Patient master rises in bark Nonggirrnga Marawili with her work Fishtrap. She says: 'It's good that I'm being recognised, myself, finally, as an artist; it's good for other people.' TWO decades ago, at the farthest extremity of northeast Arnhem Land, a young, visionary art adviser named Andrew Blake decided the time had come to change the canvas of Aboriginal art. He admired the bark painters and carvers he worked with at the Buku-Larrnggay Art Centre in Yirrkala community. He believed in them; he wanted them to be better recognised. No more messing around with small bark strips; the men he worked with needed space to unveil the full complexities of their designs. Off Blake drove in his Toyota, deep into the sombre surrounding forest. He cut a vast piece of curved stringybark from a tall tree, loaded it up and drove back to find a painter he was close to, the taciturn, majestic Djutjadjutja Mununggurr. This, Blake explained, nodding his head for emphasis, his striking mohawk hairdo bobbing as he did so, was the future: big barks, grand conceptions, the whole world of clan story-cycles traced out in fine cross-hatched marks and lines. Mununggurr had long been keen to expand the horizons of bark painting. He set to work, and the sequel is well known. Across the next few years, he began setting down the stark geometric designs of his Djapu clan on monumental barks. They were works of great austerity and seeming simplicity; many observers of the region's long-established painting tradition feel they mark its most intense crescendo and have never been surpassed. In 1997, one of Mununggurr's largest pieces, a solemn object, wide, taller than a tall man, regular in its grid-like patterning, received the best bark painting at the National Aboriginal Art Award, now the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. The exhibitions Mununggurr took part in during those years live on in the memory of those who saw them; the large barks conveyed a hieratic force and grandeur. They did not seek to please, or to dazzle, they served as screens, more than entry-portals; they designated the sacred realm of Yolngu clan belief by depicting its outside signs. What was clear at the time, but not greatly highlighted, was that Mununggurr received a degree of assistance from his two artist daughters, Marrnyula and Rerrkirrwanga. They both worked with him consistently, painting the intricacies of the cross-hatched infill. Both women went on in the years ahead to pursue careers of their own in art. Marrnyula became the workshop manager and one of the pre-eminent print-makers at Buku-Larrnggay, and her works had something of her father's rhythmic quality; Rerrkirrwanga, in contrast, began to work on a small scale, with utmost finesse. What was less clearly known, but just as inevitable, under the traditions of the region's clan-groups, was that Mununggurr's wife Nonggirrnga Marawili had taken part in his work as well. It is plain at last today, as she emerges into the spotlight as a painter of the first rank. Nonggirrnga's debut solo exhibition, on view until tomorrow in Melbourne, has been a landmark show. It brings together work of startling clarity and rigour; work that echoes elements of the big barks from years ago. Her key design is all verticals and horizontals, black lines on the bark, marked out against fine squares of cross-hatching. This is the fish-trap pattern of her husband's clan, linked with the ancestral Djapu homeland of Wandawuy. Grid-lines, but lines more like faults or rifts than simple borderings - the marks of nature, the marks of growth and form in landscape, rather than the marks of artifice and human division. Will Stubbs, the long-term art co-ordinator at Yirrkala, was quick to spot this trait. Nonggirrnga had begun painting her own works in low-key fashion a few years ago alongside other senior women in the Buku-Larnggay courtyard studio space, and Stubbs was struck at once by the lines on her barks, the widening gulfs of jet black that seemed like breaks in space. "She paints like a plant grows," he writes in his notes for the new exhibition. There are no straight lines even when that is all that the design consists of. A grid-like pattern that is the interwoven branches of the young saplings in the fish barrier at Wandawuy cannot be drawn using a ruler. He traces the precision and the freedom in Nonggirrnga's art back to times long gone, to her childhood, when she lived the traditional life of the old clans, with her extended family, led by her father, the famous chieftain Mundukul. It was a life far distant from today's more settled, sedentary patterns; in the course of a recent group discussion at Buku-Larrnggay, Nonggirrnga's daughter Marrnyula was repeatedly surprised by the details of her mother's youthful travels between the islands off northeast Arnhem Land. She was born in the late 1930s on the ocean beachfront at Darrpirra, north of Cape Shield, and brought up on the move. The family group, some 50 strong, would