Mimih

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Names & Creature Profile

Mimih, sometimes written Mimi, are spirits of the rock country in western Arnhem Land. Maningrida Arts & Culture describes them as mischievous beings, thin enough to pass through the escarpment between their world and ours. Their society has families, politics and histories. A single slender figure may therefore represent someone with neighbours, obligations and quarrels, rather than a lonely presence waiting for a human visitor. The narrow body belongs to a much larger social life. [6]

Nature & Powers

John Mawurndjul’s public statement, translated by Murray Garde, describes Mimih who emerge to sing and carry shovel-nosed spears with stone points. The danger from wind is bodily and immediate: a broken neck would kill them. Inside the rock they have shelter; outside they must judge conditions that a much heavier body might barely notice. Mawurndjul connects the carvings with a handed-down story of singing and dancing spirits. [7]

Tales & Encounters

Anthropologist Luke Taylor brings the hunters into focus through two paintings by Dick Nguleingulei Murrumurru: Butchered Kangaroo, dated 1974, and Mimih Hunting, made about 1980. In his public lecture, a Mimih kills a kangaroo, while the paintings open the animal’s body through the X-ray convention. Taylor connects these works with cooking, butchery and the proper division of game. The kill supplies food, but it also raises the question of who receives each portion. The paintings carry knowledge about sharing as well as the successful hunt. [4]

Taylor describes a further surprise behind the rock face: the Mimih have a country inside it, with a sun and rivers of their own. Discussing Paddy Compass Namatbara’s paintings, he calls them tricksters capable of taking a human husband into the rock to marry a Mimih wife. The interior is spacious enough for another life. Disappearance into stone can therefore mean entry into a household from which the human partner never returns. [4]

Homeland & Tradition

These accounts belong to the country and knowledge of Kuninjku and other Bininj people in northern Australia. Bininj is a local term for Aboriginal people, not the name of the spirit. The National Museum of Australia describes Mimih as inhabitants of the rocky escarpment and credits them with teaching the arts of living: hunting, cooking, singing, dancing and painting. Knowledge of a meal or a song thus joins people to the beings who live within the stone. [8][5]

The museum places Mimih among the moving figures of western Arnhem Land’s art. A figure can be caught throwing a spear, running or dancing. The activity matters as much as the narrow outline. These images give the rock face a population engaged in the work and pleasures of living. [8]

Historical Record

Crusoe Kuningbal’s 1983 Mimih spirits makes that presence tangible in earth pigments on stringybark. Made at Barrihdjowkkeng, it measures 92.6 by 43 centimetres and entered the National Gallery of Victoria as a gift from Geoff and Janette Todd in 1992. Three elongated figures occupy its narrow brown field. Heads, eyes and repeated pale marks lead the eye down their bodies. The painting gives each figure room to stretch without requiring a broad expanse of bark. [1]

Kuningbal was also a singer, dancer and carver. In his National Gallery of Australia essay, writer Gary Lee describes life-sized Mimih figures incorporated into the public Mamurrng ceremony, in which Kuningbal danced the spirits. A carving could stand within an occasion of music and movement rather than remain an isolated object. [3]

The NGV dates Kuningbal’s pioneering sculptures to the 1970s and describes their initial production for the art market. This sits beside Lee’s account of their use in public performance. The two settings give the figures different audiences and uses; neither makes the maker anonymous. The documented innovation is a change in artistic form, not a date for the beginning of Mimih knowledge. [1][3]

Appearance & Signs

The slender body is also a surface on which a younger artist can learn. Maningrida Arts & Culture explains that Kuninjku apprentices practise rarrk, crosshatched painting, on small Mimih forms before attempting larger bark paintings. Learning to carve takes place among others who share and develop ideas. Thin softwood trunks provide the bodies, and earth pigments supply their colour. The centre names kapok, kurrajong, beach hibiscus and Leichhardt among the timbers used for Mimih. The modest scale gives a learner a manageable piece of wood and a limited area on which to control a line. [9][8]

One recorded example is Jaylene Garnarridj’s Mimih Spirit, catalogue 1346-25: a kurrajong carving 99 centimetres high but only three centimetres wide and 2.5 centimetres deep, finished with ochre pigment and PVA fixative. Its measurements describe a body close to a metre tall within the width of a few fingers. The art centre also draws attention to differing facial expressions, through which makers give individual character to spirits associated with humour and volatility. [9]

Variants & Kindred Beings

After Kuningbal died in 1984, his sons Crusoe Kurddal and Owen Yalandja continued making large figures. Lee traces a divergence between them: Kurddal remained associated with Mimih, while Yalandja developed Yawkyawk, freshwater spirit figures with fish tails. Yalandja adapted his father’s dot patterning into arcs and then V-shaped scales. The inheritance was a way of working that allowed a son to choose a different subject and develop its surface. Mimih and Yawkyawk share a family’s artistic history without becoming the same being. [3]

