Important Australian Indigenous Art

Deutscher and Hackett acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the lands on which we work and pay our respects to Elders past and present.

Important Australian Indigenous Art

Lots 1 – 75

Auction | Melbourne | 26 March 2025

(left page) Lot 41, George Ward Tjungurrayi, Untitled (Tingari at Kaakuratintja), 2005 (detail)

Melbourne Viewing

Lots 1 – 75

Wednesday 26 March 7:00 pm

105 Commercial Road South Yarra, VIC telephone: 03 9865 6333

Tuesday 11 – Sunday 16 March 11:00 am – 6:00 pm 36 Gosbell Street Paddington, NSW telephone: 02 9287 0600

Thursday 20 – Tuesday 25 March 11:00 am – 6:00 pm

105 Commercial Road South Yarra, VIC telephone: 03 9865 6333

email bids to: info@deutscherandhackett.com telephone: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344 telephone bid form – p. 160 absentee bid form – p. 161

www.deutscherandhackett.com/watch-live-auction

www.deutscherandhackett.com | info@deutscherandhackett.com

Specialists

Chris Deutscher

Executive Director — Melbourne

Chris is a graduate of Melbourne University and has over 40 years art dealing, auction and valuation experience as Director of Deutscher Fine Art and subsequently as co-founder and Executive Director of Deutscher~Menzies. He has extensively advised private, corporate and museum art collections and been responsible for numerous Australian art publications and landmark exhibitions. He is also an approved valuer under the Cultural Gifts Program.

Crispin Gutteridge

Head of Indigenous Art and Senior Art Specialist

Crispin holds a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts and History) from Monash University. In 1995, he began working for Sotheby’s Australia, where he became the representative for Aboriginal art in Melbourne. In 2006 Crispin joined Joel Fine Art as head of Aboriginal and Contemporary Art and later was appointed head of the Sydney office. He possesses extensive knowledge of Aboriginal art and has over 20 years experience in the Australian fine art auction market.

Fiona Hayward Senior Art Specialist

After completing a Bachelor of Arts at Monash University, Fiona worked at Niagara Galleries in Melbourne, leaving to join the newly established Melbourne auction rooms of Christie’s in 1990, rising to become an Associate Director. In 2006, Fiona joined Sotheby’s International as a Senior Paintings Specialist and later Deputy Director. In 2009, Sotheby’s International left the Australian auction market and established a franchise agreement with Sotheby’s Australia, where Fiona remained until the end of 2019 as a Senior Specialist in Australian Art. At the end of the franchise agreement with Sotheby’s Australia, Smith & Singer was established where Fiona worked until the end of 2020.

Alex Creswick Managing Director / Head of Finance

With a Bachelor of Business Accounting at RMIT, Alex has almost 25 years experience within financial management roles. He has spent much of his early years within the corporate sector with companies such as IBM, Macquarie Bank and ANZ. With a strong passion for the arts more recently he was the Financial Controller for Ross Mollison Group, a leading provider of marketing services to the performing arts.

Annabel Lees

Front of House Manager – Melbourne

Annabel holds a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Art History from the University of Melbourne as well as years of professional experience in art sales and gallery administration. Prior to this role Annabel worked at artnet in London, focusing on client engagement and strategic partnerships.

Specialists

Damian Hackett

Executive Director — Sydney

Damian has over 30 years experience in public and commercial galleries and the fine art auction market. After completing a BA (Visual Arts) at the University of New England, he was Assistant Director of the Gold Coast City Art Gallery and in 1993 joined Rex Irwin Art Dealer, a leading commercial gallery in Sydney. In 2001, Damian moved into the fine art auction market as Head of Australian and International art for Phillips de Pury and Luxembourg, and from 2002 – 2006 was National Director of Deutscher~Menzies.

Henry Mulholland

Senior Art Specialist

Henry Mulholland is a graduate of the National Art School in Sydney, and has had a successful career as an exhibiting artist. Since 2000, Henry has also been a regular art critic on ABC Radio 702. He was artistic advisor to the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust Basil Sellers Sculpture Project, and since 2007 a regular feature of Sculpture by the Sea, leading tours for corporate stakeholders and conducting artist talks in Sydney, Tasmania and New Zealand. Prior to joining Deutscher & Hackett, Henry’s fine art consultancy provided a range of services, with a particular focus on collection management and acquiring artworks for clients on the secondary market.

Veronica Angelatos

Art Specialist and Senior Researcher

Veronica has a Master of Arts (Art Curatorship and Museum Management), together with a Bachelor of Arts/Law (Honours) and Diploma of Modern Languages from the University of Melbourne. She has strong curatorial and research expertise, having worked at various art museums including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice and National Gallery of Victoria, and more recently, in the commercial sphere as Senior Art Specialist at Deutscher~Menzies. She is also the author of numerous articles and publications on Australian and International Art.

Eliza Burton

Registrar

Eliza has a Bachelor of Arts (English and Cultural Studies and History of Art) from the University of Western Australia and a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne. She has experience in exhibition management, commercial sales, and arts writing through her work for Sculpture by the Sea and The Sheila Foundation.

Danny Kneebone

Design and Photography Manager

With over 25 years in the art auction industry as both photographer and designer. Danny was Art Director at Christie’s from 2000–2007, Bonham's and Sotheby's 2007–2009 and then Sotheby’s Australia from 2009–2020. Specialist in design, photography, colour management and print production from fine art to fine jewellery. Danny is also an artist in his own right, holding regular solo and group exhibitions, winning over 50 national and international photography awards.

Specialists for this auction

Crispin Gutteridge

Damian Hackett 0411 883 052 0422 811 034

Henry Mulholland

Fiona Hayward 0424 487 738 0417 957 590

Chris Deutscher

Veronica Angelatos 0411 350 150 0409 963 094

Administration and Accounts

Alex Creswick (Melbourne) Poppy Thomson (Sydney) 03 9865 6333 02 9287 0600

Absentee and Telephone Bids

Annabel Lees 03 9865 6333

Shipping

Ella Perrottet 03 9865 6333

Auctioneers

Scott Livesey

Auctioneer

Scott Livesey began his career in fine art with Leonard Joel Auctions from 1988 to 1994 before moving to Sotheby’s Australia in 1994, as auctioneer and specialist in Australian Art. Scott founded his eponymous gallery in 2000, which represents both emerging and established contemporary Australian artists, and includes a regular exhibition program of indigenous Art. Along with running his contemporary art gallery, Scott has been an auctioneer for Deutscher and Hackett since 2010.

