The Mimi are tall, very thin spirits who live inside cracks in the rock of northern Australia. They belong to the stone country of Arnhem Land, a high sandstone plateau in the far north of Australia. They almost never come out, because even a light wind can snap their fragile bones.
Some of the oldest rock paintings in Australia are on that plateau. To the people who live there, the older red figures are the work of the Mimi.
There is also a story about how a Mimi gets home. If people come near while it is out hunting, it runs to a crack in the rock face and blows on it. The rock opens to let it in and closes behind it.
What Are the Mimi Spirits of Arnhem Land?
The Mimi are people of a kind, but they live in the stone. In the dictionary of the local language they are thin spirits who live inside cracks in the rock or in caves. The entry adds a note about their manners: they are often mischievous and not particularly friendly.
Every description gives them the same shape. They are very tall and very thin, with sharp eyes and sharp ears. Their necks are so slender that a stiff breeze would kill them.
Opinions differ on how dangerous they are. To one museum they are generally harmless and only now and then mischievous. The art centre of Maningrida, a community in the region, is harder on them: mimih can kidnap people, and even kill them.
The Mimi have families, their own words for relatives, and their own language. Their society is older than humans. They are neighbours with a country of their own. That puts them in the same family of ideas as Animism: The World Is Full of Persons: a being counts as a person because it is treated as one, whether it is human or not.
The tradition belongs to several peoples of the plateau and the lands around it. Today it also appears in the work of the artists who own the land around Maningrida.
In the local language the word is mimih. English writing usually shortens it to Mimi. Museum labels and the art centre in Maningrida tend to keep the longer form.
Where Do the Mimi Live, and Why Do They Stay in the Rock?
The whole plateau is sandstone. Its cliff edge, the escarpment, is cut by deep vertical cracks. Below the overhangs are rock shelters, and that is where the paintings are.
The Mimi stay in the cracks because of the wind. Three accounts, written by different people over seventy years, agree on this. They come out only on still days and nights, to hunt. When the wind picks up, they run back to their caves and vanish inside.
Behind the crack is a whole country. The Mimi slip through the cracks to reach their own lands, which lie inside the rock. Some men who knew about these things were said to have stayed in Mimi camps. There they learned the Mimi songs and their secret places.
So the wind is a fact about the body. The Mimi are too thin to survive moving air, and that decides where a person can meet one. The same thin body is why they are funny in the carvings made today.
A painting of a Mimi man and woman, made at Gunbalanya in 1948, is now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. It came from the same expedition as the famous description of the Mimi. Nobody wrote down who painted it.
What Did the Mimi Teach the First People?
The Mimi taught the first people what they needed to live in that landscape. They showed them how to hunt, and how to cut up and cook kangaroos and other animals. They also taught them to paint, and to sing and dance.
One old saying puts it simply: “it was the Mimi who originally taught Aborigines how to paint”. In another version the Mimi did not teach the old red paintings at all. They painted them themselves, before any Aboriginal people lived there.
The songs and dances still carry their name. In western Arnhem Land, the old style of song and dance is known as Mimih style. Groups further east use the same word for the songs and dances of their western neighbours.
Are the Oldest Rock Paintings in Australia Really Mimi Paintings?
Here the popular story and the research go separate ways.
The Aboriginal peoples of western Arnhem Land sort their rock art into five kinds. One kind is pictures of Dreaming Beings, who put themselves onto the rock. Another kind is called Mimi. It covers all the older paintings, mostly the red ones. Local people hold that spirits living in the rock made them. Some archaeologists have guessed this group to be more than six thousand years old.
The word Mimi does two jobs. It names a kind of being. Researchers later borrowed it as a label for a group of old paintings, and the label drifted. The experts now agree that Mimi is no art style and no period in time. It is a kind of being. A painting counts as a Mimi painting because the owners of that land say a Mimi made it.
How old the paintings are is a separate question. The Dynamic Figures are running and fighting human shapes that stand at the start of most histories of the region’s art. One researcher put them at ten thousand years or more, and took them for the work of the Mimi. That is a different group of paintings from the six-thousand-year one.
Nobody has dated the Dynamic Figures directly. The timelines rest on which painting sits on top of which, not on laboratory measurement.
One painting on the plateau has been measured. It is a charcoal drawing from a rock shelter called Nawarla Gabarnmang, about twenty-eight thousand years old. It is the oldest confirmed painted rock in Australia, and it is not counted as a Mimi painting.
The word Mimi does name one shape. The Ngar-mimi is a human-like figure that turns up again and again on rocks across the Jawoyn lands of the plateau. A 2013 study compares it with the famous Gwion Gwion paintings of the Kimberley, a region in the far north-west. Even here, the motif is named after the beings, not the other way round.
The newest paintings have known authors. In the wet season of 1963-64, the artist Nayombolmi and his companion Nym Djimongurr camped with their families in the Anbangbang shelter in Kakadu. In one week they repainted or created about twenty images. They signed the work with their hand stencils, Nayombolmi on the right and Djimongurr on the left. In a recent study, Nayombolmi is the most prolific known rock artist in the world.
