Carving Country
Steve Ngakapoorgum Yunkaporta’s striking milkwood carvings embody what culture must rightfully be: strong, resilient, and regenerative.
WORDS BY Adam Ford | PHOTOGRAPHY courtesy of the Artist and Wik and Kugu Arts | PUBLISHED 5 November 2024
↑ Artist Steve Ngakapoorgum Yunkaporta with his work
In Aurukun on Queensland’s western Cape York Peninsula, milkwood (Alstonia actinophylla) has long been a staple in the ceremonial and sculptural practices of the community’s five clan groups (carved as mortuary/law poles or into totemic icons). Native to northern Australia and New Guinea, milkwood is cyclone resistant, fire retardant, and bird attractant. It easily weathers drought and termites and is thus a sound species not only in Australia’s most unforgiving climates, but for its most adaptable peoples.
Take, then, Wik artist and woodcarver, Steve Ngakapoorgum Yunkaporta, who fashions from this ample pine, a gamut of Aurukun animalia. Borne of ceremony, Aurukun carving is an indivisible expression of totemism and kinship. After milkwood is carved, designs historically painted on the body are transferred onto the wooden substrate, either in natural pigments or synthetic polymers, and cite the totemic markings of family groups and lineages. This transference is powerful, both materially and spiritually, sublimating potent psychical impulses into hardened exteriors.
“I like to teach my nephews and grandchildren our cultural ways. They listen but they are a bit distracted these days. Too much internet.” Steve Ngakapoorgum Yunkaporta
↑ Black Cockatoo Ochre with binders on milkwood
Belonging to the Apelech clan (saltwater people) Yunkaporta expands the milkwood imaginary of what Aurukun carvings can be. Beyond the romping grounds of cheeky ku (camp dogs) – those popular blue-chip pups that afford the Wik and Kugu Arts Centre much of its fervent art majeure – Yunkaporta looks toward sea and sky, at shark and bird. This is an inward looking, more than it is a gazing deep below or high above.
In these carvings, such inward looking uncovers the teachings of Yunkaporta’s forefathers including big uncle Jubilee Wolmby, and small dads Arthur Pambegan Jnr and Garry Namponan, the latter whom Yunkaporta has here collaborated with to carve his grandfather Old Marlick Wolmby’s totem Toyo (hammerhead shark). Uncle Wombly, Yunkaporta notes, “taught me how to do this art,” while Pambegan Jnr. and grandfather Wolmby “taught me to respect our totems, especially when we carve them.”
↑ Hammer Head Shark Totem. Ochre with binders on Milkwood
Toyo, Yunkaporta explains, is a “Big Totem for me and my family,” connected to his matrilineally inherited Country of Cape Keerweer where the significant site of Ngul Mungk (Moving Stone) lies. In this carving, hammerhead shark is coated in a chalky black ochre which is scuffed by a reddish patina. Yunkaporta finishes this carving in hems of white paint to accentuate bodily features. This colouring accords similarly to his accompanying sculpture of a black cockatoo, which like Toyo, is smoothly rendered and gently rounded (save for crest and beak, and dorsal fin, respectively). While black cockatoo rises from an apt milky pillar, Toyo glides along an arched plinth, slicing the rolling, foaming, blue waves beneath it.
“I like to teach my nephews and grandchildren our cultural ways,” says Yunkaporta.
“They listen but they are a bit distracted these days. Too much internet.” He yarns a familiar tale. Freighted with requisite cultural, ecological, and spiritual duties, Yunkaporta understands that this art must maintain intergenerational transmission. The flow on effect is fraught: “…if the art fades away, then the language and the culture will too,” he laments.
And, so, fleshed from those stately, milkwood trees, Yunkaporta’s carvings embody what culture must rightfully be: strong, resilient, regenerative. Like milkwood, his hands can weather all extremities. In his hands, culture will never fade away.
↑ Hammer Head Shark Totem. Ochre with binders on Milkwood
This article originally appeared in the Art Collector 2024 Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair Special Edition, click here to read more.
Cover Art by Betty Mula, 33-24 PunuTjuta, Synthetic polymer on linen, 152 x 122 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Mimili Maku Arts.
Contributor Adam Ford (Nyoongar) is an Assistant Currator, Indigenous Australian Art Gallery, Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)
