Yawkyawk

Also Known As: Ngalkunburriyaymi in Kundedjnjenghmi; ngalberddjenj in Kuninjku, “the young woman who has a tail like a fish”; from Bininj Kunwok yawkyawk, “young woman” and “young woman spirit being”
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Aboriginal Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: They hold the freshwater sites of Arnhem Land, change shape at will, govern the weather over their own country and carry a fertility strong enough to be felt by anyone who swims there.
Role in Mythos: They are ancestral women who were transformed at a sacred waterhole and remain alive in the pools and creeks, binding clan estates together through a shared story written into the landscape.
Relation to Humans: People fishing or walking past their pools hear them singing under the water, and anyone who comes too close sees only a shadow moving away from the bank. Their sites are approached with caution, because a Yawkyawk who is displeased can turn the weather, and a woman who swims in the wrong water may come out pregnant.

Green weed drifts in a rock pool below the Arnhem Land escarpment, blooming and turning where the water moves. Kuninjku people call it man-bak, and it is not only a plant. It is hair. Under it, in the cold part of the pool where the sandstone shelves away into the dark, there is a young woman with the tail of a fish.

The word is plain enough on the surface. In the Bininj Kunwok languages of Western and Central Arnhem Land, yawkyawk means young woman, and it also means young woman spirit being, which says something about how little distance there is between those two things. In Kundedjnjenghmi she is Ngalkunburriyaymi. Kuninjku speakers sometimes call her ngalberddjenj, the young woman who has a tail like a fish. Balanda, the outsiders, reach for the word mermaid, and the comparison is not useless, but it drags a great deal of European seaside behind it and none of that belongs in a billabong in the stone country.

From the waist up she is a woman, and the artists who paint and carve her give her a woman’s face, arms, breasts. Below that the body scales over and narrows to a fish’s tail, often finned more than once along its length. The hair is the part that gives her away and also the part that hides her, because it goes on into the water and becomes the weed. In carved sculpture the scales are cut as dense rows of small V-shapes running down the abdomen, tight enough that the surface seems to shift as you move past it, which is a fair account of how she is seen at all.

In cold weather they come up and lie on the sandy banks in the sun. At night some of them grow legs and walk into camp, calling out loudly, eating yams and sugarbag, and then they go back to the water. From under the surface they sing to themselves, and people fishing or passing by the pool hear it.

They were not always down there. They travelled the country as young women, sisters, carrying a digging stick and a sacred string, looking for food. The accounts of what happened next do not agree, and the disagreement is the interesting part. In one, they camped beside a deep waterhole and lit a cooking fire too close to the edge, and the waterhole belonged to Ngalyod, the Rainbow Serpent, who came up through the surface and swallowed them whole. In another, the trespass alone did the work: Likanaya and Marrayka made camp on sacred ground, and their legs and feet turned into the tails of fish where they stood.

At Kudjarnngal the two versions fold together into something a person can pick up. The site yields delek, nodules of brilliant white ochre, and Kuninjku people go there to collect it for ceremony and for painting on bark. The delek is said to be Ngalyod’s transformed waste. It is also said to be the bones of the swallowed girls. So the white on a bark painting of a Yawkyawk can be the Yawkyawk.

The country holds them more literally than most stories manage. A bend in a river is the Yawkyawk’s tail. A billabong is her head. The small fish and insects in the deep pools are the young women in another form, and the sites where all of this is true belong to particular clans, whose rights to paint and sing them are inherited and specific. Because the stories run on from estate to estate, they tie together groups who speak differently and answer to different law.

Shape is not fixed for them. They turn up as freshwater turtles, as dragonflies, as beetles. They hold the weather and will bring bad weather down on anyone who offends them, which is one reason their pools are approached carefully rather than curiously. Their sites carry fertility hard enough to count as a practical consideration: a woman who swims in the wrong water may come out pregnant, and a strong Yawkyawk site is associated with twins, sometimes with three. They have children of their own kind, and the woven sculptures show them, a small tailed body curled inside the swell of the mother’s belly.

The limits are the other side of all this. The power is local. It sits in particular water and does not travel, so a Yawkyawk answers for her own pool and her own stretch of creek and very little beyond it. She runs from people rather than confronting them, which is why the usual sighting is a shadow going away from the bank and nothing more. And whatever else she is, she is not the largest thing in that water. Ngalyod ate her.

None of this sits in the past tense. Yawkyawk are on the rock walls, and on bark from the 1970s onward in the hands of painters like Peter Marralwanga and Mick Kubarkku, and in carved kurrajong by Owen Yalandja, who works that timber because it holds across the grain when he cuts a tail into it. In 2003 Marina Murdilnga stretched woven pandanus over a frame and made the first of the woven Yawkyawk, and the women at Maningrida have been making them since. The pandanus is cut with a machete under a wet tropical sun with green ants coming down out of the canopy, shredded by hand, dried for months, dyed with ochre and root and leaf and wood ash and charcoal. One figure can take more than a year. Several stand in the National Museum of Australia, and others hang in the National Gallery of Victoria as though swimming.

What those figures do not show is the rest of it. Senior artists paint sites they hold the right to paint, and the meanings stacked inside the crosshatching are not all made available to balanda, which is a decision rather than an omission. The figure on the gallery wall is accurate, and it is also the shallow end.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Yawkyawk?

A Yawkyawk is a female water spirit of Western and Central Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory, with the head and torso of a young woman and the scaled body and tail of a fish. The name comes from the Bininj Kunwok languages, in which yawkyawk means both “young woman” and “young woman spirit being”. Kuninjku people also know these beings as Ngalkunburriyaymi and as ngalberddjenj, the young woman with a fish’s tail.

Where do Yawkyawk live?

Yawkyawk live in freshwater: streams, billabongs and the deep rock pools of the Arnhem Land stone country. Particular pools and creeks belong to particular clan estates, and the rights to paint and sing those sites are inherited. Features of the landscape are identified with the spirit’s body, so a bend in a river may be a Yawkyawk’s tail and a billabong her head.

How did the Yawkyawk get their fish tails?

Accounts differ. In one version, two sisters camped by a deep waterhole and lit a cooking fire too close to it, angering Ngalyod the Rainbow Serpent, who rose through the water and swallowed them whole. In another, the trespass itself transformed them, and the legs and feet of Likanaya and Marrayka became fish tails on the spot.

Are Yawkyawk dangerous?

Yawkyawk are both feared and revered, and their sites are approached with caution. They can bring bad weather down on anyone who displeases them, and swimming at a Yawkyawk site is associated with conception, sometimes of twins or triplets. They are also shapeshifters, appearing as freshwater turtles, dragonflies or beetles.

Are Yawkyawk the same as mermaids?

No. Yawkyawk are often compared to mermaids by outsiders because of the fish tail, but they are freshwater ancestral beings tied to specific sacred sites in Arnhem Land rather than creatures of the sea. They are closely bound to Ngalyod, the Rainbow Serpent, and they remain part of living Kuninjku song, ceremony and art.