Garraparra - Manini Gumana

Manini’s father was Dhakawal#1 Gumana who died in 1994. His younger brother Gawirrin Gumana AO has taken the fatherly role and particularly as regards art instruction to her and her younger brothers Yinimala and Djimiyapin.

Born in 1977, Manini is married to and assists her Marrakulu clan artist husband Garawan Wanambi, and lives at her own Dhalwangu clan land of Gängan. In 2009 she started to paint her own works, Dhalwangu clan images of the deeper ocean.

Garraparra is a coastal headland and bay area within Blue Mud Bay. It marks the spot of a sacred burial area for the Dhalwangu clan and a site where dispute was formally settled by Makarrata (a trial of ordeal by spear which settled serious grievance and sealed the peace forever).

During the times after the ‘first mornings’ ancestral hunters left the shores of Garraparra in their canoe towards the horizon hunting for turtle. Sacred songs and dance narrate the heroic adventures of these two men as they passed sacred areas, rocks and saw ancestral totems on their way. Their hunting came to grief, with the canoe capsising and the hunters being drowned. The bodies washed back to the shores of Garraparra with the currents and the tides, as the Wangupini followed with its rain and wind. Their canoe with paddle and Makani (queen fish), Minyga (long tom)
and Gårun (turtle) are all referred to in the songs and landscape. Makarrata, the ritual throwing of spears at a miscreant of Yolgnu law took place here. At Garraparra sacred trees held these barbed spears whilst not in use.

Garraparra has been rendered by the wavy design for Yirritja saltwater in Blue Mud Bay called Mungurru. The Mungurru is deep water that has many states and connects with the sacred waters coming from the land estates by currents and tidal action. Other clans of Blue Mud Bay that share similar mythology of the Yingapunjapu, i.e. the Madarrpa and Manggalili also paint the deeper saltwater - the Mungurru as such. This sacred design shows the water of Djalma Bay chopped up by the blustery south easterlies of the early dry season.

From freshwater the waters migrate to Mungurru the mighty undifferentiated Yirritja saltwater ocean that plays at the horizon which receives and unifies all the Yirritja coastal saltwaters in one. It is from here that the water (soul) transmogrifies to vapour to enter the 'pregnant' Wangupini (Wet Season storm clouds) which carry the life giving freshwater back to the start of the cycle.