Yorro Yorro

In a remarkable collaboration, Aboriginal elder Mowaljarlai and photographer Jutta Malnic rekindle a story that reaches back 60,000 years, constituting the oldest collective memory of humankind. Illustrated with more than 120 colour plates, this work tells of the Wandjina creation spirits and their "crossing over" into ancestor entities (personae) and eventually into human form. Yorro Yorro signifies the continual creation and renewal of nature. Translated, it means "everything standing up alive." The book is a testament to the extraordinary cumulative knowledge of the Wandjina people of the Kimberley, the remote northwest region of Australia, a place of transcendentally beautiful wilderness and rich human history. It begins with the authors' journey to Lejmorro - one of the least accessible but most important sites of the early Wandjina rock paintings. Recognised by his people as an articulate receiver and transmitter of the ancient and ongoing story, Mowaljarlai elucidates the meaning of the paintings and their pictorial tales, augmented by Malnic's awe-inspiring photographs of the country, its people and the original rock paintings. The authors are joined by four other elders in an elaboration of a history pre-dating the ice-age and tracing their ancestry to the beginning of human existence. Mowaljarlai also tells of his upbringing in the family network of traditional bush existence. Superb archival photographs of young Mowaljarlai with his family and those who gave him his knowledge and laws, taken in the 1930s by Andreas Lommel, add strength and poignancy to the narrative of the book, allowing the reader intimate glimpses into the life of the people of the Wandjina. From the bush, we follow the author through his life and education in a Christian mission. In the…