The man to be known as Balang Nakurulk for the forseeable future has died peacefully on 21st December in Maningrida, the north-western Arnhemland home of his art centre since he began painting in the late 1970s. He mostly lived on an outstation on his Kurulk lands, part of Kuninjku Country, from which he sent out barks and lorrkons that won four Telstra NATSIA Awards, the Clemenger Prize for contemporary art, the 2009 Melbourne Art Foundation Artist of the Year, and the 2018 Red Ochre Award voted by his peers. He was accorded solo exhibitions in Australia at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the SA Art Gallery, and in Europe in Basel and Hannover. He also features with a permanent place in the bookshop of the Musee du quai Branly in Paris.

The Australian retrospective was called ‘John Mawurndjul : I am the Old and the New’, and there were definitely two eras in his painting life. The first, tutored and mentored mainly by his older brother Jimmy Njiminjuma, already an accomplished artist, and by his father-in-law, the senior artist Peter Marralwanga, lead to his taking traditional subjects borrowed from the eons-old traditions of rock art and ceremonial design, depicting elements of Kuninjku cosmology, the Djang. His subjects were figurative – Namarrkkon, the female lightning spirit, Ngalyod, the Rainbow Serpent, Yawkyawks and Mimi Spirits. Even here, his mastery of rarrk, the fine lines sometimes painted with a single hair, created significant depth and texture. In Kuninjku, Kabimbebme can be loosely translated as ‘paint jumping out’ which is the effect that became the essence of Balang’s work.

Non-Indigenous viewers often called it abstraction. But for Balang, his second period of art-making reflected the deep mystery of the Mardayin ceremony at the various sites where he was the Djunkay, cultural manager and knowledge-keeper for the Kurulk clan. As he himself put it: “Mardayin phenomena are located in water, underneath bodies of water. Water is on the top and Mardayin is underneath… it is always in the water”. So his work went from the physicality of the Rainbow Serpent under the water with waterlilies on its back to reveal its dangerous presence, to a pattern of circles and lines amidst an intensity of rarrk to indicate the law that the Ngalyod stands to enforce. It was “a mesmerising, shimmering abstraction, with growing reference to complex cosmological and ancestral ritual power in his ‘landscape’ art”, says friend and anthropologist Jon Altman, who was sponsored by Balang to live remotely with his family for his early studies. He has this to say about the transformation in Balang’s art:

“Balang took what was for him the brave and life-changing decision to travel outside Western Arnhemland to Canberra. The occasion was the exhibition Artists of Arnhemland: Maningrida Arts and Crafts present an exhibition of traditional Aboriginal art at the Canberra School of Arts in July 1983. John experienced deeply empathetic recognition and respect from the Canberra arts community, which I believe had a profound impact on his self-identity. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see he made a transformative decision then to engage incrementally and strategically with Western arts audiences and markets. In this early period, he was fortunate to have two accomplished artists, Geoff Todd and George Burchett as art advisers in Maningrida; they assisted in nurturing and fostering this fundamental shift at a critical juncture, and were followed by others, including Diane Moon, Andrew Hughes, Fiona Salmon and Apolline Kohen” – the long-serving French-woman who did much to introduce his work to Europe.

All this time, Balang prioritised living on his ancestral land at Mumeka and then, from the early 1990s, at his own outstation at Milmilngkan. Here, he could talk to the ancestors, protect sacred places, participate in ceremony and maintain an active hunting economy. With the assistance of the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation, the outstations resource agency, and Maningrida Arts and Culture, Mawurndjul was able to live remotely and simultaneously engage with world art. But all this changed in 2007, when John Howard’s Intervention was imposed on the Northern Territory. Even as First Nations high culture continued to be celebrated around the world, the everyday culture was demeaned. And highly esteemed individuals such as Balang were caught up in draconian measures including income management, mandatory work for the dole, endless training and reduced support for homelands living. With the combination of the global financial crisis and struggling management at MAC, he was suddenly impoverished. He worked in a tyre shop. His health deteriorated, and he became deeply despondent about the escalating uncertainty of his family’s circumstances. For a time, from 2011 to 2015, he effectively stopped painting.

And his family mattered. For his wife Kay Lindjuwanga had also been encouraged by John to paint – very successfully. As Apolline Kohen explained to me, “I think their artistic partnership was quite exceptional, and whilst JM was the most skilled, talented and driven of the two, he could not have done it without her. He was hungry for success but she was his pillar, the one who would give him a reality check when needed. Through his mentoring, Kay blossomed and was herself responsible for inspiring and driving Kuninjku women to paint and be artists in their own right. She led a quiet revolution. Quite an amazing achievement”.

Sadly, Kay herself died in the middle of last year, and as Kohen assesses, “I suspect that after 51 years together, he missed her a lot and had not much reason to live on. Over the last few years, he had spent  most of his time caring for her in Darwin”, where she required dialysis.

Remarkably, the MCA exhibition in 2018 inspired high praise from Christopher Allen, writing in The Australian. And he’s a critic who generally finds only disfavour with First Nations art. But then, he analysed, “John Mawurndjul is a remarkable artist whose work not only brings his ancestral stories vividly to life in all their numin­ous and pre-rational presence but leads the attentive viewer into a meditation on the art of painting itself and the origins of image-making. In all of this we can see one of the deepest motivations of art, which is to explain the phenomena of the world around us and to assimilate the facts of nature into narratives with a human significance. In painting, this means representing elements of the world around us, but also transforming, translating them into artificial images. This is why all art…..remains poised between evocative likeness and memorable unlikeness”.

From Maningrida Arts & Culture comes the tribute: “Our thoughts are with his extended family – his children, grand-children and great grand-children, as well as with the entire Kuninjku community for whom he was such an inspirational and energetic arts, cultural, political and ceremonial leader”.

Also passing at the end of 2024 was Mrs D Yunupingu – formerly known as Dhopiya, sister to such a great family of artists – Gulumbu, Barrupu, Djerrknu and Nyapanyapa. Amazingly, she completed an outrageously bold series of barks and works on paper just before dying and they can be seen this month at the Sullivan & Strumpf Gallery in Sydney.