Liwirrinki (Goanna Dreaming) - Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves
Liwirrinki (Goanna Dreaming) - Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves
Print on Paper, 56x76 cm
The goanna, Liwirrinki (burrowing skink; peristalsis species) called Wamarru was a Japangardi from a place called Manceo West of Yuendumu. Wamarru had fallen in love with Yulgrin, a Nungarrayi. She was from the wrong skin group.
She had been singing him. So Japangardi, he had been travelling to the place where the Nungarrayi lived. Warmarru turned into a man and made some bush string and then a love belt. He put on his belt and sang that Nungarrayi, Yulgrin.
He made love to that Nungarrayi woman and took her back to his country. Two men made a big bush for the two Liwirrinki (lover-boy and lover-girl) who ran away together.
The print shows women, (U) shapes, sitting in a group performing the ceremony for this story with a ceremonial digging stick in the centre. The male and female goanna ancestors are also depicted.
‘Love Magic’ does exist in traditionally oriented Indigenous Australian communities in a variety of different ways, including visual art, ceremony, lengthy narratives, song and dance, it’s purpose seems to be widely misconstrued. Given that it is an umbrella translation for terminology from many different Indigenous Australian languages.
This artwork is part of a series using the Warlpiri and Kukatja word, Yilpinji, untranslated, rather than the misleading English hocus locus ‘love magic’. Why do indigenous societies practise Yilpinji. In traditional Australian life, there was a rigid system of arranged or ‘promised’ marriages, which to some extent continues to this day. Essentially marriage was an arrangement transacted between families, normally excluding what we now understand as ‘romance’.
’Yilpingi’ or socially authorised adulterous liaisons, which occur within a strict framework of rules, gives scope for the expression of romantic feelings and sexual love, without threatening the marriage system.
However it is quite clear that there is an inherent danger in Yilpinji-mediated relationships. Such unions could easily lurch out of control and therefore threaten normative marriage practises and rules. Hence the Yilpinji Dreaming narratives about illicit, transgressive love affairs, which as warnings and cautionary tales.
