George Mung Mung

George Mung Mung spent his life in the East Kimberley cattle industry until he finally settled, in his fifties, where he was originally born and spent his earliest years. His father, Charlie Mungmung, had worked as a police tracker stationed at Turkey Creek at the time of his birth and George began work in the stock camps while still a boy. He was employed by the manager of the Tickelera Cattle Station, Authur Muggleton, and became a drover. As a youth he travelled across the country as far as Queensland with up to 1,200 head of cattle. Later, when the new owner of Tickelara, Bill Scurthrope, sold up and moved to Spring Creek, George, now married to Betty Carrington, joined him and had a family. More than a decade later they returned to the East Kimberley to work with Jimmy Kline, the manager of Texas Downs Station where George became head stockman, and when Kline moved to Turkey Creek, George followed. He later spent four years breaking horses for Tom Davis at Lissadell Station before relocating his family to Wyndham, where his children could attend school. However, with the establishment of the Warmun Community in the mid seventies George once again returned to live at Warmun with his family. The Pastoral Award of 1969, which gave equal pay to Indigenous workers, had all but ended the lifestyle of the Aboriginal stockmen. They found themselves thrown off stations, homeless and unemployed. In its wake, Warmun provided both a shelter and, coincidentally, a site for cultural and artistic revival. This was given extra impetus when George and a number of his contemporaries, including Rover Thomas and Paddy Jaminji, were convinced that the devastation Cyclone Tracy wreaked on Darwin in 1974, was the manifestation of the Rainbow Serpent’s anger at the abandonment of traditional culture in the face of white influence. In a dream Rover Thomas was visited by the spirit of a female relative who had recently died in a car crash, and over the following year this dream became the basis of a song cycle during which the singers revisited all of the most important East Kimberley Dreaming sites. By 1978 this had developed into the Krill Krill Ceremony during which the woman’s spirit travels from the moment of her death in a medical airplane hovering over a whirlpool, to her conception site near Turkey Creek and on throughout the Kimberley to eventually end near Cape Levique as she overlooks the destruction of Darwin. From the outset, George Mung Mung aided the central figures of this invention, Rover Thomas and Paddy Jaminji, in creating the ceremonial boards for the dancers to carry in this reenactment. His own artistic development was significantly influenced by these early origins in both manner and concept. Unlike the large ephemeral ground paintings of the Western Desert with their omnipotent viewpoint, these paintings on plywood boards invited a range of different perspectives. George’s art comprised works that incorporated both aerial and lateral depictions of country simultaneously, as well as figurative profiles of ancestral animals and occasional descriptive annotation. In George Mung Mung’s works, and specifically his earliest paintings on board, naturalistic figurative representations are far more prolific than in Western Desert works, no doubt derived from the Warmun painters tendency to depict the features of the environment created by the ancestors, rather than mapping the journey of ancestral travels, as in desert painting. Initially George’s paintings differed greatly from those of his contemporaries. While Rover’s sparse canvases demonstrated a ‘simplicity that suggested there was far more to each work than met the eye'  (McDonald 2004: 21), George Mung Mung’s works were characterized by more complex composition combined with greater figuration. Later he tended toward works that were far bolder and geometric, executed in a far darker palette. In these works he always portrayed the country, which in his final years he would go and visit with his wife, children and grandchildren. A favorite camping spot was Cattle Creek, where they would sit under the tree that stood just ten meters from where Betty was born and where they had married. With his family around them they would relate stories around the camp fire that would connect them all to their country. George suddenly died in 1991, just as Rover’s work was being presented at the Venice Biennale and Kimberley paintings were beginning to make a major impact on the Aboriginal art market.