HIDDEN NO MORE — THE FACE OF THE NATION HAS A NAME Gwoja Tjungurrayi, Coniston and the extraordinary life hidden behind “One Pound Jimmy”
By Brian AJ Newman | BAJN.au
Cultural Notice: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains the names and images of deceased people and discusses frontier violence, massacre and cultural dispossession.
Dhanggana — hello, and respect.
I begin in my own Anaiwan voice.
But this is not an Anaiwan story.
Respect demands that distinction from the beginning.
The man whose story follows came from another Country, another network of kinship, another body of Law and another ancient cultural tradition.
His name was Gwoja Tjungurrayi.
For generations, however, millions of Australians saw his face—or images influenced by it—without knowing his name.
They knew him instead as “One Pound Jimmy.”
His image travelled across Australia on postage stamps.
Decades later, features associated with him helped inspire an Aboriginal elder whose image has travelled through the hands, pockets, tills and wallets of Australians on the two-dollar coin.
Yet behind that familiar national imagery was a man whose life tells a vastly more important Australian story.
A survivor.
A stockman.
A miner.
A guide.
A husband.
A father.
A ceremony man.
A keeper of Country and Jukurrpa.
And a man who survived one of the darkest episodes in the history of the Australian frontier.
For too long, Australia remembered the image more readily than the man.
It is time to put the name back behind the face.
HIS NAME WAS GWOJA TJUNGURRAYI
Historical records spell his name in several ways: Gwoja Tjungurrayi, Gwoya Tjungurrayi, Gwoja Jungarrayi and Gwoya Jungarai.
He was probably born around 1895 in the southern Tanami region of Central Australia.
The best current biographical evidence identifies him as a Ngalia—southern Warlpiri—man with Anmatyerr connections and Arrernte ancestry through his mother.
That description matters.
Too often Aboriginal people have been forced into one convenient colonial category: one “tribe”, one label, one box on somebody else's government form.
Gwoja's world was far more sophisticated.
His identity existed through Country, kinship, ancestry, ceremony, responsibility and Law.
His Country extended through the southern Tanami Desert and areas around Mount Doreen, Central Mount Wedge, Napperby and Coniston.
Even his name carried responsibilities that cannot properly be understood through European ideas about surnames.
Tjungurrayi was a skin or subsection name.
It placed him within a system governing kinship, relationships, marriage, responsibility and obligation.
Gwoja was not simply a man who happened to live in the desert.
He belonged to Country, and Country belonged within him.
Through his patriline he carried responsibilities described as kirda—commonly translated as owner or custodian of particular sites and Jukurrpa.
Through his matriline he carried responsibilities as kurdungurlu—often translated as guardian.
These were not property rights in the European sense.
They were obligations.
To Country.
To kin.
To ceremony.
To memory.
And to generations not yet born.
He was also recorded as an urrempel, a ceremony man and senior holder of cultural knowledge.
That is the man we should picture before we ever reduce him to “One Pound Jimmy”.
1928 — THE CONISTON KILLING TIMES
To understand Gwoja's life, we have to confront 1928.
Central Australia was already undergoing enormous disruption.
Pastoral leases had spread across Aboriginal Country.
Cattle competed for scarce water and vegetation.
Native animals were displaced.
Traditional movement through Country was increasingly restricted.
And then came drought.
Water in the desert is never simply a resource.
It is life.
By 1928, competition around soakages and permanent water had become increasingly desperate.
Against that background, a white dingo trapper named Fred Brooks was killed at Yurrkuru—also known as Brooks Soak—near Coniston Station.
Accounts of what happened differ.
Some Warlpiri accounts record that Brooks had interfered with Aboriginal marriage law and mistreated or attempted to take a woman.
Colonial authorities treated his death as the murder of a white man.
But whatever occurred at Brooks Soak, nothing could justify what followed.
Because what came next was not the prosecution of an individual offender.
It was collective punishment.
Mounted Constable William George Murray led a series of punitive expeditions involving police, pastoralists and settlers across Central Australia.
Aboriginal people were pursued and killed at multiple locations.
Men.
Women.
Children.
The killings became known collectively as the Coniston massacre.
The University of Newcastle's Colonial Frontier Massacres project records linked episodes involving Warlpiri, Anmatyerr and Kaytetye people.
The Australian War Memorial describes more than sixty Aboriginal men, women and children as having been killed across the Central Desert region.
The precise number will probably never be known.
Some records identify around thirty deaths in separate episodes.
Other historical estimates exceed sixty.
The safest conclusion is also the most disturbing:
Dozens of Aboriginal people were killed, the commonly accepted reconstruction exceeds sixty, and the true death toll may have been considerably higher.
The uncertainty does not diminish the massacre.
It tells us something about the value colonial Australia placed upon recording Aboriginal death.
GWOJA WAS THERE
Gwoja Tjungurrayi was caught inside those killing times.
Members of his extended family were killed.
The modern biographical record describes him moving among the dead and dying while rifle fire surrounded him.
He was eventually captured.
And chained to a tree.
His son, the great Western Desert artist Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, later told how his father broke the chain using a large rock and escaped.
Historians appropriately distinguish between what can be independently established through documentary evidence and what survives through oral history.
But the central story is clear.
Gwoja escaped.
He fled east toward the Arltunga region.
He had survived the killing of his people.
He had survived capture.
And he had survived a colonial system in which the force hunting Aboriginal people possessed the authority of the state.
No non-Indigenous participant was ever criminally held responsible for the Coniston killings.
A government inquiry accepted claims that the punitive party had acted in self-defence.
The dead had names.
The killers had names.
The institutions had names.
Yet accountability disappeared into the official language of colonial administration.
That, too, is part of the history.
SURVIVAL WAS NOT THE END OF HIS STORY
There is a danger when telling Aboriginal history that we allow suffering to become the entire identity of the person.
Gwoja deserves better than that.
He survived Coniston.
But he was much more than a survivor of Coniston.
After fleeing, he worked around the Arltunga goldfields and later in the mica mines of the
eastern Harts Range.
He developed a reputation as a capable worker and miner.
He returned to the pastoral industry and worked across Central Australia at places including Ambalindum, Hamilton Downs, Napperby, Narwietooma and Central Mount Wedge.
He mustered cattle.
Branded stock.
Drove animals.
Sank wells.
Managed camels.
Worked stations.
Guided travellers and researchers.
And supported his family.
This labour matters to Australian history.
Aboriginal workers were indispensable to the development of Australia's pastoral economy.
Yet their labour was commonly rewarded with rations, goods and grossly inadequate wages.
The colonial economy needed Aboriginal knowledge and Aboriginal labour while simultaneously producing propaganda that represented Aboriginal people as primitive, incapable or somehow outside modern Australia.
Gwoja's life contradicted that fiction every working day.
HUSBAND. FATHER. TEACHER. LAWMAN.
In the late 1930s, Gwoja joined an extended family group at Napperby and married Rosie Nangala, also known as Long Rose Ai-iri Nangala.
Their family included children orphaned during the killing times.
Among those connected with Gwoja's family were men who would later become giants of the Western Desert art movement:
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri.
Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri.
Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri.
That legacy is important.
Because Gwoja did not merely survive history.
He transmitted knowledge through it.
His children learned Country.
They learned names.
They learned stories.
They learned their responsibilities.
They learned Jukurrpa.
Clifford Possum later remembered his father as a man who could “show 'm round countries.”
Those few words tell us something profound.
Gwoja was not simply guiding outsiders geographically.
He was interpreting Country.
He was deciding what could be shown.
What could be explained.
What could be passed on.
He stood between worlds without surrendering the authority of his own.
No tourist photograph could capture that.
THE PHOTOGRAPH THAT TRAVELLED AROUND AUSTRALIA
One historical error is repeated often enough that it deserves correction.
The iconic photograph associated with Gwoja was not taken by Ronald Berndt.
The State Library of New South Wales identifies the photographer as Roy Dunstan, working with the Australian National Travel Association in 1935.
The image subsequently appeared in Walkabout magazine in January 1936.
The circumstances in which these photographs were made are important.
Tourism promoters wanted dramatic images of Central Australian Aboriginal people.
The imagery they preferred was obvious.
Spears.
Woomeras.