Ella Perrottet

Auctioneer / Senior Registrar

Ella has a Masters of Arts and Cultural Management (Collections and Curatorship) from Deakin University together with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Visual Art) from Monash University, and studied in both Melbourne and Italy. From 2014, Ella worked at Leonard Joel, Melbourne as an Art Assistant, researcher, writer and auctioneer, where she developed a particular interest in Australian women artists.

Lot 1

Djerrkŋu Yunupiŋu

Yemaya, 2020 (detail)

Various vendors page 14

Prospective buyers and sellers guide page 158

Conditions of auction and sale page 160

Telephone bid form page 162

Absentee bid form page 163

Attendee pre-registration form page 164

Index page 175

Lot 49

Wawiriya Burton

Ngayuku Ngura – My Country, 2018 (detail)

Important Notice

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this catalogue contain names and images of deceased persons.

Some imagery on bark and early western desert paintings in this catalogue may be deemed unsuitable for viewing by women, children or uninitiated men. We suggest art co-ordinators at Aboriginal communities show this catalogue to community elders for approval before distributing the catalogue for general viewing. Co-ordinators may wish to mask or remove certain images prior to circulation. The English spelling of aboriginal names has evolved over the years. In this catalogue every effort has been made to use the current linguistic form. However original information from certificates has been transcribed as written with the result that there are different spellings of the same name, title, language group and story.

Cultural Heritage Permits

Under the provisions of the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act, 1986, buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items in this sale from the Cultural Property Section:

Department of Communications and the Arts

GPO Box 2154

Canberra ACT 2601

Email: movable.heritage@arts.gov.au

Phone: 1800 819 461

Under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), permits are required for the movement of wildlife, wildlife specimens and products made or derived from wildlife. This includes species on the endangered species list. Buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items offered at auction. Permits must be obtained from:

Wildlife Trade Regulation Section

Environment Australia

GPO Box 787

Canberra ACT 2601

Email: wildlifetrade@environment.gov.au

Phone: (02) 6274 1900

Under the provisions of the Wildlife and Protection (Regulation of Exports and Imports) Act, 1982, buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items offered at auction (including plant or animal products derived from an Australian native species such as: ivory, tortoise shell, feathers, etc). Permits must be obtained from the Wildlife Protection Section, Environment Australia-Biodiversity Group at the address above, prior to items being export from Australia.

QUEENSL AND NORTHERN TERRITORY SOUTH AUSTRALIA

WESTERN AUSTRALIA

NE W SOUTH WALES

VICTORIA TAS Melbourne Hobart Canberra ACT

Alice Springs

Minjilang (Croker Island)

Maningrida Milingimbi

Galiwinku (Echo Island) Ramingining Yirrkala

Groote Eylandt

Mornington Island

Melville Island

Bathurst Island Darwin

Wadeye (Por t Keats)

Ngukurr Roper River

Alligato r River

Lockhart River Aurukun

ARNHEM LAND

Fitzroy Crossing Halls Creek

Billiluna Balgo Hills

Wyndham

Bidyadanga (L a Grange)

Broome

Warmun (Turkey Creek)

KIMBERLE Y

Kununurra

Ernabella Mt Liebig Hermannsberg

Amata

Yuendumu Utopia

Lajamanu

Warmun (Turkey Creek)

Kintore

Kiwirrkurra Papunya

Balgo Hills

Halls Creek

Papulankutja (Blackstone) Warbur ton

Patjarr Warakurna

CENTRAL DESERT

Alice Springs

Darwin

Mornington Island

Djerrkŋu Yunupiŋu

(c.1945 – 2022)

Yemaya, 2020

natural earth pigments and recycled printer toner on eucalyptus bark

171.0 x 79.0 cm (irregular)

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre cat. 1980–20 and Alcaston Gallery cat. AK22265

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Provenance

Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala, Northern Territory Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited

Djerrkŋu Yunupingu: I am a Mermaid, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, 20 April – 14 May 2021, cat. 3 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

This work is accompanied by certificates of authenticity from Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre and Alcaston Gallery.

The paintings of Djerrkŋu Yunupiŋu stem from her memory of a time before she was born when her spirit appeared before her father in the form of a mermaid, signalling her conception. The day after this magical encounter, Djerrkŋu’s mother discovered she was pregnant. Born in 1945 at the end of the second world war, Yunupiŋu was a senior Yolŋu elder and artist based in Yirrkala in the Northern Territory. A member of the creative Yunupiŋu family, she was the daughter of Mungurrawuy, and the sister of Nyapanyapa, Gulumbu, Barrupu, and Galarrwuy Yunupiŋu.

Executed on bark and timber board, using a unique combination of natural earth pigments and reclaimed toner ink (ground polyester) from discarded printer cartridges, Yunupiŋu’s remarkable ‘mermaid paintings’ record intimate episodes of the artist’s life. Here, Yemaya, 2020 recalls the passing of her granddaughter’s child when, at a later gathering, ‘the whole community poured their love into a massive ceremony which celebrated her spirit... In Yolŋu way as I am the maternal great grandmother, she is just like me, and I am a mermaid. I painted this for her whilst the ceremony was going on. Here she is with her beautiful parents.’

The accompanying certificate of authenticity from Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre records Djerrkŋu Yunupiŋu’s story and states in part:

‘Around that time, I was conceived in my mother’s belly and my spirit was the Mermaid, white skinned from the ocean with scales. And that is when my spirit revealed itself to my Father. My dad was walking in the morning with his spear and his

woomera (spear thrower). He walked down to the beach to hope he could spear a fish. Where he is walking on the beach there are these rocks and on the rock was sitting this mermaid.

My dad sees the tail of the mermaid and thinks he has seen a fish, so he walks closer and closer and closer and silently puts the woomera into the spear ready to throw. He throws the spear at the mermaid, but she jumps into the water. The spear hits her tail though and the blood from it sits on the water. My father speared my spirit being, it shows here on my leg… this black marking. Speared me thinking I was a big fish; the fish dived deeper in a cave underneath the sea… and there was lots and lots of blood. My father felt sorry for that fish seeing lots of blood. He cupped a handful and smelt it and realised that it was human blood.

So he stands very still and thinks, then he turns around and heads home. He gets home and lies down and falls into a deep sleep. He is very worried about the human blood. He dreams. In his dream he sees the mermaid and realises it was no ordinary fish. It was me. I was telling him in the dream ‘That was me dad, don’t spear me. Bapa… why did you try to spear me? It is I, it was not a fish.’

He woke up and saw my mother preparing yams, ganguri. She was cooking ganguri and he said to himself, ‘OK I will ask your mother whether she is having a baby or not.’ My father said to her, ‘I just had a dream… are you with child?’ ‘Yes, I am with child,’ my mother said. And so, it was this time when they all boarded the canoes, two canoes, with all my mothers, and headed to Yirrkala.’

