Today, Wandjina are painted by Indigenous Kimberley artists on a variety of media, including bark, hardboard and canvas, and are produced for the national and international art market (Figures 10.7 and 10.8).[34] They are also carved out of pearl shell, on baobab nuts and painted onto utilitarian objects such as baskets.[35] Although art in this new media is produced largely for sale, O’Connor et al. have recently argued that it is still intimately connected to country and landscape and
represents a continuation or transference of traditional practice. Stories about the travels, battles and engagements of Wandjina and other Dreaming events are now retold and experienced in the communities with reference to the paintings, an activity that is central to maintaining and reinvigorating connection between identity and place. The transposition of painting activity from sites within Country to the new ‘out-of-Country’ settlements represents a social counterbalance to the social dislocation that arose from separation from traditional places and forced geographic moves out-of-Country to government and mission settlements in the twentieth century.[36]
Wandjina are also still occasionally repainted in rock shelters by traditional owners of the country.[37] Blundell and Woolagoodja[38] record how Sam Woolagoodja repainted a coastal rock art site at Raft Point, near the entrance of Doubtful Bay, during a filmmaking expedition with Malcolm Douglas in the 1970s. ‘Sam took advantage of his filmmaking trips to repaint’ and to fulfill other obligations to his country and kin. Woolagoodja had been given custodial rights and responsibilities for this country and the site by a clan known as Umbrewewal before the last of their old people had ‘finished up’. Rock cod portrayed in the Raft Point site were totems for the Umbreewel clan. Refreshing the paintings was a ‘way for Sam to care for this country and thus fulfill the responsibility that had been given to him by his Umbreewel relations’.[39]
Woolagoodja handed the responsibility of the upkeep and repainting of Wandjina images in rock shelters and caves in this area to his son Donny Woolagoodja. As recently as 2005, Donny, a well-known contemporary Kimberley artist from Derby, repainted a very important Wandjina named ‘Namarali’ as well as other motifs at the rock shelter known as Karndirrim in the western Kimberley (Figure 10.9). The process of repainting, and the spiritual and physical journey it involved, was documented by Blundell and Woolagoodja in their book Keeping the Wanjinas Fresh. Donny has also created many paintings of Namarali and other Wandjina on canvas. These paintings follow closely the artistic conventions of the images on the shelter walls (Figure 10.10).
The origins of portable art portraying Wandjina are even less certain than those of the Wandjina rock art. Ryan and Akerman[40] report that the earliest bark paintings collected date from the 1930s. They note, however, that while it has usually been assumed that the Wandjina barks were produced in response to a commercial demand from Europeans, the German anthropologist Helmut Petri records ‘a stone shrine-like construction with an associated arch made of bark painting of two Wandjina figures’.[41] This observation would suggest that barks were produced in a traditional framework for use in ceremony or ritual and might have operated alongside Wandjina rock art.
Figure 10.9 Namarali at the Karndirrim rock shelter after repainting by Donny Woolagoodja in April 2002.
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Photograph by Sahyma Lachman, reproduced with permission of Donny Woolagoodja.
Figure 10.10 Namarali at Rest, contemporary painting of the Wandjina Namarali by Donny Woolagoodja, 2004. Acrylic on Canvas; 1802 x 881cm.
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Photograph from Blundell, Valda and Woolagoodja, Donny 2005, Keeping the Wanjinas Fresh: Sam Woolagoodja and the enduring power of Lalai, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, p. 192, reproduced with permission the artist.
[34] Dedman, R. 2006, ‘Market profile: Wandjina’, Art & Australia, vol. 43, no. 3, p. 454; Stanton, John E. 1989, Painting the Country: Contemporary Aboriginal art from the Kimberley region, Western Australia, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands; Stanton, John E. 2006, ‘Wandjina’, Art and Australia, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 414–19.
[35] Akerman, Kim 1993, ‘From boab nuts to Ilma: Kimberley art and material culture’, in J. Ryan with K. Akerman (eds), Images of Power: Aboriginal art of the Kimberley, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, p. 107.
[36] O’Connor, Sue, Barham, A. J. and Woolagoodja, D. 2008, ‘Painting and repainting in the west Kimberley’, in L. Taylor and P. Veth (eds), Aboriginal Art and Identity. Australian Aboriginal Studies, vol. 1, pp. 22.
[37] Ibid., pp. 22–38.
[38] Blundell and Woolagoodja, Keeping the Wanjinas Fresh, p. 132.
[39] Ibid., p. 135.
[40] Ryan and Akerman, Images of Power, p. 15.
[41] Ibid., p. 15.