Bare bodies.
The supposedly “primitive” Aboriginal man standing outside time.
It was an image of Australia designed for outsiders.
The worker disappeared.
The miner disappeared.
The father disappeared.
The negotiator disappeared.
The ceremony man disappeared.
The contemporary Aboriginal person disappeared.
In his place stood a marketable image of a supposedly vanishing race.
This was the colonial tourist gaze.
A living Aboriginal man participating fully in the twentieth century was photographed as though he were evidence from an ancient world about to disappear.
But Gwoja did not disappear.
“ONE POUND JIMMY”
Then there is the nickname.
One Pound Jimmy.
It is repeated so often that many Australians know the nickname without ever knowing the man.
There is no single proven account of how it originated.
One common story claims that Gwoja demanded one pound whenever somebody wanted to photograph him.
The evidence is not strong enough to state that as fact.
The nickname was already being used during the 1930s.
Anthropologist T. G. H. Strehlow recorded it in 1935, and Clifford Possum remembered knowing his father as “One Pound Jim” from childhood.
More recent scholarship has suggested that the name may have arisen when Gwoja negotiated for a cash payment of one pound rather than accepting tobacco—the form of exchange commonly imposed upon Aboriginal workers.
Other accounts associate the amount with his labour, cultural knowledge, artefacts or interactions with tourists.
We may never know exactly where the nickname began.
But perhaps the uncertainty tells us something.
Colonial Australia preferred the simple nickname.
It was catchy.
Commercial.
Easy to remember.
His real name required Australia to understand that he belonged to a people, a kinship system, Country and Law.
“One Pound Jimmy” could be packaged.
Gwoja Tjungurrayi had to be understood.
And there is another possibility worth considering.
Whatever the nickname's origins, Gwoja appears to have learned how to use the identity imposed upon him.
He understood that his time, knowledge and presence had value.
That is not passivity.
That is negotiation.
1950 — AUSTRALIA PUT HIS FACE ON A STAMP
On 14 August 1950, two Australian definitive postage stamps were released carrying a stylised version of Gwoja's image.
They circulated until 1966.
Approximately ninety-nine million impressions of the image were distributed.
Think about that.
Letters carrying his face crossed suburbs, towns, states and international borders.
Collectors handled it.
Families licked it, stuck it to envelopes and dropped it into letterboxes.
Gwoja became one of the most widely circulated Aboriginal faces in Australian history.
Yet the stamp did not say:
Gwoja Tjungurrayi.
It said:
“Aborigine.”
A man became a category.
Australia recognised his face while withholding his individuality.
The stamp did not tell Australians that he had survived Coniston.
It did not tell them about his Country.
His family.
His work.
His cultural responsibilities.
His knowledge.
His sons.
His survival.
It simply presented an Aboriginal face.
Visible everywhere.
Named nowhere.
THEN CAME THE TWO-DOLLAR COIN
The symbolism becomes even more extraordinary with Australia's two-dollar coin.
The coin was introduced on 20 June 1988.
On its reverse is the familiar image of an Aboriginal elder surrounded by the Southern Cross and Australian flora.
For decades many Australians have referred to the figure as “One Pound Jimmy” or believed that the coin is a direct portrait of Gwoja.
That is not quite correct.
And the distinction matters.
The Royal Australian Mint identifies the image as an archetype of an Aboriginal elder, designed by Horst Hahne.
The chosen design was influenced by an artwork by Ainslie Roberts.
Roberts used some features of Gwoja Tjungurrayi, while other features were drawn from imagination and his visual memory developed through drawing many Indigenous people.
So the face on the two-dollar coin is not a literal portrait of Gwoja.
His photograph was not simply transferred into metal.
But the connection is real.
His features helped form part of the artistic lineage that ultimately produced one of the most recognisable images in Australian currency.
And that makes the story, to me, even more revealing.
Gwoja is simultaneously there and not there.
Present.
Yet unnamed.
Recognisable.
Yet transformed into an archetype.
Once again, Australia embraced the Aboriginal image while detaching it from Aboriginal biography.
THE CITIZENSHIP CONTRADICTION
The symbolism becomes even more uncomfortable when we look at the Australia through which Gwoja's image was circulating.