Dhambit Munuŋgurr born

1968

Lilies, 2023

synthetic polymer paint on eucalyptus bark

207.0 x 68.0 cm (irregular)

bears inscription verso: Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre cat. 1825–23

bears inscription on label verso: artist’s name and Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre cat. 1825–23

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Provenance

Buku Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala, Northern Territory Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in September 2023

Exhibited

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery at Sydney Contemporary 2023, Carriageworks, Sydney, 7 – 10 September 2023 (as ‘Lillies’)

This work is accompanied by a copy of the certificate of authenticity from Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

Dhambit Munuŋgurr was born in 1968 in north-east Arnhem Land, where she now lives and works. Munuŋgurr comes from an extraordinarily rich artistic genealogy. Her grandfather, Muŋgurrawuy Yunupiŋu (c.1904 – 1979), was an artist and contributor to the legendary 1963 Yirrkala Church Panels; and her father, Mutitjpuy Munuŋgurr, and mother, Gulumbu Yunupiŋu, were both celebrated Aboriginal artists, each having won first prizes at the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Awards. Emulating her forefathers’ great success, Munuŋgurr was a first prize recipient, awarded the 2021 Telstra Bark Painting Award for her work Bees at Gängän

In an effort to overcome the difficulty of grinding ochre by hand, which became beyond her capability after being hit by a car in 2007, Munuŋgurr introduced non-traditional colours to her oeuvre

when she began painting with acrylic paint. Munuŋgurr initially echoed the traditional Yolŋu palette by working in orange, red, yellow and black acrylics, sometimes including green in her work for trees. However, around 2019, Munuŋgurr introduced blue to her work, choosing it because “the earth is blue, the sky is blue and the sea is blue”,1 and since, has settled on a vivid array of blues for her paintings. Munuŋgurr’s distinct brushstroke and her compelling juxtaposition of contemporary materials and traditional stories construct an unexpected signature style.

1. ‘Dhambit Munuŋgurr: Ocean, 2019’, Madayin: Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Virginia, USA, https://madayin.kluge-ruhe.org/experience/pieces/banhdharra-ocean/ (accessed February 2025)

Vincent Namatjira born 1983

The Queen and Me, 2017

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

91.0 x 122.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Iwantja Arts cat. 215 –17

Estimate: $30,000 – 40,000

Provenance

Iwantja Arts, APY Lands, South Australia

THIS IS NO FANTASY + Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above

Related Work

The Queen and Me, 2016, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 91.0 x 122.0 cm, in the collection of The British Museum, London

‘I believe in the power of Art, the power of the paintbrush. I know that art can change lives – it changed mine – and I hope that Art can change

the world too.’1

The art of Vincent Namatjira holds a mirror to power structures, established colonial histories and contemporary influence in Australian society. Using wit and caricature to probe the complex colonial narratives implicit in Australia’s relationship with United Kingdom and its realms, his paintings of the Royals and in particular his many portrayals of Queen Elizabeth II form part of an ongoing critique of colonialism and the role generations of the British royal family have played in the colonial history of Australia. In paintings such as The Queen and Me, 2017, Namatjira seeks to ameliorate the power imbalance by placing himself on an equal footing with the Royals, where, as a proud Aboriginal man he is front and centre, standing side by side with the Monarch, not relegated to the background or kept out of sight. He is part of the story.

Born in Mparntwe (Alice Springs), Namatjira spent his early life between Mparntwe and Ntaria (Hermannsburg), the home of his great grandfather, Albert Namatjira. Inspired by his Namatjira family members, as well as the Tjilpi (senior men) of Indulkana, Vincent started painting at Iwantja Arts in South Australia’s APY lands in 2011. Choosing to become a portrait artist, rather than a painter of traditional lands, his

witty and satirical depictions of those in positions of power contrast sharply with his warm portraits of family and friends.

‘I started painting portraits because I’m interest in people, power, wealth and politics. For me portraiture is a way of putting myself in someone else’s shoes, as well as to share with viewer what it might be like to be in my shoes.’ 2

Through his artwork, Vincent Namatjira takes us on a journey, whether it be a focus on family or friends, Indigenous soldiers, Indigenous leaders, people in power and the Royal Family, giving us an insight into his world view. He is an acute observer of the connections between leadership, wealth, power and influence, and his work offers a critique of the principles of power through the depiction of contemporary significant political figures, such as US presidents and Australian prime ministers – thus revealing his interest in contemporary discourse around politics and history.

‘I’m interested in painting strong figures and leaders. We see them on the news and wonder how and why they make their decisions. These powerful people are far away from us here on the APY Lands, but when I paint them, it brings them right into the studio. I like to paint with a little bit of humour, humour takes away some of their power and keeps us all equal.’ 3

1. Vincent Namatjira, cited in Namatjira, V., Vincent Namatjira, Thames and Hudson, 2023, p.82

2. ibid.

3. Vincent Namatjira, cited in ‘Gina, Donald, Malcolm, Obama and Me’, in Cumpston, N. (ed.), Tarnanthi, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2017, p. 82 Crispin Gutteridge

Vincent Namatjira born 1983

My friend Tiger, 2017

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

122.0 x 91.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Iwantja Arts cat. 372–17

Estimate: $25,000 – 35,000

Provenance

Iwantja Arts, APY Lands, South Australia

THIS IS NO FANTASY + Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above

Exhibited

2017 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, Juniper Hall, Sydney, 19 October – 17 December 2017 [finalist]

Literature

Harmon, S., ‘Doug Moran portrait prize 2017 finalists’, The Guardian, 11 October 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/ gallery/2017/oct/11/doug-moran-portrait-prize-2017-finalists-fromisla-fisher-to-anh-do-in-pictures (accessed February 2025)

Reminiscent of Vincent Namatjira’s respectful portraits of Elders and Senior artists from the APY lands produced in 2016, this compassionate portrait of Vincent Namatjira’s friend and fellow artist Kunmanara (Tiger) Yaltangki, shows deep affection for his sitter. Yaltangki, an eccentric artist was well known for his bold, bright and often wild paintings that were a compelling blend of the artist’s understanding of land and Country, (the depiction of the Anangu concept of Mamu - spirit beings), and his love of country music and rock and roll, including such greats as Hank Williams, ACDC, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Creedence Clearwater Revival! One of Kunmanara’s habits was to paint his hat and shoes different colours. Obviously on the day this was painted Tiger was into blue.

Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori (c.1924

My Country, 2009

synthetic polymer paint on linen

198.0 x 101.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, title, medium and Mornington Island Arts and Crafts cat. 4897–L–SG–1009

Estimate: $28,000 – 35,000

Provenance

Mornington Island Arts and Crafts, Mornington Island, Queensland Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in 2012

This painting is accompanied by a copy of the certificate of authenticity from Mornington Island Arts and Crafts which states:

‘This is the little river I was born next to on Bentinck Island.’

Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori grew up on Bentinck Island, Northern Queensland, in the traditions of the Kaiadilt people who used the local marine resources to fulfill all their needs and had very little outside contact. After an intense drought and subsequent tidal surge made the island uninhabitable, at the age of 24, Mirdidingkingathi (meaning born at Mirdidingki River) Juwarnda (her totem, the dolphin) Sally Gabori and her family were persuaded to move to the adjacent Mornington Island – a move that prompted feelings of huge loss for the Kaiadilt people. Gabori began her art career late in life, at the age of 85, and Judith Ryan of the National Gallery of Victoria compares her immense innovation and star power to that of similar latestarters, Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Lorna Fencer Napurrula.1 Unlike many other Aboriginal language groups, the Kaiadilt did not have a tradition of mark making, whether on tools, objects or bark. Taking this cultural background into consideration,

– 2015)

Gabori’s style is completely self-made, conjured from maps in her mind of Bentinck Island and the country she loved.

My Country, 2009 celebrates the artist’s birthplace of Mirdidingki – a small creek and estuary that runs from inland Bentinck Island to a small bay on the south-west coast. The creek ends in a long sandy tidal flat that extends out into the bay for hundreds of metres before transforming into a vibrant network of coral reefs teeming with turtles, fish and other sea-life. She is at once painting the saltpans and estuary of the land, a portrait of her connection to this country, and finally, her own longing, loss and memory.

1. Ryan, J., ‘Broken Colour and Unbounded Space’, Mirdidingkingathi

All, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2016, pp. 33 – 34 Crispin Gutteridge

Juwarnda Sally Gabori: dulka warngiid: Land of

Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori (c.1924

Nyinyilki Country, 2010

synthetic polymer paint on linen

151.0 x 196.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, title, medium, Mornington Island Arts and Crafts cat. 6195–L–SG–1010 and Alcaston Gallery cat. AK16558

Estimate: $50,000 – 70,000

Provenance

Mornington Island Arts and Crafts, Mornington Island, Queensland (stamped verso)

Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne (stamped verso)

Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2023

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Alcaston Gallery.

– 2015)

Only coming to painting in 2005 as an octogenarian, Kaiadilt elder Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori created with astounding innovation and intensity a series of paintings expressing cherished memories of living on the remote Bentinck Island, in the South Wellesley Island archipelago in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Although Gabori was an experienced barkstring weaver, Kaiadilt culture had no previous use of ochre painting in their ceremonial customs.1 Thus, the spontaneous apparition of Gabori’s bold artistic language, confidently and independently generated, quickly led to national and international renown. Shortly after she died in 2015, the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne presented large retrospective exhibitions of her work, and in 2022, Gabori’s work was presented to much acclaim in a major solo exhibition overseas, at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris.

Nyinyilki Country, 2010, emphatically painted in saturated tones of magenta, yellow, black and white, is a monumental canvas of raw alla prima (wet-on-wet) gesture. Although her first paintings were of a small scale and densely patterned, from 2007 Gabori painted distinctive fields of colour and abstract topographical motifs into vast panoramic canvases. Although she derived her patterns of light and colouration from real-world topographical characteristics, the resulting works are almost entirely abstract, the motifs having been ‘transmuted so radically that the landscape which inspired them are barely recoverable.’ 2 Here the horizontal expanse is overlaid with semi-circular motifs of bold arches and sinuous outlines which echo the rocky outcrops and sandbars that form around Nyinyilki, an important area of gathering and fishing on the far eastern point of Bentinck Island. Gabori had played a vital role in maintaining the stone wall fish traps to catch barramundi at Nyinyilki, as well as

harvesting freshwater from the billabong surrounded by Casuarina Trees with baler or trumpet shells, she also spoke of the maze-like trails left by dugongs after they had fed on the seagrass beds.3

In her younger years, Gabori had lived a traditional life amongst Kaiadilt people on the island until a series of catastrophic natural disasters in the late 1940s forced the remaining members of her population to relocate to the Presbyterian mission on Gununa, Mornington Island, mostly inhabited by local Lardil people.4 This relocation, as visitors on Lardil land, was thought to be temporary – only to become a decades-long exile with a devastating effect on Kaiadilt language and culture. In the Outstation Movement of the 1980s, Gabori and her husband Pat Gabori returned as often as possible to the sole reestablished settlement on the island: Main Base, at Nyinyilki. Unfortunately, due to a lack of medical infrastructure and funding, the outstation was abandoned in the 2000s and the Kaiadilt people once again returned to Mornington Island.5

More than a tragic post-colonial artefact, Gabori’s joyous and idiosyncratic paintings, with shifting shafts of light, bold transitions of colour and incredible gestural strength, express an undiminished chain of deep cultural knowledge. With these unique paintings, Gabori asserts her claim as a dulmarra dangkaa, a traditional owner with unrestricted rights to live off the island’s bountiful natural resources.6

1. McLean, B., Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori: dulka warngiid: land of all, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2016, p. 17

2. Evans, N., and Johnson, P., ‘Bilda Miburiji Kurrij (seeing with far eyes). The Root of Kaiadilt Womens Art’, Art Bulletin of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, vol. 49, 2010, p. 62

3. Ryan, J., ‘Unprecedented: The Art of Sally Gabori’, in Sally Gabori : Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda, Fondation Cartier, Paris, 2022, p. 89

4. ibid, p. 85. The Lardil already had known an earlier painting movement led by Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey in the 1960s.

5. ibid, p. 243

6. Evans, op. cit., p.30

Lucie Reeves-Smith

Prince of Wales (Midpul)

(c.1935 – 2002)

Body marks, 1998

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

103.0 x 103.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, title, date, size and Karen Brown Gallery cat. PW313

Estimate: $15,000 – 20,000

Provenance

Commissioned by Karen Brown Gallery, Darwin Private collection, Adelaide, acquired from the above in July 1999

In Larrakia culture the traditional landowners and leaders of ceremonies and dances are referred to as ‘King’. In around 1935, Prince of Wales was born Midpul to Larrakia leader, King George, at Cullen or Kahlin Beach, which at the time was the untouched bay of Darwin. Both parents passed away when Midpul was very young, and he was raised by his mother’s family to become a Law and Song Man. His ceremonial skills were legendary, and he led many public corroborees for international visitors. Significantly, as lead dancer for his people, he led the ceremonial dance for Queen Elizabeth II on her Commonwealth visit to the Northern Territory during the 1970s, and accordingly, from that point onwards, he was forever known as ‘Prince of Wales’. When he suffered an untimely stroke, his ceremonial responsibilities were curtailed, and he took up painting on canvas as a means to ensure that the ceremonial body decorations of his dance and song endured. In 2001, his standing as a Larrakia painter was recognised when he won the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in the Open Painting Category.

Painted on his favoured white ground, Body marks, 1998 reinforces the ceremonial body decorations that Prince of Wales wanted to preserve in his painting. The alternate-coloured dotting here surrounds and covers the tan-coloured rectangular body design, framing the pattern of blue-black, with subtle tan and white dots together to create an intense energy within the work. These are the markings Prince would have originally painted onto the bodies of his clansmen prior to a ceremonial dance, but here they are transferred as a permanent record for posterity. As Hetti Perkins noted, ‘His paintings have a musicality, imparted by the lively staccato-effect of dots and intermittent bars, which reads like the sheet music for an important symphony.’ 1 The work was painted just over a year after his landmark solo exhibition of 1997 held at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne.

1. Perkins, H. and Pinchbeck, C., Tradition Today: Indigenous Art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2014, p. 166

Prince of Wales (Midpul) (c.1935 – 2002)

Body marks, 2003

synthetic polymer paint on linen

120.0 x 135.0 cm

Estimate: $30,000 – 40,000

Provenance

Commissioned by Karen Brown Gallery, Darwin (cat. KB1125)

Private collection, Adelaide, acquired from the above

Renowned for his unique interpretations of body decorations and markings used in the ceremonial activities of the Larrakia people, Prince of Wales (Midpul) drew inspiration from these traditional activities for the imagery in his contemporary paintings. Born Midpul at Kah’lin (Cullen) Beach, Darwin in 1935, Prince grew up at Belyuen (Dellisaville), a small community on the far side of Darwin Harbour. He was the son of acknowledged Larrakia leader and traditional landowner Imabul (Old King George) and known as Prince of Wales. A custodian and leader of Larrakia ceremonies and dances, a leading didgeridoo player and ceremonial body painter for much of his life, Prince started painting in 1995 – initially on discarded pieces of wood and cardboard – and participated in his first exhibition the following year.

‘In taking up painting in 1995, Prince found a medium through which he could retain the essence of his active ceremonial life. His paintings have a musicality imparted by the lively staccato effect of the dots and intermittent bars, as if to read like sheet music for an improvised symphony. Prince’s uninhibited use of colour belies the origins of these designs which were passed on by his ancestors as marks on the bodies of ceremonial participants.’ 1

Executed on a unique teal blue ground, Body marks, 2003 reinforces the ceremonial body decorations that Prince of Wales wanted to preserve in his painting. Alternate lighter blue and deep marine blue

dots of the body marks surround, and are contained within, a soft purple frame that together creates a rhythmic energy within the work. These markings evoke the patterns Prince would have originally painted onto the bodies of his clansmen prior to a ceremonial dance, but here they are transferred as a permanent record for posterity. The work was painted in the final year of his life and as curator Hetti Perkins notes ‘In his last years, Prince ‘upped the ante’, scaling up his Body marks paintings to assert his cultural authority as a Larrakia elder.’ 2 ‘These paintings... I paint them on bodies... young people and old... ceremony for singing... dance... I make the marks.’3

Prince held his first solo show in Melbourne in 1997 at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, and in 2001, he won the painting sections of the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. Prince delighted in the whole process of painting, creating modern minimalist artworks characterised by simple geometric forms floating above a sparse ground with dotting to emphasise the forms.

1. Perkins, H., Tradition Today; Indigenous Art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004, p. 166

2. ibid.

3. Prince of Wales, cited in ‘Notes on Prince of Wales and the Gwalwa Daraniki Land Movement’, kindly provided by the late Grant Smith of Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in 2010. Crispin Gutteridge

Ginger Riley Munduwalawala (c.1936 – 2002)

Ngak Ngak and Limmen Bight Country, 1994

synthetic polymer paint on cotton duck

130.0 x 147.5 cm

signed lower right centre: GINGER RILEY

bears inscription verso: Alcaston Gallery cat. AK2433

Estimate: $30,000 – 40,000

Provenance

Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne (stamped verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in July 1995

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Alcaston Gallery which states in part:

‘This painting depicts Ngak Ngak and Limmen Bight country.

Ginger Riley Munduwalawala believes he is a direct descendant of the first man and that the world as he knows it commenced at the Four Arches. His position in his known world is confirmed by ancestral myths and legends which illustrate Munduwalawala’s lineal connection and ritual title to his mother’s country – the land around the Four Arches which are hills near the mouth of the Limmen Bight River in South East Arnhemland.

The Four Arches were formed by the snake Bandian. This snake, a king brown snake, appears in various guises, sometimes as two snakes, is known as Garimala or Kurra Murra and undergoing transformation becomes Wawalu, the Rainbow Serpent. The sea eagle Ngak Ngak is often shown singly or as a repeated image; he acts as a sentinel looking around Munduwalawala’s mother’s country. The image illustrates land marks, rocks, hills, islands and caves.

‘My mother’s country is in my mind.’1

Distinguished by their daring palette, dynamic energy and strongly flattened forms, Riley’s bold, brilliantly coloured depictions celebrating the landscape and mythology of his mother’s country are admired among the finest in contemporary Indigenous art. Emerging at a time when barks were the familiar output for his Arnhem Land country and Papunya Tula paintings were considered the norm, his striking interpretations challenged preconceived notions of Indigenous art – thus earning him the moniker ‘the boss of colour’ by artist David Larwill. Notably influential upon such idiom was Riley’s chance encounter during his adolescence with celebrated watercolourist Albert Namatjira, whose nontraditional aesthetic and concept of ‘colour country’ left an indelible impression upon the young artist. Encouraged by ‘…the idea that the colours of the land as seen in his imagination could be captured in art with munanga (white fella) paints’.2 Nearly three

decades passed before Riley would have the opportunity to fully explore his talent when he attended a printmaking workshop at the Northern Territory Open College of TAFE in Ngukurr. At the mature age of 50, Riley rapidly developed his own sophisticated style and distinct iconography and, after initially exhibiting with Ngukurr-based painters, he soon established an independent career at Alcaston Gallery. Enjoying tremendous success both locally and abroad over the following sixteen years before his untimely death in 2002, Riley received a plethora of awards and in 1997, was the first living indigenous artist to be honoured with a retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne..