sail in a canoe fleet as far south as Blue Mud Bay, and over open waters to Groote Eylandt, just visible in the east. The sheltered Isle of Woodah, reef-surrounded, in waters that teemed with fish, crocodiles and turtles, served as their special home. In that life, nature's straight shapes and linear patterns held special meaning; the verticals of falling rain also called up her father's totemic lightning snake. Rhythms and patterns learned directly from life spent in nature are different, Stubbs argues, from the variants of form and rhythm learned in art or music schools, hence the distinctive feel of Yolngu art made by men and women of Nonggirrnga's age group, who were brought up in a world untouched by Western influences. Time passed in cyclic fashion; seasonal changes shaped everything. Music and song stretched out at great length, and modulated continually; it was the music of the yidaki, or didgeridoo, accompanied by clap-sticks - and it had its own structure, the variation coming not from the melody but from a deeper underlying rhythm, at once elusive and "as fluent and musical as an aria." Different rules, a different sense of form and beauty; can works from that world reach us? Can Nonggirrnga's patterned barks, with their dark dramatic voids and fretted chessboard squares speak in tones that we might catch? It helps, of course, to know something of the stories her works record, the old stories of the Djapu clan estate at Wandawuy, home of the ancestral shark and thunderman. Those squares traced on her barks are the freshwater billabongs and ridged banks all around Wandawuy; they also signify the fish traps the hunters of old times made from the thin trunks of young trees, and the fine scoop nets they used. On the surface, at least, they tell the simple story of hunters seeking to catch freshwater fish. But the shark being, all strength and power, swims through, breaks the trap and stirs the water up, and so the squares of the bark painting are also the different states of the turbid water in the shark's wake. A straight enough story, but fresh water is something much more resonant in the work. At its higher level, the painting is depicting the fluid reservoir of life itself - at once the source and the destination of the Djapu soul. And so this plain, squared-off design Nonggirrnga paints repeatedly comes into focus as a piece of metaphysics, it is much more than mere geometry traced out. Indeed, it can be read as a sketch of the Djapu death ceremony: the deceased lies in state on a bier of saplings laid out in fish-trap criss-cross style. Spears with teeth like the shark's stand beside the body. Shark songs are sung. At the climax of the ritual dancers rush through the funerary shelter like the shark through the water, breaking its bonds apart, releasing the deceased soul back into the flowing ancestral waters round Wandawuy. All this lies in the painted symbols, symbols for knowing eyes to trace out and decode. But even before the onlooker reads the work at this mid-level - and there are doubtless higher strata of meaning bedded in - something of its gravity comes through. Those grids that leave the strict vertical, those black funnel shapes that seem like cracks in the world's order, they compel attention, they announce a way of seeing. They come from that time Nonggirrnga still thinks of constantly, and speaks of little, but seeks to consecrate in paint: her youth, when she lived poised between land and water, and when the landscape and the creatures in it were the reference frame for everything - the source, even, of her name, which designates the vine-thick forest jungle found near the nesting places of the crocodile. And Nonggirrnga has something about her of the ancestral crocodile's patience and its furious determination. Decades have passed since she first set down her marks on paint for her husband. Now at last she claims her right to make work in her own name, and take her place in a crowded art-world market rich in distinctive bark styles from the Yirrkala region; in fact, glutted with them - artists by the score, men, women, young, old, all jostling for attention and for gallery space. But the usual anxieties of marketing and reputation-building don't apply in her case. Hers is not the story of a new talent, but of a missing master, of the monumental bark-painting tradition suddenly revived. Already the most potent works in her first exhibition have been committed to museums and state art institutions. Nonggirrnga herself feels a quiet satisfaction - not for her own sake but for her family and her clan: "It's good," she says, "that I'm being recognised, myself, finally, as an artist; it's good for other people." At last, the descent-line of one of the great painting dynasties of northeast Arnhem Land can be traced in detail. Another piece of the Yolngu art jigsaw puzzle falls into place. Nonggirrnga Marawili: And I Am Still Here closes tomorrow at Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne.