Maypal – Shellfish of the Arafura Coast
31 Aug 2018
BUKU-LARRNGGAY MULKA CENTRE
VICKERS STREET GALLERY
1/3 Vickers Street
Parap
PAINTINGS
Coinciding with this exhibition hosted by Salon Art Projects, will be Midawarr/Harvest at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. This collection of barks, woodcuts, larrakitj and one massive 10 metre wall scroll is a collaboration between Mulkun and non-Indigenous artist John Wolseley. Over a period of seven years the two worked together in their shared passion to look clearly at the land we inhabit and express the nature of the rich food within.
The publication accompanying that exhibition gives an intimate view of thirty eight individual plants. So much of the knowledge of, and even the existence of, these plants is unknown to us as residents of the Top End. Although we are surrounded by them and we could take sustenance from them they are strangers to us. It is Mulkun’s concern that as development and invasive species and practices impinge upon them they may disappear. But even more tenuous than their own survival is the ephemeral knowledge of them as characters in the long running saga ‘Human Life in the Top End’. As the pervasive flour, sugar, tea, tobacco empire casts its pall over her community she sees the devastating effect of the loss of interest in the reality of our surroundings.
If native foodstuffs are valued it is only through the prospect of their industrialisation and commercialisation. If they are described it is only in terms of a Northern hemisphere version a Bush Onion, Tomato, Carrot, Apple. Never known by their own name.
And so it is a natural progression for Mulkun to turn our eye to another cast of characters who had dominated the stage before we imported our own narrative and players. The category of things that we call shellfish.
I guess most of us could name a few; oysters, mussels, clams, hermit crabs, mudcrabs. But then it starts to peter out. The inspiration for this show was an amazing publication put out by NAILSMA with documentation by Bentley James, photography by David Hancock and incredible design by Therese Ritchie. Its full title is Maypal, Mayali’ ga Wäŋa: Shellfish, Meaning and Place. It has the weight and feel of a prayer book. And in a way it is.
It is a reverence for these sacred foodstuffs that define and sustain the magical coast that we live on. But instead of that handful of species that we sleepwalkers can name there are over two hundred pages of individual edible Maypal with multiple Yolŋu names, their Latin tag and where available an English Common name.
It is a prayer that the existence of this knowledge and these names be infinite. It is a ritual incantation of this knowledge and these names that they may live on in the hearts and minds of the people who live with them for eternity.
Along the way funny things have been revealed. When Mulkun adopted her brother John Wolseley as a member of the Dhudi-Djapu clan of the Dhuwa moiety she anointed him with the name Laŋgurrk: a particular beetle larvae ‘Witchetty Grub’ which burrows into the mud and yams adjacent to freshwater billabongs. This recognises his propensity for grubbing around in the mud of floodplains in pursuit of his art.
And in this exhibition are several moving portraits of her brother as grub. But what is an insect larvae from a freshwater setting doing in a collation of ‘Shellfish’? Well, in this classificatory system, Yolŋu include Laŋgurrk and other large edible larvae of cossid moths and longicorn beetles in the category of gämurruŋ within the designation of maypal. And this grub is ‘grub’.
Sounds weird? In Linnaen classification a mollusc is “An invertebrate of a large phylum which includes snails, slugs, mussels, and octopuses. They have a soft unsegmented body and live in aquatic or damp habitats.” So slugs are molluscs in the way that we organise the world.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Shellfish.
– WILL STUBBS, Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre
IMAGES:Exhibition installations at Vickers Street Gallery, Parap 2018. Photography by Fiona Morrison
Works on bark
This exhibition comprised 22 bark paintings, a small selection of them are shown here.