Capturing the saltwater area extending from the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria along the Limmen Bight River to the weather-worn rocky outcrops known as the ‘Four Archers’, Ngak Ngak and Limmen Bight Country, 1994 offers a stunning example of Riley’s heroic landscapes. Pivotal to the composition is the totemic, whitebreasted sea eagle, Ngak Ngak, who presides over the landscape. While weaving its way through the centre of the composition, the Limmen Bight River appears as an intense blue undulating ribbon, offering not only a dramatic visual accent but poignantly anchoring the work to the artist’s mother country. Meanwhile, Garimala, the mythological Taipan who, according to the ancestral dreaming, created the Four Archers – an area regarded as ‘…the centre of the earth, where all things start and finish’3 – is depicted as a pair of black snakes (a typical convention to denote him travelling). Informed by the artist’s strong sense of place, the aerial perspective sees the Four Archers envisaged in multiple to both emphasise their significance and reflect different viewpoints; as Riley observes, he often paints ‘…on a cloud, on top of the world looking down… In my mind, I have to go up to the top and look down to see where I’ve come from, not very easy for somebody else, but all right for me. I just think in my mind and paint from top to bottom, I like that’.4

A vibrant celebration of the joy of belonging to the saltwater country of the Mara people, indeed the work embodies Riley’s powerful vision of his mother’s country as a mythic space – a mindscape whose kaleidoscope of dazzling colours and icons continually evoke wonder and mystery in the viewer with each new encounter.

1. Riley, cited in Ryan, J., Ginger Riley, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1997, p. 15

2. Riley, cited ibid.

3. Riley, ibid., p. 29

4. Riley, ibid., p. 27

Veronica Angelatos

Albert Namatjira (1902 – 1959)

Arafura Sea at Darwin, 1950

watercolour on paper

34.0 x 37.0 cm

signed lower right: ALBERT NAMATJIRA

bears inscription verso: Coastline, Darwin / 60 gns / A Hord / 7

Estimate: $60,000 – 80,000

Provenance

Painted in Darwin, July 1950

Anthony Horderns’ Fine Art Gallery, Sydney (as ‘Coastline, Darwin, N.T.’)

Private collection

Gould Galleries, Melbourne (as ‘Coastline, Darwin, N.T.’)

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1984

Exhibited

The Aranda Group: Seven Aboriginal Water Colour Artists, Anthony Horderns’ Fine Art Gallery, Sydney, April 1952, cat. 7 (label attached verso, as ‘Coastline, Darwin, N.T.’)

Albert Namatjira, Rex Battarbee Gallery, Alice Springs, 28 – 29 August 1952 (as ‘Coastline Darwin’)

The Director’s Choice 2012, Gould Galleries, Melbourne, 19 July – 31 August 2012, cat. 10 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘Coastline, Darwin, N.T.’)

Literature

Freeden, R., ‘Namatjira Paints His First Seascape’, The Australian Women’s Weekly, Sydney, 16 September 1950, p. 36 (illus.)

McGregor, K., The Life & Times of Albert Namatjira, Badger Editions, Melbourne, 2021, pp. 101 (illus.), 430

‘Namatjira Paints His First Seascape’, The Australian Women’s Weekly, 16 September 1950

National Library of Australia, Canberra

From his earliest watercolours in the 1930s, Albert Namatjira fostered the foundation for the later emergence of Indigenous art at Papunya forty years later and the flourishing expansion of first nations art that would follow. A household name by the 1950s, Namatjira’s evocative landscapes of inland Australia were fundamental to how Australians viewed their island home. ‘Namatjira’s dramatic entry into the Australian art world was both inspired and inspiring. He inspired his own and subsequent generations of Aboriginal people and artists across Australia. In skillfully adopting the methods and materials of Western landscape painting he challenged the relegation of Aboriginal art to the realm of archaeology and ethnography. Namatjira became the most prominent Aboriginal Australian of his era and, in 1957, was the first Aboriginal person to be granted full citizenship.’ 1

Arafura Sea at Darwin, 1950, a rare and important seascape was painted on Namatjira’s first trip beyond central Australia, travelling to Darwin in July 1950 on an ultimately unsuccessful mission to gain approval to acquire a pastoral lease north-west of the Haast’s range where he intended for his family to graze cattle. On 19 July, he arrived in Darwin, a place he thought the biggest in the world at the time; Namatjira was yet to embark on his 1954 journey to the southern capitals Sydney, Canberra (to be presented to the Queen), then Melbourne and Adelaide before returning to Alice Springs. Although not planning to paint on this trip, his intentions changed after a visit to Rapid Creek beach close to where he was staying, and with the Arafura Sea stretching out beyond, he vowed to return and record these watery scenes. Namatjira painted perhaps four or five seascapes whilst in Darwin; the first attempt he destroyed feeling it was an inferior work. Two watercolours were illustrated in the September edition of the Australian Women’s Weekly magazine: Bloodwood

trees at Rapid Creek, 1950 and the present Arafura Sea at Darwin, 1950 which was featured in colour. The accompanying article written by Robert Freeden under the title, ‘Namatjira Paints His First Seascape’, noted that ‘…For Albert Namatjira, the aboriginal artist, to paint his first seascape took courage of a sort that white Australians might find it difficult to understand. When Namatjira visited Darwin recently he went into what was for him, a foreign country… But nobody, not even Namatjira, realised what his reaction to the sea would be. He saw it first in the morning light, the glittering blue-green Arafura Sea. For a whole day Namatjira stared at the sea. Next morning, he completed his first seascape. It was subdued, timid. I realised Namatjira was afraid of Darwin. For two days he painted no more. But he kept coming back to look at sea. One day without word to anyone, he walked along the beach and painted the two pictures in this issue.’ 2

The art of Albert Namatjira is now understood to have inspired his own and subsequent generations of Aboriginal people and artists across Australia. Brenda Croft argues that the artist’s gift to Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is ‘more than the sum parts of watercolour paints on paper. It is an essence that resides in the strength of Namatjira’s work – his courage, his sorrow, his spirituality – where the enduring influence of this one man upon the entire indigenous arts and culture industry continues to be felt.’ 3

1. Watson, K., ‘Poetic Justice: an overview of Indigenous Art’, in Perkins, H., One Sun, One Moon: Aboriginal Art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p. 20

2. Freeden, R. ‘Namatjira Paints His First Seascape’, The Australian Women’s Weekly Sydney, 16 September 1950, p. 36

3. Croft, B., ‘Albert’s Gift’ in French, A., Seeing the Centre: The Art of Albert Namatjira, 1902 – 1959, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p. 148

Crispin Gutteridge

Albert Namatjira painting at Rapid Creek, Darwin, July 1950 photographer unknown

11

Lin Onus (1948 – 1996)

Garkman, 1995

gouache on illustration board

27.0 x 63.0 cm

signed lower right: Lin Onus

Estimate: $40,000 – 60,000

Provenance

Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in September 1995

Exhibited

probably Lin Onus Bama-Mutjing (Barmah – My Father’s Country), Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 12 September – 8 October 1995

Garkman, 1995 displays the sublime tranquillity that Lin Onus derived from a cultural and spiritual interaction with the land. A single frog, the eponymous ‘garkman’, rests in the shallows of this environmental sanctuary, inviting peaceful contemplation. Although its head pierces the surface of the water, not a single ripple emanates, the flat and glassy plane perfectly reflecting the silhouettes of two gum trees bordering this body of water. Depicted from above, Onus’ narrow and deceptively sparse composition provides no identifying land features or horizon, alluding to an expansive sense of custodianship and incontrovertible timeless belonging.