Kurddal’s own Mimih grew taller and changed their arrangements. The Art Gallery of New South Wales records black figures, double figures with one standing on another’s shoulders, female figures wearing pandanus skirts, and sculptures cast in bronze. Its illustrated 2003 Mimih spirit, painted in natural pigments on wood, is 263 centimetres high and 14.4 centimetres wide. Enlarging the figure makes slenderness something a viewer can stand beside and look up at; stacking two bodies introduces balance and support into the sculpture’s silhouette. [2]

Meaning & Belief

In the exhibition Void, curator Emily McDaniel reads Jennifer and Josephine Wurrkidj’s irregular forms through the spaces within their homeland. Their uneven shapes describe the rough interiors of rocks. What looks like a deviation from a smooth outline can therefore carry information about the dwelling it fits. The exhibition’s learning resource names peanut tree, Leichhardt tree and ochre among their materials: the artists work with substances from the environment as well as with forms that describe it. [5]

Jennifer Wurrkidj’s accompanying statement joins people, Country and animals as family. The exhibition interprets the Mimih carvings as continuing presence within a landscape that outsiders might regard as empty. For these works, a gap is inhabited space. The viewer sees a figure, while the artist’s account supplies the country around and within its form. [5]

Later Retellings & Reception

Kurddal’s figures entered the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Yiribana Gallery when it opened in 1994. The gallery’s artist profile also records his dancing in Australia and overseas. His sculptures and performances thus continue two practices already joined in his father’s work. Increased scale and new materials belong to a career that moves between making a figure and moving a body before an audience. [2]

Maningrida Arts & Culture presented Samson Bonson’s new Mimih sculptures at Vivien Anderson Gallery from 6 June to 7 July 2018. Its account emphasises refined carving and mark-making. Later that year, Jennifer and Josephine Wurrkidj’s sculptures appeared in Void, first held at UTS Gallery from 25 September to 16 November. These are distinct exhibitions: Bonson’s newly made figures and the Wurrkidj artists’ contribution to a discussion of land and presence. [6][5]

Bonson’s training extends the story of carving beyond Kuningbal’s sons. A Gurrgoni sculptor born in 1968, he learned from Kurddal in the late 1990s, according to Maningrida Arts & Culture. His exhibition My Mother’s Country, held at Art Leven Woolloomooloo from 18 April to 9 May 2026, brought Mimih and lorrkon, or hollow-log sculptures, together. The art centre describes increasingly fine, dense dot work across their surfaces. The two forms retain different associations: the narrow Mimih body and the hollow log connected with mortuary practice. Their shared surface treatment belongs to Bonson’s handling of the wood. The account also records an earlier journey for his work: a sculpture entered the British Museum in 2007, and exhibitions took his carving to Bahrain’s La Fontaine Centre of Contemporary Art in 2006 and to London. The teaching line has passed from Kuningbal through Kurddal to another maker, whose figures reach audiences well beyond Arnhem Land. Each transfer involves a person learning and then choosing how to work. [10]

Landscape & Associations

Mawurndjul’s statement gives place an obligation as well as a population. He says that remains associated with this history must not be disturbed or removed. Their proper place is the rock country. The account is a public explanation of care: finding something does not give the finder a right to take it. The beings’ shelter and the histories attached to it remain connected to the people who maintain that knowledge. [7]

Evidence & Open Questions

Institutional descriptions do not always use the same categories. The NGV calls the Mimih ancestral beings in its account of Kuningbal’s painting; the National Museum distinguishes escarpment spirits from ancestral or creator beings. Those wordings should remain attached to their sources. A broad English label cannot by itself settle how a particular artist or community understands a figure. [1][8]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

Artist statements, collection records and exhibition texts identify the speakers and makers behind these accounts. Mawurndjul’s words appear in Murray Garde’s English translation; Taylor’s lecture discusses named paintings, while Lee follows one family’s carving history. [7][4][3]

Mimih spirits, Crusoe Kuningbal, 1983 ↗
National Gallery of Victoria · English
Object O.26-1992; artist and work details; description; displayed image.
Checked 2026-10-11
Crossing Country: Crusoe Kurddal ↗
Art Gallery of New South Wales · English
Complete Crusoe Kurddal profile; labelled Mimih spirit 2003, 263 x 14.4 cm; Yiribana 1994 paragraph.
Checked 2026-10-11
Culture Warriors: Owen Yalandja ↗
Gary Lee · National Gallery of Australia · 2007 · English
Gary Lee signed essay; opening Kuningbal paragraph; Kurddal/Yalandja comparison; Yalandja artistic innovation paragraphs.
Checked 2026-10-11
Individual inspiration and social connection in western Arnhem Land ↗
Luke Taylor · National Museum of Australia · 2014 · English
Lecture by Dr Luke Taylor, 5 June 2014; transcript posted 1 January 2018; passages naming Dick Nguleingulei Murrumurru, Mimih Hunting and Paddy Compass Namatbara.

Artwork

Illuminated folios

Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.

Two very slender spirit silhouettes shelter in narrow sandstone clefts as wind bends grasses in a dusky rock-country landscape, within an independent dark celestial frame. — Original interpretive illustration informed by public accounts of Mimih dwelling and shelter in western Arnhem Land’s rock country.

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