Gwoya Jungarai (known as "One Pound Jimmy") - portrait, 1935 / Roy Dunstan

SPF/1289

fonds

1935

Graphic Materials, Photographs

449073

Photographs - 1 silver gelatin photoprint - 23.7 x 19.2 cm.

Perhaps the best known example of a stamp [Australian] subject is Gwoya Jungarai (ca.1895-1965) of the Warlpiri people, Central Australia. His portrait appeared on the 8 and 1/2 pence (8 1/2d) and two shillings and sixpence (2s.6d) definitive stamps issued in 1950 and 1952, repectively. Gwoya Jungarai was widely known as "One Pound Jimmy", a nickname acquired through his invariable response of "one pound" (L1), when asked the price of his artefacts for sale. -- Australia Post website (online)

The generic Aboriginal male head depicted in 1950 was based on a 1935 photograph from Walkabout Magazine of Gwoya Jungarai (One-pound Jimmy), whose relatives the police had massacred at Coniston in 1928. -- Humphrey McQueen, website

Djon: The most famous of these is an Anymaterre man called One Pound Jimmy, or Jimmy Djungarrayi, who is really the artist Clifford Possum's father. In the mid-forties there was a photographer who came out to Alice Springs, or north of Alice Springs, who worked with a number of magazines, but he arranged Jimmy Djungarrayi to sit on a horse like another mythical composition of a native American plains Indian sitting on a horse with a spear, after a day's hunting ? however, the image was cropped quite a bit and it appeared on the front page on this thing called Walkabout magazine in 1950 and it was then taken up by the Australian Postage people and then adopted for the two and six stamp and it remained in use for quite a long time, up until about 1965, and I think overall about 85 million copies ended up being sold, so as a result that became a very recognizable image of 'the Aborigine'. -- from Greetings from White Australia, Sun 22/10/2000, Radio National website [Cataloguer's note: he was not on a horse; this is the full length portrait of Jungarai holding spear and spear throwers from which the head portrait was a detail (which see at SPF/Australian Aborigines (BM)]

Out of copyright: Created before 1955

Australian National Travel Association (ANTA) stamp -- on the reverse
ANTA negative no. 5005
Detail published as "One Pound Jimmy : Wailbri Tribe" in We, the Aborigines / Douglas Lockwood. Melb. : Cassell, 1963 (pp. 80-81). Another image from the same series is published in the same book as Loritja Tribe (pp. 120-121)
"The head in this picture was used by Daphne Mayo in her design for one of the panels in the doors of the new Public Library of N.S.W. 2.9.'41" -- in ink on the reverse
The Australian 2 dollar coin was issued to replace the 2 dollar note in 1988, the image of the Aboriginal Elder, One pound Jimmy by Artist Ainslie Roberts with the Southern Cross and grass tree (Xanthorrhoea) / Renniks Australian Coin and Banknote Values (19th edition) / Ian Pitt. Chippendale, NSW : Rennicks, 2000 -- Wikipedia online

Transferred from SPF / Australian Aborigines - Implements and weapons (BM), October 2010