PRINCE OF WALES (MIDPUL) | BODY MARKS

Karen Brown Gallery, Darwin, catalgue no. KB0223

The Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands

Piet Mondrian saw parallels between his grid-like paintings and the rhythms of modern jazz: to the eminent Aboriginal curator Hetti Perkins, the sequential patterns in the paintings of Midpul (Prince of Wales) possess ‘a musicality imparted by the lively staccato-effect of dots and intermittent bars, as if to be read like the sheet music for an improvised symphony.’¹

Midpul, was an elder or daribah, a ceremonial leader, a song man, performer and painter of the Larrakia people who are the original inhabitants of the land on which stands the city of Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory. The Larrakia were the first group in the so-called ‘Top End’ to bear the force of colonization in the mid-nineteenth century, that lead to dispossession of country and the attenuation of traditional ceremonial practice. In terms of land area alone, Darwin was to become one of the largest (if least populated) cities in the world in order to keep the original owners of the land as far away as possible from colonial settlement. In 1916 the Larrakia were banned from their own territory and Midpul’s father Imabul, also known as Ichungarrabilluk and King George, lead the Larrakia’s struggle to have their rights to land recognized. These were granted exactly a century later, in 2016, more than a decade after Midpul’s death.

Throughout his life, Midpul worked to preserve Larrakia culture and he became a renowned ceremonial performer both in the traditional arena and further afield. From the 1960s, he led a group of Larrakia in public performances, including one to HRH Queen Elizabeth on the royal tour of 1963,² and some thirty years later he carried on his father’s struggle for land rights – in paint. In 1995 he began to translate Larrakia ceremonial body painting designs and patterns of cicatrices indicating ritual rank into acrylic paint on canvas. His early works were ‘torso-size’, on a scale that equates to the scale of the human canvas on which these designs are applied ceremonially. In the latter years of his life, while the Larrakia land claim was still before the courts, Midpul painted a number of larger canvases effectively asserting his cultural authority in the public domain.³

[1] Hetti Perkins in Tradition Today: Indigenous Art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004, p.166.

[2] Midpul is said to have been given his English moniker as the son of King George / Imabul, or as a result of the performance to the Queen.

[3] op. cit, p.166.

Wally Caruana