It would be historically inaccurate to say Aboriginal people were simply “not citizens” in 1950.
The Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948, commencing in 1949, created Australian citizenship.
But formal citizenship and equality were very different things.
Aboriginal Australians continued to live under an extraordinary web of discriminatory state and territory laws controlling movement, employment, wages, marriage, property, children and access to services.
At the same time Gwoja's face was circulating on Australian postage stamps, section 127 of the Australian Constitutionstill excluded “aboriginal natives” when calculating the population of the Commonwealth for constitutional purposes.
That provision remained until the 1967 referendum.
Most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians did not gain an unrestricted right to vote in federal elections until 1962.
So we should describe the contradiction accurately.
Australia was prepared to circulate an Aboriginal man's image as a symbol of itself while governments continued treating Aboriginal people as populations to be controlled, administered and assimilated.
That is not simple recognition.
It is visibility without equality.
Recognition without authority.
National symbolism without Indigenous self-determination.
THE IMAGE COULD NEVER CONTAIN THE MAN
No stamp could contain Gwoja's life.
No photograph could.
No coin ever will.
An image cannot tell you what it was like to live through the rifle fire of Coniston.
It cannot tell you about relatives lying dead.
It cannot reproduce the chain around his body or the escape that followed.
It cannot contain a lifetime's knowledge of waterholes, Country, Jukurrpa and ceremony.
It cannot show every day spent mustering cattle, sinking wells, mining, guiding or working stations.
It cannot record every conversation with his children around a campfire.
It cannot capture the responsibilities of a husband.
A father.
A teacher.
A lawman.
A custodian.
And most importantly, it cannot contain his refusal to disappear.
Colonial photographers wanted an image of a vanishing Aboriginal race.
What history gave them instead was a man who kept living.
Kept working.
Kept teaching.
Kept negotiating.
Kept carrying Country.
HIS LEGACY KEPT MOVING
Gwoja's knowledge survived him.
His sons became major figures in the Western Desert art movement.
Knowledge transmitted through Gwoja contributed to later recognition of Warlpiri–Anmatyerr interests in Country around Central Mount Wedge.
Cultural material he had provided to researcher Charles Mountford for safekeeping was eventually returned to a keeping place at Yuendumu in 2021.
And in 2019, the Northern Territory electoral division previously known as Stuart was renamed Gwoja.
There is something powerful in that.
The stamp reduced him to “Aborigine.”
The coin transformed Aboriginal identity into an unnamed archetype.
But generations later, Country carried his name again.
Gwoja.
CONISTON WAS EVENTUALLY NAMED FOR WHAT IT WAS
Official language also began, slowly, to change.
In 2018 the Northern Territory Police Commissioner apologised during a Coniston commemoration for the role of police in what was publicly recognised as a state-sanctioned massacre.
In 2024 the Northern Territory Police Commissioner again addressed the history of police violence against Aboriginal Territorians and specifically acknowledged Coniston.
An apology cannot undo what happened.
It cannot return the dead.
It cannot reverse dispossession.
It cannot reconstruct every family line broken by frontier violence.
But words still matter.
Because truth-telling begins when institutions stop describing massacres as unfortunate encounters.
It begins when the dead are acknowledged.
When responsibility is acknowledged.
And when survivors are named.
HOW I BELIEVE WE SHOULD REMEMBER GWOJA
We should say his name before his nickname.
We should remember that Gwoja Tjungurrayi was a Ngalia, southern Warlpiri man with Anmatyerr connections and Arrernte ancestry through his mother.
We should understand that Tjungurrayi was a skin name within a complex kinship system—not merely a European-style surname.
We should understand that words such as Jukurrpa, kirda, kurdungurlu and urrempel describe systems of Law, responsibility, ceremony and Country that existed long before Australia had a parliament or constitution.
We should tell the truth about Coniston.
It was not one chaotic confrontation between equal parties.
It was a series of punitive killings carried out in a landscape transformed by pastoral expansion, drought, racial power and the colonial seizure of land and water.
We should be accurate about the photograph.
Roy Dunstan photographed Gwoja in 1935.
We should be accurate about the stamps.
