Mandramankana is one of the named mura-mura, the ancestral culture heroes whose travels and exploits across the Cooper Creek country the Lutheran missionary J.G. Reuther set down in the great Diyari manuscript he compiled at the Bethesda mission near Lake Killalpaninna. Reuther's collection names well over a hundred such beings and follows their journeys, affiliations and deeds; of Mandramankana it is recorded that he was killed and yet came alive again, a motif of return from death that marks him among the heroes. Because much of Reuther's mythological material remains only partly published, the fuller narrative of Mandramankana survives chiefly in the dictionary and its mythology sections, made accessible through Philipp Scherer's English translation and the later scholarship of Peter Austin on the manuscript.