Bark painting 'Howard Island" by Harry Margawala, Milingimbi, 1948

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Type: Bark paintings
Date: July 1948 - September 1948
Place: Milingimbi, Central Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia
Materials: Bark, Binder, Pigment
Collection: American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land (AASEAL) collection
Accession number: 1985.0067.0077

Description

A bark painting worked with ochres on bark. It has two thin rectangles protruding from the top of the main panel. Each depicts an insect-like figure, with the one on the left also depicting a turtle and a fish. The main panel is divided into four further sections by wide crosshatched bands. There are diamond-shaped patterns painted in different colours running vertically down each of these.

The story of these is about Miliwai (Howard Island)[.] The name of this is rock gunda and its other name is Gadawarg, also Dugururu (= the big names of the mangrove fish, the laidjin). There are three parts of the one (fish) – the 'legs', the 'arms' and the head; this 'gunda' shut-up (or closed-upon) a fish (like barramundi) with its 'legs' (magar): along both sides (part of the pattern) is water, the red and black are the same, water: this at the foot is named Balngarngara (river-mouth at the west end of Howard Is.), and near the foot are three (or a few) niriwan (oysters). This painting is part of a collection of 95 bark paintings collected during the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land (AASEAL) in 1948. A team of 17 team of Australian and American researchers and support staff spent 9 months investigating the Indigenous populations and the environment of Arnhem Land. The team included an anthropologist, an archaeologist, a photographer, a filmmaker, a botanist, a mammologist, an ichthyologist, an ornithologist, and a team of medical and nutritional scientists. Related collections of bark paintings are held in the AGNSW, AGSA and in the USA in the Smithsonian Institution.

Read live from the Museum's Collection API (12/11/2026, 5:11:32 am). Record last updated by the Museum 2025-02-23. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.