Yawkyawk — water spiri… | Bestiary of Cryptids and Legendary Creatures

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Names & Creature Profile

Yawkyawk names a young woman or young woman spirit being in Kuninjku accounts. Simona Barkus’s essay on Anniebell Marrngamarrnga connects their long hair with trailing green algae. The outline familiar to an outsider as a mermaid carries local names, relationships and responsibilities within particular clan estates. [4]

Historical Record

Gary Lee’s 2007 artist essay follows Yalandja back to his father, Crusoe Kuningbal, a singer, dancer and ceremonial leader who carved the slender mimih spirits associated with rocky country. After Kuningbal’s death in 1984, Owen and his brother Crusoe Kurddal continued making large figures. During the 1990s, Owen developed his yawkyawk sculptures. His father’s dot patterns gave way to arcs, then V-shaped fish scales; black replaced the red ground used by other family members. He made inherited carving knowledge the basis of a style recognizably his own. Lee also identifies him as a recorded didjeridu player and a singer for yawkyawk diplomacy ceremonies. The maker’s practice includes sound and performance, even when a museum visitor encounters only the carved object. [3]

Anthropologist Christiane Keller traces two different fibre histories. Kune artist Lena Yarinkura and Rembarrnga artist Bob Burruwal made the award-winning Family Drama in 1994. Its four humans, dog and burial platform enact a traditional burial. Yarinkura subsequently adapted fish-trap and basket techniques into rounded spirit bodies. In Family of Yawkyawk, made in 1997, a swelling, narrowing woven body could end in a flat tail. In 2003, Kuninjku artist Marina Murdilnga took another route. Mick Kubarrkku’s daughter, taught fibre work by her mother, she knotted pandanus into a vine frame. Her first figure was painted; the second used dyed fibre, with feathers suggesting algae-like hair. Other Kuninjku women developed the framed form in their own work. [2]

Appearance & Signs

Lulu Laradjbi’s 2005 National Museum sculpture has an orange face, dangling fibre hair and extended arms. Its leaf-shaped mesh body narrows toward a fanlike tail. Light passes through the open weave. [1]

Anniebell Marrngamarrnga’s 2007 work at the National Gallery of Victoria has a denser, patterned body. Orange, purple and dark strands surround two smaller faces and fish-bodied forms. The museum identifies a mother with two babies. Their placement makes the large figure’s body a space occupied by other beings; the viewer can follow each small face and tail before returning to the encompassing shape. [10]

At 264.7 centimetres high, this sculpture gives the family a presence larger than a human standing beside it. Natural dyes colour the pandanus, while bamboo supplies the frame. Mark Chapman gave it to the museum in 2008. It is a particular object with a maker, materials, scale and collecting history, rather than a diagram fixing every yawkyawk’s appearance. The repeated bodies create an intimate relationship within its considerable size. [10]

Tales & Encounters

The National Museum’s public account begins with two sisters seeking food between clan estates. Carrying a digging stick and sacred string, they camp beside a waterhole. Their cooking fire angers Ngalyod, the Rainbow Serpent, who rises and swallows them. They become ancestor spirits associated with that place. [1]

Curator Judith Ryan names Likanaya and Marrayka in a separately presented version. They travel through Kuninjku Country as humans and camp too close to Ngalyod’s sacred waterhole. Their legs and feet change into fish tails. The transformation attaches the young women to freshwater places; the trespass changes how they inhabit the world. Ryan situates such accounts among artists whose inherited connections to particular sites shape the stories and images they present. [9]

Homeland & Tradition

Maningrida Arts & Culture identifies Yalandja as a senior Dangkorlo clan member. His clan’s outstation community stands near a billabong inhabited by yawkyawk, a place for which members have spiritual and practical responsibilities. The spirits may be glimpsed as shadows fleeing a human approach. His relationship with that waterhole precedes the carved figure seen in a gallery. [5]

The profile also records his insistence on making according to his own ideas. Custodianship has not prevented invention. He selects kurrajong trunks for their slender curves, then gives their surfaces arrangements of marks that he has developed over years. A figure’s posture begins with a choice among growing forms, before carving and paint give it another life. His work has travelled to collections and exhibitions in Australia and overseas while retaining that connection to a particular billabong. [5]

Nature & Powers

The National Museum describes spirits singing underwater, sunning beside pools and walking at night, calling out while eating yams and sugarbag honey. They may become turtles, dragonflies or beetles, protect waterways and influence weather. [1]

Landscape & Associations

Barkus describes a relationship between the spirit’s body and Country: a river bend can be its tail, a billabong its head. A curve in the landscape has bodily meaning. Weaving also follows the seasons. New pandanus leaves are gathered during and after the monsoon; roots, leaves, berries and bark provide dyes. Women prepare fibres while sharing time with children and one another. The eventual body contains work undertaken long before its outline is visible. Marrngamarrnga works inward from the frame, building each segment until the separate sections complete the body. [4]

