Wanalirri is the great Wandjina of the Ngarinyin, whose principal site lies in the country along the Gibb River. Like all Wandjina he is a rain and cloud being whose painted image, refreshed as the wet season nears, draws down the monsoon. He is chiefly remembered for the myth of the great flood: when two children tormented Dumbi the owl and plucked out its feathers, the owl's grievance reached the Wandjina, who gathered a vast flock of brolgas to stamp a black-soil plain into quicksand and then loosed a deluge that drowned the people who had broken the Law. The story stands as a charter of the seriousness with which cruelty and lawlessness are punished.