Mabel Juli's - Garnkiny Ngarranggarni (Moon Dreaming)

Mabel Juli's - Garnkiny Ngarranggarni (Moon Dreaming)

Garnkiny Ngarranggarni, represents Juli’s main dreaming: the moon dreaming. Describing the movements of the ancestors as they emerged from the land and formed its many features, the Ngarranggarni underpins Gija law and culture and is upheld through song, dance and, now, through painting.

 
In the Ngarranggarni  Garnkiny, the moon, is a man. After hunting kangaroo one day he was resting in a riverbed when he caught site of a beautiful woman with long black hair and fell immediately in love. She was Darwool, the black-headed snake, but she was also of Garnkiny’s mother-in-law’s skin and so a relationship between them was forbidden. When the old people asked him who he would marry and he pointed to Darwool, they told him that she was his mother-in-law and that she had given her daughter as his wife. The old people sent Garnkiny away, and angrily he left. ‘They made him feel shame then’, Juli explains. ‘He climbed up high on the side of the hill and looked down … at all the old men and women sitting below.’ He cursed the people for not allowing him to marry Darwool, telling them they were going to die, but that he would always live. And so he ‘always appears as the new moon in the west. He dies for three days … rests for a little while and then climbs up’.

Size: 120cm x 120cm

Medium: Natural ochre and pigments on canvas