Lot 31: NYM DJIMURRGURR CIRCA 1910-DECEASED

MOOROOL THE DREAMING MAN LATE 1950S

MEASUREMENTS

69 by 33.5 cm

Bears artist's name, date and size inscribed on the reverse together with label attached to the reverse
Natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark

PROVENANCE
Painted in the Kakadu/Oenpelli region of western Arnhem Land Private collection, Sydney Cf. For a painting of a similar ancestral being see 'Gnormo: A beneficent spirit', c.1912, in the Baldwin Spencer Collection at the Museum of Victoria, illustrated in Spencer, W. B., Wanderings in Wild Australia, Macmillan, London, 1928 (1967), fig. 524, and in Brody, A. M., Kunwinjku Bim: Western Arnhem Land Paintings from the Collection of the Aboriginal Arts Board, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1984, p.70, plate iv Spencer (1928, p.807) describes the Gnormo spirit as living among the bamboo and only flying during the day or by moonlight, but 'not on dark nights.' Spencer suggests the image of the spirit is reminiscent of a possum as it is covered in hair with the 'very large hairy masses representing ears.' If a person falls ill, the Gnormo would find a medicine man to heal them Some of the information of the label on the reverse is incorrect. The artist was a member of the Jawoyn group in Kakadu on the fringes of western Arnhem Land The label on the reverse reads; 'In the Dreamtime after the mimis ceased to wander about in mobs visible to the naked eye it is said that they had many ceremonies but now the little mimis are unseen spirits of the rocks where they made drawings long ago. Nobody knows their ceremonies now nor the real meanings of the old rock drawings about them. About this time Moorool began walking over the country around Oenpelli and the Liverpool River. He was a strange man who had no wives and preferred to live alone, wandering from place to place. Today people refer to such social misfits as a Moorool'