In painting, abstraction exists in the interplay between form and idea. Djambawa Marawili of the Madarrpa clan lives at Yilpara on a peninsula that stretches out into the north of Blue Mud Bay. An artist and religious leader, he looks after the home of Bäru, the ancestral crocodile. Bäru’s spiritual country surrounds Garrangali, the estuarine mangrove jungles where crocodiles build their nests today. In the ancestral past Bäru’s body was burnt, caught in the flames of a burning hut. He dived into the sea to quench the flames, but the fire continued to burn beneath the waters.

The landscape of Blue Mud Bay is one of great seasonal variation. In the wet season the waters from the inland rivers flow out into the bays creating powerful swirling currents that are cross-cut by the movement of tides – forces of nature that threaten but that are also understood as signs of renewal and growth. This is the time when the land regenerates following the aridity of the late dry and the sea prepares to release its bounty to the coastal hunters.

In his recent series of paintings Djambawa Marawili develops variations on the theme of the Madarrpa diamond design to express the power of the ancestral crocodile. The meanings are latent in the designs and influence how they are seen and felt. The crosshatched diamonds represent the crocodile as it dives into the waters carrying the fire that burnt into its back. The design expresses the heat of the flames as they leap through the bush, and the boiling waters of the sea as the crocodile thrashes about. The curved lines in some of the paintings refer to the rounded crocodile’s nests at Garrangali. The lines of diamonds are powerful expressions of the ancestral crocodile but they also allude to the forces of the sea and the crosscutting nature of the currents. The more knowledge one gains of the designs the less abstract they seem, yet the more the processes of abstraction become apparent.