Dorothy Bunibuni, Anniebell’s younger sister, is a Kuninjku fibre artist from Ji-balbal on her father’s Country. Her art-centre profile places seasonal gathering, preparation and dyeing within the creative process itself. She works with locally collected pandanus and bush dyes. These materials arrive with knowledge of where to find them and how to prepare them; they are not neutral supplies added after a design has been settled. Working alongside her sister, she has developed an individual practice rather than simply reproducing an older relative’s objects. [7]

Variants & Kindred Beings

Yarinkura’s rounded twining and Murdilnga’s framed knotting give fibre different kinds of space to occupy. Keller records Yarinkura’s willingness to share techniques alongside her insistence that other artists represent their own culture and spirits. Learning a method does not transfer every subject associated with it. [2]

The human-and-fish outline also appears in the Cornish mermaid story recorded by William Bottrell. There a woman asks a ship’s captain to lift an anchor blocking the entrance to her underwater home. Family life gives the encounter its immediate problem. The tale differs from the sisters’ transformation beside Ngalyod’s waterhole, while offering another way for a water-dwelling woman to belong to a household. In the Orcadian Wastness selkie account, the body changes through a sealskin whose theft prevents its owner from returning to her people. Each story makes passage between land and water depend on a different relationship.

Meaning & Belief

Ryan connects artistic authority with clan and moiety affiliations, knowledge of sacred places, mentorship and an individual’s way of drawing. A moiety is a social division within these relationships. An image can carry a story, a place and an acknowledgement of a teacher at once. Some meanings remain outside the public explanation. The visible figure is an invitation to look closely, but its visibility does not mean that every meaning attached to it has been offered to every viewer. [9]

Later Retellings & Reception

Anniebell’s 2021 exhibition account makes the labour of a sculpture concrete. Her mother, Nancy Djulumba, taught her fibre work. Her husband, artist Dick Nadjolorro, made frames for her weavings. She gathered pandanus, boiled it with ash and tree roots for yellow and dark brown shades, then stitched it to the frame. Basketry and bag-making skills became the means of filling a spirit’s body. Support, colour and surface were made through different tasks, brought together in one large form. The same account includes her woodworking and bark painting: fibre is one of several materials through which she represents the water spirits. [6]

In May 2021 another collaboration took her to JamFactory. With textile and furniture designer Ivana Taylor, she conceived Bindalbindal in a studio filled with raffia and Dolly Parton’s music. The exhibition account records this small detail of an actual working setting. It brings a contemporary artist’s visit into view alongside inherited skills and family collaboration: a career continues through encounters, materials and the pleasure of trying another possibility. [6]

The Kubumi installation in the 2023 Shadow Spirit exhibition arranged several artists’ works as a waterscape. Anniebell and Dorothy’s woven spirits, freshwater crocodile and brown river stingray occupied the space above. Below, Ken Ngindjalakku Djungkidj’s three-dimensional figures placed mimih among rocks and yawkyawk on land. A painting by Paul Nabulumo Namarinjmak gave Kubumi another form. The exhibition statement describes a shared setting made through distinct contributions. The eye could move from hanging fibre to figures below, then to painted water, following a landscape across changes in medium. [8]

Evidence & Open Questions

Dorothy’s public career brings these histories into a new generation. Her work entered the National Museum’s collection and appeared in Shadow Spirit at Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station. The exhibition carried her woven forms far from Ji-balbal without making their origins irrelevant. Recognition adds a collecting and exhibition history to a practice still grounded in family knowledge and seasonal materials. [7]

Kubumi’s arrangement leaves the viewer with several directions to look: upward to suspended bodies, downward to figures among rocks, across to a painted place. The installation’s company matters. A water spirit is encountered among other lives, while each maker contributes a distinct part of the scene. The room becomes a place to notice those relationships rather than search for one definitive portrait. [8]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

The public transformation accounts come from the National Museum and Judith Ryan. Keller distinguishes the weaving histories; Lee and Barkus describe individual artists. Maningrida Arts & Culture records responsibilities, working relationships and exhibitions. The NGV catalogue identifies the mother-and-babies sculpture. [1][9][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][10]

Yawkyawk sculptures ↗
National Museum of Australia curatorial staff · National Museum of Australia
Complete public collection essay: Ancestral beings, transformation account, Sculpting spirits, Materials and techniques, Evolution of yawkyawk; enlarged Lulu Laradjbi 2005 image
Checked 2026-10-11
From Baskets to Bodies: Innovation Within Aboriginal Fibre Practice ↗

Artwork

Illuminated folios

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

An adult female freshwater spirit with flowing algae-like hair and two full human arms rests one hand on a rock; her other hand and tapering fish tail are visible beneath the moonlit pool, framed in dark silver and blue-green glass. — Original interpretive illustration informed by the National Museum of Australia’s public freshwater description of Yawkyawk; the figure, landscape and ornamental frame are artistic choices.

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