So the paintings are real, and many are very old. The claim that the Mimi made the oldest ones is of a different kind from an archaeological finding. It is what the owners of that land say about their own rock, and they have been saying it for a long time.
Why Do Kuninjku Artists Still Carve Mimih?
Because the ceremony that uses the carvings is still performed. The carved Mimi is a recent invention, and we know who made it. Crusoe Kuningbal, a singer and artist of the Kuninjku people, famous for his Mimi songs and dances, created the form for a ceremony called Mamurrng.
Mamurrng is a trade ceremony. It keeps good relations between language groups and moves goods between them. Humour is part of it, and the humour starts with the Mimi body. The spirits are said to be so thin that a slight wind can break their necks. Dancing around the tall, thin carvings is one of the funnier parts of the show.
Mamurrng was performed in public at Maningrida from the 1960s. The carvings were sold and grew popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Kuningbal died in 1984. His sons Crusoe Kurddal and Owen Yalandja inherited the right to the form and carried it on. Kurddal kept his father’s red base colour and his dots. In the mid-1980s he began carving the figures much larger than his father had. Giant mimih now stand in public collections, and the two brothers are seen as the leading innovators of the form.
One of those giants is in Sydney. Kurddal’s Mimih spirit, carved in Maningrida in 1985, is 313 cm tall and 18.3 cm wide, painted with natural pigments. A figure three metres high and eighteen centimetres across is the dictionary’s thin spirit made solid. The Art Gallery of New South Wales bought it in 1986.
Who Wrote the Description Everyone Copies?
Most of what English readers know about the Mimi comes from one man, Charles Mountford. He led the art research of a large Australian and American expedition to Arnhem Land in 1948. Its four-volume report put a large body of Aboriginal painting into print for the first time.
The first volume holds the description that still gets repeated. Mountford put the Mimi’s homes under the great rocks of the plateau. He gave them tall thin bodies, sharp sight and sharp hearing. In his account they hunt only in still weather, because the wind would break them. The story of the Mimi blowing on the rock to open it comes from him, too.
The experts of the day did not like the book. The anthropologist Ronald Berndt reviewed it in 1958 and was harsh. He granted that it made a great many pictures available. Beyond that, he found little to praise. The discussion was neither scientific nor anthropological, and the way it described things was far from satisfactory. For the study of Aboriginal art and myth, he called the volume retrogressive.
The pictures are the part that lasted. The scholars turned their backs on the book, but general readers kept buying it. Its version of the Mimi is the one that reached the encyclopedias.
Sources
- Bininj Kunwok Regional Language Centre, Njamed: Bininj Kunwok Dictionary, entry ‘mimih’ (noun, semantic domain: mythology; entered 13 October 2003, last modified 14 September 2018), https://njamed.com/entry/mimih/. The definition, the cross-references to ngalmalanjdirrihdirri and marrawirri, and the audio and video attachments were read from the dictionary’s own data endpoint, https://njamed.com/data/normalized-entries.json, on 19 September 2026. Bininj Kunwok here covers the dialects Kunwinjku, Kuninjku, Kune, Kundednjenghmi, Kundjeyhmi and Mayali.
- Paul S. C. Taçon, ‘From the “Dreamtime” to the Present: The Changing Role of Aboriginal Rock Paintings in Western Arnhem Land, Australia’, The Canadian Journal of Native Studies IX, no. 2 (1989): 317-339. Page 320 on the most recent x-ray paintings as the work of Najombolmi; pages 322-323 on the large attenuated stick figures said to be Spiritual Beings such as the Mimi, on the pre-x-ray dynamic figures said to have been made by the Mimi before Aborigines lived in the area, and on the Mimi as the ones who originally taught Aborigines to paint; figure 8 caption for the dynamic figure painting from Deaf Adder Gorge and the estimate of at least 10,000 years. Full text checked as PDF from cjns.brandonu.ca.
- Robert Gunn, Bruno David, Jean-Jacques Delannoy and Margaret Katherine, ‘The past 500 years of rock art at Nawarla Gabarnmang, central-western Arnhem Land’, chapter 12 in The Archaeology of Rock Art in Western Arnhem Land, Australia (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017). The passage quoted on Taçon (1992:210-211) and the five classes of rock art recognised by Aboriginal peoples of western Arnhem Land, including the ‘Mimi’ class and the estimate of more than 6,000 years attributed to Taçon (1993:114). Read in full at press-files.anu.edu.au.
- Charles P. Mountford, Records of the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, vol. 1: Art, Myth and Symbolism (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1956). Quoted through the catalogue entry for Mimih man and woman, Art Gallery of New South Wales, accession 9274, which cites the volume for the Mimi’s homes under the great rocks of the plateau, their tall and thin build, the statement that they can hunt only in still weather because the wind would break their frail bodies, their keen sight and hearing, and the cleft in the rock that opens when they blow on it. Catalogue checked 19 September 2026.
