Gwoya Tjungurrayi

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Gwoya Tjungurrayi (c. 1895 – 28 March 1965) was an Aboriginal man from the Walpiri and Anmatyerre people who lived in the Tanami Desert, near Coniston Station in the Northern Territory. He survived the 1928 Coniston massacre during a time of drought and growing pressure over water and food as European settlers moved into his country. He later worked as a miner, a stockman, and made boomerangs. He was respected as an elder and lawman of his people.

Gwoya’s name has many spellings: Gwoja Tjungarrayi, Gwoya Jungarai, Gwoya Djungarai, and Tjungurrayi. The name Gwoya comes from the Anmatyerr word Kwaty, meaning water, and his skin name Tjungurrayi is also known as Kngwarray. His nickname One Pound Jimmy came from selling boomerangs for a pound, though the nickname is now considered offensive.

He gained international attention after photographer Roy Dunstan took his portrait in 1935. The photo helped him become a symbol of a vanishing culture and appeared on the cover of Walkabout magazine in 1936 and again in 1950, and on the cover of Dawn magazine in 1954. In 1950 his image appeared on Australian postage stamps—the first time an Aboriginal person, and the first living Australian, was depicted on a stamp. The stamp was reissued in 1952, and more than 99 million copies were sold between 1950 and 1966. It later emerged that his image had also appeared earlier, on a 1938 Geelong centenary stamp, though that stamp was a collector’s item and unsigned.

Toward the end of his life, Gwoya remained a respected elder in the Tanami region. He died on 28 March 1965, aged about 70. The two-dollar coin design released later drew inspiration from a drawing of him by Ainslie Roberts in 1988. The Northern Territory electoral division of Gwoja, created in 2019, was named after him.

Family: He was married to Long Rose Nagnala, and they had three sons—Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, both noted artists, and Immanuel Rutjinama Tjapaltjarri, who became a Lutheran pastor.