Michael Boiyool Anning

Yidinyji
b.1955

Belonging to the Dulgu-barra clan of the Yidinyji people, Michael Boiyool Anning was born in Atherton in 1955 and currently lives in Ravenshoe. His traditional name of Boiyool was given to him by his aunt — it is the word for a piece of lawyer cane cut specifically to stir a non-lethal quantity of poison into waterholes when hunting fish, and the name of a mythical being, half-human, half-eel, which travelled up the rivers to significant sites in the Buluru (story time).

Michael Boiyool Anning saw his first traditional shield during his primary school years in Innisfail: ‘This kid came along and he had this old shield, you know, and ever since I said, oh jingos, I’d been interested in that!’. When his family moved to Ravenshoe, he worked at a sawmill where he gained a basic knowledge of the timbers he would later use in his art practice.

In around 1990 Michael Boiyool Anning began to revive the making of traditional artefacts. After a few years of selling artefacts to tourists through retail outlets in Kuranda, he began his own art practice in 1996. Stimulated by stories of the early days, he began investigating rainforest shield designs in museum collections and anthropological texts. Michael Boiyool Anning is now recognised as the foremost Indigenous artist in Queensland to rejuvenate the unique tradition of making rainforest swords and shields.

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See also . . .

Learn about Rainforest shield (scorpion design) and sword.
Learn about the community of Ravenshoe.
Michael Anning references.