- Art Gallery of New South Wales, catalogue entry for Mimih man and woman, 1948, Gunbalanya (Oenpelli), Western Arnhem Land, natural pigments on paper on cardboard, 58.4 x 45.0 cm, accession 9274, gift of the Commonwealth Government 1956. Also the Gallery’s Mountford gifts: Works from the American Australian scientific expedition to Arnhem Land 1948 (2009), the source for the four-volume publication of the expedition results, for Baldwin Spencer’s 1912 commission to have rock art transferred to bark, for Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek’s account of parents painting stories for their children, and for the wording and context of Ronald Berndt’s 1958 review.
- Ronald M. Berndt, ‘The Mountford Volume on Arnhem Land Art, Myth and Symbolism: A Critical Review’, Mankind 5, no. 6 (October 1958): 249-261. The quoted passage is given in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Mountford gifts (2009), citing Michael Davis, Writing Heritage: The Depiction of Indigenous Heritage in European-Australian Writings (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing and National Museum of Australia Press, 2007), 209-210. Volume, issue and pagination verified against Crossref.
- Luke Taylor, in Tradition today: Indigenous art in Australia (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2004), reproduced in the catalogue entry for Crusoe Kurddal, Mimih spirit, 1985, Maningrida, carved wood and natural pigments, 313.0 x 18.3 x 15.0 cm, accession 248.1986, purchased 1986. The source for Crusoe Kuningbal’s creation of the sculptural form for the Mamurrng trade ceremony, for the thin necks as the source of the humour, for the phrase about the Mimi slipping through the cracks to reach their own lands inside the rock, for the public performance of Mamurrng at Maningrida from the 1960s and the marketing of the carvings, for Kuningbal’s death in 1984 and for the work of his sons Crusoe Kurddal and Owen Yalandja. Object data and text checked 19 September 2026.
- Maningrida Arts & Culture, ‘Mimih Spirits’, AIDAIA, http://www.idaia.com.au/en/ancestral-stories-and-cultural-connections-in-maningrida/mimih-spirits/. The source for the necks so slender that a stiff breeze would be fatal, for the emergence on windless days and nights to hunt and the retreat into the caverns when the wind rises, for mimih families, kinship terms and language, for men said to have stayed in mimih camps, for the teaching of hunting and butchering, dancing, singing and painting, for the survival of a Mimih style in western Arnhem Land song and dance and its use by eastern Central Arnhem Land groups for their western neighbours’ repertoire, for the language groups involved and for the statement that mimih are capable of kidnapping and even killing humans. Page consulted 19 September 2026.
- Australian Museum, ‘Indigenous Australia Spirituality’, 30 October 2015, preserved copy at web.archive.org/web/20160305182819/http://australianmuseum.net.au/Indigenous-Australia-Spirituality. The source for the summary of the Mimi as tall thin beings living in the rocky escarpment as spirits, with human forms before the coming of Aboriginal people, generally harmless but occasionally mischievous, credited with teaching the first people to hunt and cook kangaroos and with making the first rock paintings. Archived copy read 19 September 2026.
- Joakim Goldhahn, Sally K. May and Jeffrey Lee, ‘The audience and the message: Nayombolmi’s bark paintings from western Arnhem Land, Australia’, Aboriginal History 47 (2023): 3-36, doi:10.22459/ah.47.2023.01. The source for Nayombolmi’s dates (c. 1895-1967), for the description of him as the most prolific known rock art artist in the world, for the repainting of around twenty images in the Anbangbang Main Gallery with Nym Djimongurr (c. 1910-1969) during a week-long stay in the wet season of 1963-64, for the two hand stencils that signed the work, and for the figure of more than 150,000 visitors a year to the gallery.
- Bruno David, Bryce Barker, Fiona Petchey, Jean-Jacques Delannoy, Jean-Michel Geneste and others, ‘A 28,000 year old excavated painted rock from Nawarla Gabarnmang, northern Australia’, Journal of Archaeological Science 40, no. 5 (2013): 2493-2501, doi:10.1016/j.jas.2012.08.015. Cited for the age of the oldest confirmed painted rock in Australia and for the fact that it is not a Mimi-classified painting. Bibliographic data verified against Crossref.
- Robert G. Gunn, R. L. Whear and Lloyd Cassel Douglas, ‘The “Ngar-mimi” motif from the Arnhem Land plateau’, Rock Art Research 30, no. 2 (2013): 217-234. Cited for the identification of the Ngar-mimi as a recurrent anthropomorphous figure motif across the Jawoyn lands of the Arnhem Land plateau and for the comparison drawn with the Gwion Gwion figures of the Kimberley. Volume and pagination from two independent bibliographic records; the publisher’s full text could not be retrieved, so no passage is quoted.
- The archaeological chronology literature of the western Arnhem Land plateau, summarised through the ANU Press volume The Archaeology of Rock Art in Western Arnhem Land, Australia (2017), doi:10.22459/ta47.11.2017.06 and doi:10.22459/ta47.11.2017.01. Cited for the statements that Mimi is an ontological category rather than a formal archaeological style or period, that the Dynamic Figures have no direct dating, and that the published chronologies rest on superimposition sequences.