A self-taught artist living in suburban Melbourne, Onus was influenced by the relationships his father had cultivated with older, Indigenous artists who, in the absence of traditional cultural initiations, had been successful in using a European landscape tradition to depict their ancestral lands: Albert Namatjira (1902 – 1959), Ronald Bull (1942 – 1979) and Revel Cooper (c.1934 – 1983). Art historian Sylvia Kleinert has interpreted Lin Onus’ depiction of land as a ‘means of retrieving and rewriting history’; its multilayered presentation illustrates a ‘cultural archive.’ 1 The trompe l’oeil effects of Onus’ early photorealistic style provide the foundation for the ‘real and illusory collaging’ of his waterand-reflection paintings of the mid-1990s such as Garkman 2

The Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council facilitated a transformative visit for Onus to Maningrida in the Northern Territory in 1986 – a ‘spiritual awakening’3 during which he met Senior Yolŋu artist, Djiwul (Jack) Wunuwun. The long partnership with Wunuwun, and particularly his adoption of Onus into the family, provided the artist with a deep initiation into the Yolŋu culture

of the Murrungun people of East Arnhem Land – giving him authority to paint some of their cultural motifs. In the late 1980s, Wunuwun had pioneered the use of Western three-dimensionality, transparency and perspective in bark painting to illustrate the coexistence and transitions between physical and spiritual realms, inspiring Onus to reconcile multiple views in his artworks.4

Translucent and multilayered, Onus’ watery landscape of trees and a riverbed of leaves features an ‘indigenised’ frog, painted in colours and designs mimicking bark painting in natural ochres from Arnhem Land. ‘Garkman’ is a generic Yolŋu name for all frog species in Arnhem Land, used by both Dhuwa and Yirritja moieties, and symbolises the wet season, celebrating the renewal of life with the coming rains.5 Onus spoke of his affinity with these creatures, which often feature in his works, following his assimilation into this community: ‘Having a skin name you know who else you’re automatically related to… you get to know all the Dhuwa creatures, so these creatures become your countrymen, they’re part of me and I’m part of them now.’6

1. Kleinert, S., ‘Aboriginal Enterprises: negotiating an urban Aboriginality’, A boriginal History, vol. 34, 2010

2. O’Ferral, M., ‘Lin Onus’, in Lynn, V. (ed.), Australian Perspecta 1991, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1991, p. 80

3. Lin Onus, cited in Leslie, D., ‘Earth, spirit and belonging in Australian art’, Spirit in the Land, McClelland Gallery + Sculpture Park, Langwarrin, 2010 – 2011, p. 19

4. ‘Jack Wunuwun - Barnumbirr the Morning Star 1987’ in Caruana, W., and Cubillo, F., Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander art: collection highlights from the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2010, p. 187

5. Boll, V., ‘The distribution and ethnozoology of frogs (and toad) in north-eastern Arnhem Land (Australia)’, Anthropozoologica, vol. 39, issue 2, 2004, p. 67

6. Lin Onus, Interview recorded with Donna Leslie, 30 Jan 1995, cited in Neale, M., Urban Dingo - the Art and Life of Lin Onus 1948 – 1996, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2000, p. 14 – 15

Lucie Reeves-Smith

12

Lin Onus (1948 – 1996)

Arafura Swamp IV, 1996

synthetic polymer paint on canvas 182.0 x 182.0 cm

signed lower right: Lin Onus bears inscription verso: SO1 ARAFURA SWAMP IV

Estimate: $300,000 – 400,000

Provenance

Private collection, Victoria, acquired directly from the artist in 1996

Related Work

Arafura Swamp, 1990, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 182.0 x 182.0 cm, in the Baillieu Myer collection of the 1980s, illus. in Neale, M., Urban Dingo: The Art and Life of Lin Onus 1948 – 1996, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p. 77

Lin Onus’ technically polished and stylistically hybrid Postmodern paintings sought to reconcile the various facets of his own cultural métissage, as a metaphor for broader political and social reconciliation, and through his art illuminate the underlying indigenous cultures of the Australian continent. A lightning rod moment came for the artist following a pivotal meeting with Yolŋu elders in Maningrida, Arnhem Land in 1986: ‘It suddenly hit me that you could paint both what you saw and what lay underneath it – what is understood – as well’, he explained in 1991.1

Thus, with a dazzling mosaic of layered representations, Onus’ immersive Arafura Swamp IV, 1996 simultaneously presents two opposing landscape views of a site of great indigenous cultural significance, Gurruwiling, the Arafura Swamp wetlands of central Arnhem Land. Incorporating in a unified vision many of his most powerful and striking stylistic devices, this painting belongs to a celebrated series of works stemming from a large work of the same name, Arafura Swamp, 1990 (Baillieu Myer Collection, Melbourne), a masterpiece of his jigsaw motif. The Yorta Yorta artist, a largely self-taught pioneer of Koori activist art, was at the height of his powers in 1996, working with Margo Neale on a large retrospective exhibition at the University of Queensland Art Museum when he suddenly passed away, at the age of 47.

Painted at the liminal hour of dusk, the sublime surface of Onus’ billabong, dotted with blooming pink water lily plants is still.

Drawing on the artistic lineage of H. J. Johnstone’s Evening Shadows, Backwater of the Murray, South Australia, 1880 (Art Gallery of South Australia), the water reflects the rhythmic, graphic

Lin Onus

Arafura Swamp, 1990

synthetic polymer paint on linen, 182.0 x 182.0 cm

Baillieu Myer Collection, 1980s

© Lin Onus/Copyright Agency 2025

black trunks of native gums, its glassy transparency revealing a bed of russet leaflitter at the bottom of the canvas. Punctured unevenly with rectangular apertures placed throughout the painted surface, Onus has compromised the integrity of this view. Revealed through these interstices is the same landscape painted in colours mimicking bark and natural earth pigments, borrowing the graphic flatness and ceremonial rarrk crosshatched motifs of local Yolŋu bark painting, whose sacredness Onus had recently been granted the authority to paint.

