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Names & Creature Profile

Mimih, also written Mimi in some English-language records, names spirits associated with western Arnhem Land’s rock country. Their extraordinary slenderness joins body and home: public accounts describe beings able to travel through the rocky escarpment, while John Mawurndjul explains that wind drives them into shelter because it could break their necks. This makes their slightness consequential. It is both a means of inhabiting places inaccessible to people and a vulnerability in the open air. [7][6]

They are also social beings. Maningrida Arts & Culture describes a Mimih world with family groups, politics, and histories. A lone elongated figure therefore need not stand for a solitary creature. It can suggest one member of a community whose life continues beyond the human viewer’s reach. Their apparent concealment does not mean an empty interior world; public paintings and accounts repeatedly give that world activity. [6]

Homeland & Tradition

The relevant homeland is western Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia, with public accounts and art associated particularly with Kuninjku and other Bininj people. Rock country is a lived and storied environment, rather than a generic setting for an Australian fairy. The National Museum of Australia describes Mimih as spirits of the escarpment and distinguishes them from ancestral or creator beings. That distinction keeps their identity specific even where museum displays bring many kinds of spirit imagery together. [8]

Rock painting is central to their public significance. The NGV credits Mimih with teaching Kuninjku ancestors to paint, and the NMA’s broader account includes hunting, cooking, song, and dance among the arts of living taught to Bininj people. Teaching links an elusive neighbour to ordinary skilled activity. The creatures may be hard to see, but their importance extends into how people work, perform, and make images. [1][8]

Historical Record

A dated artwork gives this entry a tangible point of departure. Crusoe Kuningbal’s Mimih spirits, made in 1983 at Barrihdjowkkeng, is an earth-pigment painting on stringybark. The NGV records its dimensions as 92.6 by 43 centimetres and its accession as O.26-1992, following a gift from Geoff and Janette Todd. The date identifies this painting’s making. It does not date the beginning of Mimih knowledge or the first telling of an associated story. [1]

Kuningbal also helped change what a Mimih artwork could be. The NGV places his pioneering carved figures in the 1970s, initially for the art market. Gary Lee’s National Gallery of Australia essay connects his carving with his work as a singer and dancer, including Mimih figures used in public performance. A painted being could become a freestanding figure, and a sculpture could participate in a performance as well as enter a collection. These are particular artistic developments, not a replacement of an unnamed ancient culture by a single modern style. [1][3]

Appearance & Signs

On Kuningbal’s 1983 bark, three elongated figures occupy a narrow field. Their heads and eyes stand out against the brown ground; lines and repeated pale marks articulate the bodies. The eye travels vertically from head to limb, registering how much figure the artist draws from a restricted width. This is an observation of one identified painting. It gives a reader something concrete to look at without turning every mark into an invented spiritual code. [1]

Different artists can make that slenderness work differently. In the Void learning resource, curator Emily McDaniel interprets the slight irregularity of Jennifer and Josephine Wurrkidj’s figures through the uneven spaces within their rocky homeland. Shape becomes a way of thinking about a place. Her reading also makes clear why a smooth, standardized fantasy silhouette would lose something: the relationship between a particular form and the environment it occupies is part of the work’s meaning. [5]

Nature & Powers

Public accounts give the Mimih abilities through what they do, rather than a list of combat powers. They move through stone country, inhabit the rocks, and practise skills that people also value. John Mawurndjul’s public statement describes them emerging to sing, and identifies singing and dancing with the Mimih story represented by carvings. Their knowledge and activity are therefore as important to their identity as their elusive bodies. [7][6]

Their fragility also changes the usual balance between a human observer and an extraordinary being. A powerful wind can threaten them, yet their shelter lies within rock inaccessible to that observer. Movement outdoors and withdrawal indoors belong together. The account asks a reader to imagine a life fitted to another kind of dwelling, whose advantages and dangers cannot be measured simply by human size or strength. [7]

Tales & Encounters

Luke Taylor’s public lecture offers a particularly vivid route into Mimih life through Dick Nguleingulei Murrumurru’s Mimih Hunting, dating to about 1980. He discusses it alongside Murrumurru’s Butchered Kangaroo (1974). His account identifies a Mimih killing a kangaroo and connects these paintings with butchery and the correct division of game. Hunting, preparation, and sharing give his discussion a sequence of skilled work and social responsibilities. Extraordinary figures participate in activities through which a community sustains itself. [4]

Taylor also describes a Mimih world within the rocks, with its own sun and rivers. The outside wall can therefore conceal a landscape rather than merely a crack. A reader looking at a slender figure emerging from stone can imagine the direction of travel differently: it comes from somewhere with a life of its own. Public art makes that larger world legible through selected activities without needing to stage an invented first-person sighting. [4]

The painting’s title is especially useful beside a museum label that merely says “spirit.” Hunting supplies a verb and a consequence. It shows how a familiar human activity can open a way into an unfamiliar neighbour’s society. In this account, the Mimih’s distinctiveness lies in the conjunction of rock dwelling and ordinary social work: a hidden world becomes imaginable through the things its inhabitants need to do together. [4]

Landscape & Associations

Jennifer Wurrkidj’s public statement in the Void resource connects people, animals, and Country as family. Within that exhibition, Mimih sculpture contributes to an account of continuing presence within a landscape that outsiders might mistake for empty space. A crevice can hold life and meaning even when it is not visible from the surface. The curator’s discussion of negative space is thus more than a formal description of a gap between rocks. [5]

