Wandjuk Djuwakan Marika OBE (c.1927 or 1930 – 16 June 1987), was an Aboriginal Australian painter, actor, composer and Indigenous land rights activist.
He was a member of the Rirratjingu clan of the Yolngu people of north-east Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia, and the son of Mawalan 1 Marika.
[5] Through his parents, he learned to respect his country and inherited extensive rights to land through his father, who was a clan leader.
Because my father is the most important man... We are the sons who know how to make, where to go, where to find the place"[6] Marika was educated and learned English at the Methodist Overseas Mission at Yirrkala, which was established in 1935.
[8] In a 1974 Marika was distressed to discover that an earlier painting, Sea life (Dreaming of the artist’s mother) (1959) had been turned into a tea towel.
"[10] As he had been taught English at the mission school, he used his skills to assist anthropologists such as Charles Mountford and Ronald and Catherine Berndt to understand Yolngu culture.
[15] Marika wrote frequent but unsuccessful letters to the Australian federal government to protest against mining activities on Yolngu lands.
[1] In August 1963 he helped to send the first of several bark petitions to the Commonwealth government protesting the decision to grant mining leases on the Gove Peninsula.
[16][17] Following the appropriation of his sacred clan designs on a line of Dutch tea towels, Marika became concerned with the intellectual and cultural property rights of Indigenous Australians.
[23][24] His art is also featured in the Madayin exhibition which is on tour in the United States from 2022-2025 and encompasses eight decades of artistic production at Yirrkala, from 1935 to the present.