Garn’giny Ngarranggarni (Moon Dreaming) is Mabel Juli Wirringgoon's signature iconography. In the collections of numerous public galleries and private collections, and in 2018 projected onto the sails of the Sydney Opera House, her Moon Dreaming paintings have become amongst the most identifiable and famous images in contemporary Aboriginal art.

These paintings depict the creation story of the Star (Wardal) and the Moon (Garn'giny) in Mabel Juli's Yarin country of Darrajayin (Springvale Station) south of Warmun, and at a broader level the story of humankind and the moon.

Wardal, the Star, was the promised wife to the Moon man (Garn'giny). However, the Moon man fell in love with her mother, his mother-in- law Dawool (the Black Headed Python). 

The Moon was sitting in the east and the Star is sitting on top of a hill. Elders made the Moon man run away because he loved his mother-in-law (a strictly taboo relationship). The Moon man felt shame and climbed the hill. Looking down, he cursed all people, condemning humankind to mortality by telling them that they would all die, and that he will be the only one living.

“I will keep coming back/out. After three days camp I will rise from the dead.”

And so it is that the Moon man sleeps then reappears as the new moon every month, but humans die and our bodies return to the earth. 

Atlanta has heard many versions of this story from her grandmother Mabel Juli who has gifted her the rights to represent it in paintings in her own style. 

This is the first collaborative painting by  Mrs Juli and Atlanta Umbulgurri.