Djambawa Marawili paints the patterns and stories that come from his country in the north of Blue Mud Bay. His paintings are imbued with meanings that link people to the ancestral creation of the land and sea. His paintings are condensations of the landscape and the spiritual and physical forces within it. In this sense, abstraction is a process for encoding meanings and impressions from the land and sea. His paintings reflect a vision of the world, a sensually rich and intimate portrait of the landscape that simultaneously captures its scale. The paintings reveal the flickering sea grass beneath the water’s surface, the pattern etched into the crocodile's back and the fire as it flares up, all signs of the ancestral creation of place. Yet they also refer to the magnitude of the seascape as the waters stretch out across the bay.

Djambawa's painting Baraltja is centred on the estuary of a river that flows through the coastal floodplains out into Blue Mud Bay. Baraltja is the home of Burruttji the lightening serpent. The snake moves with the seasons following the freshwater as it mixes with the salt, deep into the bay as the wet season floodwaters push out to sea and retreating inland as the dry season progresses. This painting shows the waters of the Baraltja River as they run from the floodplains past a sacred manifestation of the serpent, past the shore line and over a sand bar before being flushed into the sea. The mixing of fresh and salt water is a potent symbol in Yolngu culture representing a source of fertility knowledge and power. This structure of this particular painting was determined by Wakuthi Marawili Djambawa’s father to illustrate one of the sources of Yolngu knowledge.

Djambawa has painted several aspects of the stories associated with the saltwaters of Yathikpa, the sacred site of the original Garrangali - the crocodile nest- an important site for the Madarrpa. In this particular painting Djambawa shows the sea off Yathikpa from above, incorporating a dugong, paddle, a canoe and the sacred rock Marrtjala. These motifs refer to the story of the Ancestral Dugong hunt, in which two ancestral hunters Borrak and Garramattji pursued Djunungguyangu the Dugong. From their canoe the hunters harpooned the dugong. As it tried to escape by swimming towards the submerged rock Marrtjala, the waters boiled and the canoe capsized. In some versions of the story the Ancestral Hunters drowned, in others they safely reached the shore.

References:
Buwayak Invisibility (2003);
Saltwater (1999)