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Nym Bandak (circa 1904—1981)

Nym 'Bunduck' (variously Bandak, Bunduck, Pandak, Bundak, Panduk, Punduk) was a member of the Diminin clan and a Murrinh-patha (Murinbada) leader from the Wadeye (Port Keats) community in the Fitzmaurice region on the west coast of the Northern Territory.

Bunduk was a Murrinh-patha leader instrumental in the art movement.

He experienced first-hand the colonisation of his country, and the frontier violence it brought. The mission was established on his country in 1935 and it was here that he started to paint his traditional stories and culture,

Personal life
Bunduck had four wives and 13 children.
 * Kurrungga from the Murrinh-patha tribe (one child: Stephen Ninnet)
 * Wurrkadki from the Murrinh-patha tribe (two children: Rita Toitkaim and Nellie Ngamur)
 * Biddy or Tulba from the Jamijung tribe (one child: Felix Yambunyi)
 * Polly or Linta (also Lintha) from the Murrinh-patha tribe (eight children: Agnes Demurutak, Kevin Kanalda, Johanna Kalaingout, Benigna Yerjin, Alan Nguramilyen, Theodore Palarda, Anita Ngaliwanmar, Prudence Suzanne Nilin)

Bunduck passed his painting skill onto his son Kevin Bunduck (1942–94).

Collaboration with Stanner
Many of Bandak's most famous paintings were designed to convey to his friend, the anthropologist Bill Stanner, an understanding of the political and social meaning of the landscape in the Port Keats area and the form of the Murrinh-patha social world. Bandak and Stanner were close friends for over 40 years. Thus Bandak's paintings are unique in that they were painted for an anthropologist and are accompanied by Stanner's notes. In Stanner's book White Man Got No Dreaming (1979) Stanner describes one of his works in some detail.

They provide an insight into the philosophical basis of Murrinh-patha thought and institutions. Importantly, soon after they were painted, Stanner published significant works on Aboriginal symbolism, religion and land ownership.

While all of these works were influenced by Stanner's collaboration with Bandak, it is within Stanner's famous monograph On Aboriginal Religion where the influence of Bandak and of his 1958 and 1959 paintings is most apparent.

Stanner went on to become an important figure in Australian anthropology and within Aboriginal affairs. The education he received from Nym Bandak, and others within the Daly River area, contributed to his ability to make significant contributions to the debate which eventuated in the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 and the progress of a number of land claims under that Act.

The changes created in the outside world by Stanner and others, led to the Daly River Reserve and the Port Keats community becoming recognised as Aboriginal land under Australian law. Shortly after Stanner's last visit to Port Keats the Mission became an Aboriginal community. Once again the Aboriginal political systems and principles described by Bandak in his paintings were explicitly recognised as the cultural design which governs the Aboriginal world. At the time of writing, the descendants of Bandak are acknowledged as the owners of Wadeye.

To the outside world Nym Bandak became known as an artist, at a time when Aboriginal art was virtually unknown beyond academic circles. Nearly two decades after Bandak's death, his paintings are now found in collections in Australia and around the world. He is, however, remembered best by his kinsmen and family as a significant figure whose adherence to, and teaching of, Aboriginal cultural values and principals contributed to their survival in a rapidly changing world.

National Gallery Exhibition for the Sydney 2000 Olympics
In 2000, works of Nym Bandak were featured by the National Gallery of Australia in an exhibition Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art in Modern Worlds at the State Hermitage Museum at Saint Petersburg, Russia then touring to Lausanne, Switzerland, Hanover, Germany, Helsinki, Finland held in the lead up to the Sydney 2000 Olympics. During the 1980s, Australia was privileged to receive from the State Hermitage Museum the loan of an exhibition of Old Master paintings; the National Gallery returned the gesture with the most significant exhibition of Australian Aboriginal art ever to travel abroad. The World of Dreamings Exhibition consisted of paintings, sculptures and installations by six artists, John Mawurndjul, Nym Bandak, Rover Thomas, Emily Kngwarreye, Tracey Moffat and Fiona Foley. In addition there were two main collaborative works.

The exhibition featured many works of Nym Bunduk and stated that the stories and the concept about Murin-pata people are his inspiration. His series of art works, mostly painting on bark but several of his masterpieces on masonite were about this topic. According to information from the website National Gallery of Australia (2012), ”the circumstances in which the paintings by Bandak and the Wik sculptures were made, involved the active participation of anthropologists and missionaries”.

Australian National University Collection
For example, the first contribution, by Melinda Hinkson and Kim Barber, details the work brought back to the ANU by W. E. H. Stanner during his field work in the Port Keats area in the middle years of the twentieth century. If you own a copy of Stanner’s collected essays, White Man Got No Dreaming, you’ll immediately recognize Nym Bandak’s All the World (1958-59), which was reproduced on the endpapers of that volume, although not with quite the glowing color found here. If you’ve read An Appreciation of Difference: W. E. H. Stanner and Aboriginal Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008, edited by Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett), you’ll be familiar with some of the stories and biographical details re-presented in this essay. But to read those stories again in the context of the paintings in the ANU collections is to gain a new appreciation for both the art of the Port Keats region and for Stanner’s contributions to the recognition of Indigenous visual culture.

Collections
Select works by Nym Bunduck are listed as part of the following major collections:


 * National Gallery of Australia: The artist's country.


 * Australian National University: All the world.


 * Art Gallery of NSW: Emus feeding, Corroboree


 * National Gallery of Victoria: Totemic fish.


 * AIATSIS


 * France

Nym Bunduk is listed at position 52 in the list of the top 100 aboriginal artists for the Australian Aboriginal Art Index (AAAI). The works of Nym Bunduk are however very seldom released to the public arena.

Reading
Barber, K.E.A., A History of Creation: A discussion of the Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection of Port Keats paintings, unpublished paper, 1993.

Barwick, D.E., Beckett, J. and Reay, M., 'W.E.H. Stanner: An Australian anthropologist', in. D.E. Barwick, J. Beckett and M. Reay (eds), Metaphors of Interpretation, Sydney: Australian National University Press, 1985.

McGrath, A., Aborigines and Colonialism in the Upper Daly Basin Region, Darwin: Northern Land Council, 1983.

Pye, J., The Port Keats Story, Darwin: J.R. Coleman, 1980.

Searcy, A., In Australian Tropics, London: George Robertson & Co, 1909.

Stanner, W.E.H., On Aboriginal Religion, Oceania Monograph No. 11, 1966.

Stanner, W.E.H., White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938-1973, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979.

Stokes, L., Discoveries in Australia with an Account of the Coasts and Rivers Explored and Surveyed During the Voyage of HMS Beagle. In the Years 1837-38-39-40-41-42-43, London: T. and W. Boone, 1846.

Sutton, P., 'Aboriginal Maps and Plans', in D. Woodward and G. Malcom Lewis (eds), Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp.387-416.

Add brackets before publishing
Category:1900 births Category:Australian Aboriginal artists Category:Indigenous Australian people Category:People from the Northern Territory Category:1981 deaths