sheet laid out under the shade in Marrkolidjban (Figure 4.3).Occasionally, Ivan Namirrkki would help him to paint and Marralwanga's wives, Mary Yurdubula, Barbara Ngalmabbaba, Mary-Rosie Dukkalwanga and Peggy Mayurlmar, who were sitting in their own shades nearby, would add to the story as he recounted it (Figures 4.4 and 4.5).Painting was an occasion where we all learned something from this older generation. PETER MARRALWANGA -A LIFE HISTORY Early lifeMarralwanga's life was impacted, before he was born, by the early contact history of the region.Bond-Sharp (2013) documents early colonial contacts along the coast and rivers near Maningrida that include some amicable and violent episodes.Macassans had visited the northern coast on a regular basis, but such contact had ceased before Marralwanga was born; nevertheless, the Macassans were known to have had a campsite at Entrance Island at the mouth of the Liverpool River opposite the site of contemporary Maningrida.Closer to Marralwanga's lands, the Lindsay Expedition passed through the Blyth River and Liverpool River region on 4 October 1883, shooting Aboriginal people on the upper Blyth (Cooke 1990; Lindsay 1884, 15).There is a rock painting of a pipe-smoking European riding a horse with a bell tied to its neck at Kabarnderreh in Marralwanga's Kardbam Country (Namunjdja et al. 2010) that dates from this time.Lindsay recorded that Aboriginal people took a bell and hobbles from one of his horses on 3 October 1883 (Lindsay 1884, 14).As Balanda incursions progressed, there were violent conflicts in Rembarrnga Country and many Rembarrnga people moved west into the stone Country of Kune lands or south to Bulman as a result (Figure 1.1).With the establishment of Florida Station in 1884-93, later renamed Arafura Station, there was, reportedly, a shoot-on-sight policy between 1903 and 1907 that led to some deaths and dispersals of Rembarrnga-speaking people (Cooke 1990; Searcy 1909, 185).Keller references these accounts and records the Rembarrnga artist Brian Njinawanga telling her about the death of his grandfather in one of these organised killings by pastoralists from Murwangi Station.Brian's father fled west to the stone Country at Yaymini (Keller 2006, 105).Early pastoralists eventually found that the Country was too arduous to sustain development.Consequently, the Maningrida area only received sporadic exploratory visits in ensuing years.There were more continuous contacts to the west along the East Alligator River with buffalo shooters and small-scale traders collecting trepang, pearl shell and timber around Cobourg Peninsula, Croker Island and Goulburn Island (Mitchell 1994) (Figure 1.1).Kuninjku say that some of these traders occasionally visited the Liverpool River.Marralwanga was born at Kalerrkiwerr, near Mimarn, in his mother's Country around 1916.The area was a favourite camp with permanent good water.It is adjacent to the present-day Mumeka outstation established by Anchor Kulunba.Marralwanga's father was a Kardbam clan man called Namunjdja of the Bulanj subsection whose Kardbam lands lie further south in the rocky escarpment outliers of the Arnhem Land Plateau.Marralwanga's family also used to regularly travel from the rock Country to the floodplains of the Tomkinson, Mann and Liverpool rivers, which are about 25 kilometres and two days walk in relatively open and well-watered Country (see Figure 1.2).