Mawurndjul gives the association another consequence: places linked with Mimih history require care, and associated remains must not be disturbed or removed. His public account joins a description of beings to responsibilities toward a place. That relationship changes the meaning of discovery. Seeing or naming something does not make it available for possession. The rock country is a homeland whose histories continue to matter to the people who speak about it. [7]

Variants & Kindred Beings

Mimih and Yawkyawk can both appear as slender carved spirit figures, but the two names do not denote interchangeable versions of the same being. Gary Lee’s essay makes their difference visible through one family’s artistic history. After Kuningbal’s death in 1984, his sons continued carving: Crusoe Kurddal remained especially associated with Mimih, while Owen Yalandja developed distinctive Yawkyawk figures associated with freshwater. A shared training does not erase a different subject. [3]

Kurddal also altered the Mimih figure itself. The Art Gallery of New South Wales records larger works, double figures with one standing on another’s shoulders, female figures with pandanus skirts, and work in bronze. These are choices within a named artist’s practice. They widen the public visual repertoire without creating a rule that every Mimih is a towering double figure or wears a particular garment. Variation belongs to makers as well as to narrated beings. [2]

Meaning & Belief

The teaching account gives Mimih a place in the history of culture rather than only in an inventory of frightening things. Hunting, painting, song, and dance are learned abilities. To credit another society with teaching them establishes a relationship across the boundary between human and spirit life. That relationship can appear on a bark painting or in a carving without reducing the work to a literal illustration of a single text. [8]

Named makers matter to that relationship. Kuningbal’s painting, Kurddal’s changed sculptural arrangements, and the Wurrkidj artists’ public work each connect inherited knowledge with an individual decision about materials, form, and presentation. The resulting objects are not anonymous evidence collected from an extinct belief. Their dates and authors belong to a continuing art history in which people choose what they will show and how they will show it. [1][2][5]

Later Retellings & Reception

The movement into public galleries can be followed through concrete occasions. Kurddal’s figures were included in the Yiribana Gallery installation at the Art Gallery of New South Wales when it opened in 1994. Maningrida Arts & Culture later described Samson Bonson’s new Mimih sculptures for a 2018 exhibition at Vivien Anderson Gallery. The latter account emphasized his refined forms and mark-making alongside Mimih society and its movement through stone country. These occasions show different makers bringing the subject before different audiences. [2][6]

Void, first held at UTS Gallery in 2018, offered another encounter through Jennifer and Josephine Wurrkidj. Its public educational resource set their sculptures within a discussion of landscape and continuing cultural presence. The gallery setting changed the questions viewers might bring to a figure: how does a body describe its homeland, and what can apparently empty space contain? The same subject can enter new conversations while retaining the names of the makers and the place from which the work comes. [5]

Evidence & Open Questions

The public record is strongest when it keeps its different kinds of evidence visible. A collection entry establishes a painting’s maker, medium, date, and dimensions. An artist’s statement speaks from a particular person’s knowledge and experience. A museum curator interprets a displayed work for an audience. Together they can describe a rich Mimih tradition and a developing public art history, while preserving who makes each account and what that account addresses. [1][7][5]

An especially important question concerns resemblance. A museum may identify slender rock-painted figures with Mimih, but an artwork’s appearance is not by itself a date for the associated tradition, nor proof that every similarly shaped figure means the same thing. Kuningbal’s documented bark offers a secure starting point precisely because it has a maker and a title. From that point, the story opens outward into teaching, performance, sculpture, and the work of later artists—a history of creative decisions whose human authors remain visible. [1][8][3]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

Begin with the NGV’s record and image of Crusoe Kuningbal’s Mimih spirits (1983). Follow its sculptural history through the Art Gallery of New South Wales profile of Crusoe Kurddal and Gary Lee’s NGA essay on Owen Yalandja. Luke Taylor’s NMA lecture transcript discusses named paintings and Mimih activities. The Void learning resource supplies Emily McDaniel’s and Jennifer Wurrkidj’s public perspectives; Maningrida Arts & Culture documents Samson Bonson’s 2018 exhibition. John Mawurndjul’s translated public statement connects rock dwelling with place and care. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

Mimih spirits, Crusoe Kuningbal, 1983 ↗
National Gallery of Victoria · English
Object O.26-1992; artist and work details; description; displayed image.
Complete object record and curatorial text consulted; public object image visually inspected. Supports artist, 1983 date, bark medium, dimensions and place, acquisition, rock-painting teaching attribution, and the account of Kuningbal’s sculptural innovation in the 1970s. Artwork copyright remains with the named rights holder.
Checked 2026-10-11
Crossing Country: Crusoe Kurddal ↗
Art Gallery of New South Wales · English

The artist’s reading of the legend

Illuminated folios

These artworks interpret the stories and landscapes explored here. They are imaginative illustrations, rather than historical records or evidence of an encounter.

Two very slender spirit silhouettes shelter in narrow sandstone clefts as wind bends grasses in a dusky rock-country landscape, within an independent dark celestial frame. — Original interpretive illustration informed by public accounts of Mimih dwelling and shelter in western Arnhem Land’s rock country.

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