They carried a stylised image of a real man while naming him only as “Aborigine”.
And we should be accurate about the coin.
The Aboriginal elder on Australia's two-dollar coin is not a literal portrait of Gwoja Tjungurrayi.
It is an archetype created by Horst Hahne, influenced by Ainslie Roberts' artwork, which itself incorporated some features of Gwoja.
But most of all, we should refuse to remember Gwoja only through suffering.
Because his is also a story of strength.
Judgement.
Work.
Family.
Negotiation.
Cultural authority.
Knowledge.
Transmission.
And survival.
THE FACE HAS A NAME
Next time you hold an Australian two-dollar coin, look at it differently.
The metal cannot tell you that Gwoja Tjungurrayi survived the Coniston killing times.
It cannot tell you about a man chained to a tree who escaped.
It cannot tell you about the goldfields.
The mica mines.
The cattle stations.
The stock routes.
The ceremonies.
The campfires.
The children.
The Country.
It cannot tell you how Australia could make an Aboriginal image famous while leaving an Aboriginal man almost anonymous.
But the coin can become a prompt.
A reason to look beyond the image.
A reason to ask:
Who was he?
What happened to his people?
What Country did he belong to?
What knowledge did he carry?
And why was Australia so much more comfortable celebrating an Aboriginal image than recognising Aboriginal authority?
Then say his name.
GWOJA TJUNGURRAYI.
Not a relic.
Not an anonymous “Aborigine”.
Not simply “One Pound Jimmy”.
A Ngalia Warlpiri man.
A man with Anmatyerr connections and Arrernte ancestry.
A survivor of Coniston.
A stockman.
A miner.
A guide.
A husband.
A father.
A ceremony man.
A keeper of Jukurrpa.
A man whose life continued long after others tried to freeze him inside a photograph.
From my own Anaiwan voice, I say:
Dhanggana — hello, and respect.
And then I say his name.
Gwoja Tjungurrayi.
Because the face of the nation is not abstract.
It has a name.
Language Note
Dhanggana is used here from my own Anaiwan language tradition and is not presented as Gwoja's language.
Warlpiri, Anmatyerr and Arrernte-related terminology used in this article is limited to publicly documented cultural descriptions associated with Gwoja's life. No restricted ceremonial knowledge is reproduced.
Jukurrpa / Tjukurrpa — often translated into English as “Dreaming”, although the concept encompasses ancestral Law, stories, Country, tracks, responsibilities and the continuing order connecting people and place.
Kirda — commonly translated as owner or custodian through the patriline.
Kurdungurlu — commonly translated as guardian through the matriline.
Urrempel — recorded in biographical sources as a ceremony man or holder of ceremonial knowledge.
Sources and Further Reading
Jillian Barnes, “Gwoja Jungarrayi (c.1895–1965)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian National University.
Jillian E. Barnes, “Resisting the captured image: how Gwoja Tjungurrayi, ‘One Pound Jimmy’, escaped the ‘Stone Age’”, ANU Press.
Paige Gleeson, “Gwoja Tjungurrayi as ‘One Pound Jimmy’: Aboriginalia in the post”, Aboriginal History, ANU Press.
Royal Australian Mint — Two Dollars, history and design of the Australian two-dollar coin.
State Library of New South Wales — Gwoja Tjungurrayi (‘One Pound Jimmy’).
State Library of New South Wales catalogue record: “Gwoya Jungarai (known as ‘One Pound Jimmy’) — portrait, 1935 / Roy Dunstan.”
University of Newcastle Colonial Frontier Massacres Database — Coniston massacre records.
Australian War Memorial — Memories of the Coniston Massacre.
National Museum of Australia — Rights and Freedoms: Defining Moments, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voting rights and the 1967 referendum.
Australian Bureau of Statistics — Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Census after the 1967 Referendum.
Northern Territory Electoral Commission — Division of Gwoja.
ABC News — “Coniston Massacre: NT police apologise for state-sanctioned massacre of Aboriginal people,” 2018.
Northern Territory Police — Commissioner apology speech at Garma Festival, 2024.
© Brian AJ Newman | BAJN.au
HIDDEN NO MORE — because our history does not disappear simply because somebody stopped saying the names.
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