Gwoya Jungarai

Gwoya Tjungurrayi also spelt Gwoya Jungarai or Gwoya Djungarai. (c. 1895 – 28 March 1965) was a Walpiri-Anmatyerre man of the Northern Territory of Australia. Also known by his nickname One Pound Jimmy, he became the first Aboriginal person to be featured on an Australian postage stamp.

Tjungurrayi was born in the Tanami Desert of the Northern Territory, 200 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, in the region surrounding Coniston Station around 1895. His first name Gwoja means water. His last name reflects his skin name was Tjungurrayi. As pastoralism expanded in the region during the early 1900s, encroaching further into Tjungurrayi’s ancestral country, tensions intensified during the drought of the 1920s, with increasing competition over water and food. He survived the Coniston Massacre in the Northern Territory in 1928, although accounts of his survival differ:

One claimed his father was taken prisoner by Constable Murray, escaped and fled with his family to the Arltunga region east of Alice Springs. Another described Tjungurrayi ‘worm[ing] his way out from among the dead and dying’ at Yurrkuru to ‘narrowly escape death from a hail of rifle fire poured at him by whites’.

Clifford Possum’s [Tjungurrayri's son] oral account of his father’s capture and evasion records that a mounted policeman arrested and chained him up before ‘carry him ‘round to show’m every soakage. They leave him... tied up on a tree, big chain... they put leg chain too... Then everybody go out and shoot all the people... They come back and see him — nothing! This chain he broke’m with a big rock and he take off... to mine ...’.

After the massacre, Tjungurrayi spent time in Alyawarre country near Arltunga before settling at Napperby.

Tjungurrayi made and sold boomerangs, that he sold for one pound each. Some sources claim this is where the nickname 'One Pound Jimmy' comes from. Whenever asked how much one of his pieces were, he would answer "One pound, boss".

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