This painting records one of the key episodes in the honey ant song cycle, the narrative that dominates the desert country around Papunya. At the centre if the image is a white-hued circle enfolding four small roundels and a larger red-shaded disc motif. Guarding the white circle form on its outside are a series of arcs - these represent women gathered at a ceremony. The white circle itself is the Waluwanu design, which desert women wear on their bodies when in performance at certain large religious gatherings. This particular ritual event records the encounter of the Honey Ant ancestors with a large party of Mala wallabies - a meeting that took place at a site named Mawurrungu, and is regularly re-enacted at ceremonies there. The site, in deep desert, has certain features suggestive of the primal encounter, when the honey ants, headed eastwards from a place named Alyalya, were startled to come upon a number of the Mala engaged on a journey of their own, bringing the features of the landscape into being in their own image - and the Mala were at that moment celebrating, and had formed a vast lake on the flat red plain - a plain that still floods regularly to this day.