Deutscher and Hackett

Yingarna is described by the Kunwinijku as the original creator being, a powerful ancestral being of androgynous form who held all the original ancestors or dreaming inside her body until she was speared to let them out. This work probably shows a myth described by Senior Curator Judith Ryan in her publication Spirit in land: bark paintings from Arnhem Land in the National Gallery of Victoria, as ‘an incident in the Ancestral period when “Yingarna” was floating down the East Alligator River in a fish–trap, creating and naming animals, plants and sacred sites and giving land to people as she travelled. “Yingarna” seems to emerge from the fish–trap, which is decorated with rarrk so that it resembles a sacred object.'