Barramundi Dreaming, known as Daiwul Ngarranggarni in the Gija language, is one of the most significant women's Dreaming stories of the East Kimberley. It tells how a great barramundi leapt across the land near what is now the Argyle Diamond Mine, and how the scales she shed became the diamonds still found in the region today. This page covers the story, its variations across neighbouring language groups, and the artists who continue to paint it.
What Is Barramundi Dreaming?
Barramundi Dreaming belongs to the Gija people of the East Kimberley, centred on Country near Warmun and a site known as Barramundi Gap. It is one of the Ngarranggarni, or Dreaming stories that explain the origins of specific features in the landscape: here, the gap in the ranges, the diamonds scattered through the surrounding earth, and stone formations that mark where the story's key figures came to rest. It is regarded as a significant women's story, painted and held by generations of senior Gija women.
The Barramundi Dreaming Story
As the story is told by Gija artists and Elders, a giant barramundi named Daiwul was chased by a group of ancestral women through Gija Country during the Ngarranggarni, the Creation Era. The women, fishing in the traditional way with nets woven from rolled spinifex grass (a method known as Kilkayi), tried to trap Daiwul in the shallow water near a cave at what is now Barramundi Gap.
Cornered, Daiwul swam toward the far end of the cave, searching for a way out toward Nunbung (Wesley Spring), but found none, and returned to the entrance where the women waited. As she swam back toward them, she leapt clean over their nets, shedding her scales in the shallow water as she flew through the air. Those scattered scales became the diamonds of many colours later found across the site, now home to the Argyle Diamond Mine. Daiwul then jumped again, through a gap in the surrounding rocks, and landed in the deep, clean water of a rockhole known as Kowinji (also spelled Gawinyin), or Cattle Creek Rockhole, on the Bow River. As she dived into the water, she turned to white stone, a rock formation still visible there today. Three of the women who had chased her peered into the water looking for her, and they, too, turned to stone, becoming three formations that still overlook the creek. According to Gija belief, barramundi are no longer found in this stretch of water because of the presence of the Ngarranggarni Daiwul at the site.
A related telling comes from the neighbouring Miriwoong people, whose Country lies just to the east. In this version, a barramundi living in the Dunham River is speared at by a hunting crane but escapes, swimming upstream and scraping her scales against a hillside as she passes, a mark still visible as pale rock on the hillside near the Mandangala community today. Further on, women try to catch her using the same rolled-spinifex net method, known in Miriwoong as Gelganyem, but she again flicks free, leaping over their trap and through the gap in the rocks that gives Barramundi Gap its name, before coming to rest as a white rock at Bow River. As with the Gija telling, the creation elements of the story stay consistent even as the details shift slightly between language groups and storytellers, each version carried and told by the community that holds it.
Artists Who Paint Daiwul Ngarranggarni
Barramundi Dreaming has been painted by generations of senior Gija women artists, each expressing the story through her own visual language, built from a shared vocabulary of symbols specific to this Dreaming:
- Queenie McKenzie (c.1915 to 1998): One of the founding artists of the Warmun art movement, painted Daiwul as part of her wider landscape compositions, setting out the hills, valleys and waterways of her Country in rows to create a sense of perspective. Her Barramundi Dreaming works are rendered in her signature palette of soft pinks, mauves and earthy browns, made by mixing red ochre with white kaolin, a technique she developed herself and that gives her paintings a softer, more luminous quality than the work of many of her Warmun contemporaries.
- Phyllis Thomas: Painted the story in a minimal, monotone style: a soft pink ochre ground with the barramundi's scales marked out in white ochre, running as a band of U-shaped symbols across the centre of the canvas. Her paintings focus closely on the fish's leap over the cliff face, with the scattering of scales, read as both fish scales and diamonds, at the heart of the composition.
- Lena Nyadbi: She paints Barramundi Dreaming, which she calls Dayiwul Lirlmim (Barramundi Scales), as one of her two major inherited Dreamings, alongside Jimbirla (Spearhead) Dreaming from her father's Country. She renders the barramundi's scales as repeating crescent, or arc, shapes, drawn from the body paint designs used in women's ceremony connected to the fish, worked in a stark, austere palette of black, white and grey ochre. Her Dayiwul Lirlmim design was later adapted for a major public artwork on the roof of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.
- Goody Barrett: Lena Nyadbi's sister, paints the same Dreaming under the title Limkirrel (Barramundi Scales), along with related works such as Dayiwool, Ngiyiwa Nawan (The Barramundi Cove). Her style is bolder and more textural than her sister's, applying ochre thickly and bulking out her blacks with charcoal in the manner of the earliest Warmun ochre painters she trained alongside.
- Peggy Patrick: A senior custodian of a number of song cycles connected to her Country, paints Daiwul among the wider Ngarranggarni sites of her father's and mother's Country, mapping the land in ochre in the broader Warmun tradition of using the landscape itself to hold the story.
- Geraldine Bedford: A Gija woman from Wyndham and the niece of Lena Nyadbi and Goody Barrett, granddaughter of renowned Warmun painter Paddy Bedford, continues this line of artists today. Painting in rich natural ochres, she uses repeating U-shaped motifs for the barramundi's shed scales, rows of short strokes for jimbala (spearheads) and fish-trap stakes, dots for stones and water, and rounded forms for the rocky outcrops at the Dreaming site.
Across these different hands and generations, the same core symbols recur: U-shapes or arcs for the scattered scales, parallel strokes for spearheads and fish-trap stakes, and dots or rounded forms for water and Country, each artist arranging them according to her own inherited version of the story and her own Country.
Barramundi Dreaming and the Argyle Diamonds Story
Barramundi Dreaming is closely tied to the discovery of diamonds in the East Kimberley. Long before the Argyle Diamond Mine was established near Barramundi Gap, local Aboriginal people already knew the clear, milky stones scattered across the site; some tellings describe them as "rain stones," said to be struck together and thrown into waterways to help bring on the rains. The Ngarranggarni story of Daiwul, and the diamonds left behind by her scattered scales, gives a cultural and spiritual account of the very same deposits later mined at Argyle, connecting the region's geology directly to its Dreaming.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How is Barramundi Dreaming connected to the Argyle diamonds?
The diamonds found at what became the Argyle Diamond Mine are explained, in Gija belief, as the scattered scales of Daiwul, shed as she leapt over the women's fishing nets during the Dreaming, or Ngarranggarni, era.
Who paints Barramundi Dreaming today?
Senior Gija women artists including Queenie McKenzie, Peggy Patrick, Phyllis Thomas, Lena Nyadbi and Goody Barrett have painted this Dreaming, with artists such as Geraldine Bedford continuing the tradition today.
Is Barramundi Dreaming told the same way by every community?
No. While the core story stays consistent, Gija and Miriwoong tellings differ in detail, each held and passed down by the community whose Country the story belongs to.
