Garrapara is a coastal headland within Blue Mud Bay. This sacred design shows the water of Djalma Bay chopped up by the blustery South Easterlies of the early Dry season.
It marks the spot of a sacred burial area for the Dha`wangu clan and a site where dispute was formally settled by Makarrata (ceremony in which wrongdoers were subject to ordeal by spear).
During the times after the ‘first mornings’, ancestral hunters left the shores of Garrapara in their canoe towards the horizon, hunting for turtle. Sacred songs and dance narrate the heroic adventures of these two men as they passed sacred areas and rocks and saw ancestral totems on their way. Their hunting came to grief, with the canoe capsising and the hunters being drowned. The bodies washed back to the shores of Garrapara with the currents and the tides, as the Wa\upini (Thunderhead storm cloud) followed with its rain and wind. Their canoe with paddle and totems queen fish Makani and long tom Minyga and turtle Gårun are all referred to in the songs and landscape.
Makarrata, the ritual throwing of spears at a miscreant of Yolngu law took place here. At Garrapara sacred Casuarina trees held these barbed spears whilst not in use.
Garrapara has been rendered by the wavy design for Yirritja saltwater in Blue Mud Bay called Mungurru. TheMungurru is deep water that has many states and connects with the sacred waters coming from the land estates by currents and tidal action. Other clans of Blue Mud Bay that share similar mythology also paint this deeper saltwater which links them.
It is interesting to note that Flinders passed this way and his crewmembers sketched this landscape in 1803. Of art historical significance is that Manini began a radical shift in Yolngu art by using a marwat or hair brush to make the cartoon or outline of the work rather than a thicker brush as had always been the case previously.