A self-proclaimed ‘cultural mechanic’ 2 and post-modern bricoleur, Onus found in the works of Belgian surrealist René Magritte, an artist whom he admired3, a visual deceit that he could use to illustrate explicit themes of Indigenous cultural dislocation: the treacherous double image and fragmentation using a jigsaw motif (see for example, René Magritte, The Large Family, 1963). Onus’ metaphorical dislocations disrupt and subvert assumptions on ideologies of representation and the implications of belonging and custodianship they project. The first of these works arose in the 1980s around questions of land rights and restoring cultural knowledge in the wake of destructive colonial assimilationist policies, for example, the painting Picking up the Pieces, 1986 and linocut Dislocation, 1986. Arafura Swamp IV joins a small and important group of double-image landscape paintings arising from these early works, featuring overlays and/or perforations.4

The incorporation of dual perspectives in his artworks became Onus’ picturesque and gently humorous strategy to surmount prejudiced notions of what aboriginal art could and should

René Magritte

La Grande Famille (The Large Family), 1963 oil on canvas

100.0 x 81.0 cm

look like. Self-consciously, they interrogate the process of representation itself and provide an unwavering reminder that this land is, and always has been, Aboriginal land. Originally, these fractured and spliced works referred to ‘a number of my friends who are trying to find out where they have come from, and I suppose, where they are going’, the artist elucidated in 1990.5 This search for belonging and land custodianship became more poignantly personal for the artist towards the end of his life, as he discovered his ancestry was descended from Yorta Yorta nations, and not Wiradjuri as he originally had been led to believe.6

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Lin Onus painted landscapes of his local environs around the Dandenong Ranges in a Western photorealist style, influenced by the works of older, Indigenous artists who had been successful in using a European landscape tradition to depict their ancestral lands: Ronald Bull (1942 – 1979), Revel Cooper (c.1934 – 1983), and Albert Namatjira (1902 – 1959), all of whom had visited the Onus family in Melbourne. It was Onus’ later involvement with the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council, however, that provided a transformative visit to Maningrida, NT in 1986 – a ‘spiritual awakening’ during which he met Senior Yolŋu artist, Djiwul (Jack) Wunuwun, whose ancestral lands run along the Northern edge of the Arafura Swamp, which is depicted in this painting. Over the course of dozens of subsequent pilgrimages to visit Wunuwun, Onus was adopted by and welcomed into the MurrungunDjnang clan, initiated into cultural knowledge systems and given permission to use sacred rarrk designs and storylines. Wunuwun’s philosophy of ‘seeing below the surface’ and using artistic hybridity to achieve reconciliation was also shared and adopted by Onus, explored in depth in these late water-and-reflection paintings.7

Occupying what anthropologist Levi Strauss defines as that ‘inbetween’ space between multiple worlds, the densely layered patterning of Arafura Swamp IV oscillates between two interwoven modes of viewing and systems of understanding the world, metaphorically portraying Indigenous displacement and erasure. Like the foundational Arafura Swamp, 1990, the revelation of an underlying bark design gives primacy to its ancient origins.8 The directional lines of black tree trunks and the discs of lily pads unify the two images, indicating that in the impossibility of returning to a land of pre-colonisation, the co-existence of multiple and equivalent frames of reference is a sustainable path to progress.

1. Onus, cited in Moore, F., ‘Cultures find a common cause’, Australian Financial Review, Sydney, 15 March 1991

2. Neale, M., Lin Onus, Savill Galleries, Melbourne, 2003, p. 1

3. Neale, M., Urban Dingo – the Art and Life of Lin Onus 1948 – 1996, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2000, p. 15

4. These include Jimmy’s Billabong, 1988 (National Gallery of Australia) overlaid with rarrk; Arafura Swamp, 1990 (Baillieu Myer Collection, Melbourne) with square cut-outs revealing an underlying bark painting; and Barmah Forest, 1994 (Australian Heritage Commission, Canberra) with mismatched jigsaw piece cut-outs.

5. ‘Lin Onus. Language and Lasers’, Art Monthly Supplement, no. 20, May 1990, p. 19

6. Letter, dated 14 July 1995, from Lin Onus to Art Gallery of New South Wales, AGNSW archives

7. Davis, P., ‘In Touch with an artist’s Aboriginality’, Canberra Times, 7 July 1990, p. 21 and Mundine, D., ‘Jack Wunuwun’, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia Handbook at: https://www.mca.com.au/collection/artists/jack-wunuwun/ (accessed March 2024)

8. Neale, op. cit., p. 16

Lucie Reeves-Smith

Emily Kam Kngwarreye

(c.1910 – 1996)

Yam flowers, 1994

synthetic polymer paint on linen 119.0 x 90.5 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Delmore Gallery cat. 94B023

Estimate: $50,000 – 70,000

Provenance

Commissioned by Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs, Northern Territory in February 1994 Hogarth Gallery, Sydney

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in October 1995

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Delmore Gallery which states:

‘Such exaggerated application of colours, highlights the varied and changing colours of the daisy of the Anooralya Yam mythology. This yam mythology is central to Emily Kngwarreye’s custodial responsibilities for her country called Alalgura on Utopia Station.

Emily Kngwarreye completes a canvas in one session. The “story” is applied onto a prepared black canvas, and is viewed as a seemingly unregulated and spontaneous manner of expression, often concentrating on one area, and occasionally allowing an abandoned outburst. The dotwork indicates through her main colours, red and yellow, that summer rains have fallen. In her layered approach, we see the sporadic clustered growth of plants in different stages of maturity. Understanding the life cycle of these plants is vital to survival in the bush, as is understanding the human life cycle and its needs. This knowledge is affirmed within the narrative of the song cycle sung in ceremony. Ceremony, or “awelye”, recognises the spiritual power that maintains nature’s fertility and hardness, and celebrates this to ensure the survival of future generations.’

Emily Kam Kngwarreye (c.1910 – 1996)

Untitled (Awelye), 1992

synthetic polymer paint on canvas 164.0 x 228.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, ‘Rodney Gooch’ and Mulga Bore Artists cat. 4.892

Estimate: $400,000 – 600,000

Provenance

Mulga Bore Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory

Hugh Jamieson Collection, Sydney Private collection, New South Wales

Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 18 May 2011, lot 12 (as ‘Untitled’)

Private collection, Perth

Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 27 November 2013, lot 139 (as ‘Untitled’)

Private collection, Brisbane

Exhibited

Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere, Paintings from Utopia, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 20 February – 13 April 1998, then touring to: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 May – 19 July 1998; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 8 September –22 November 1998 (label attached verso, as ‘Untitled’)

Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan, 26 February – 13 April 2008; National Art Centre, Tokyo, Japan, 28 May – 28 July 2008, cat. C–10 (as ‘Untitled’)

Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present, (curated by Hoor Al Qasimi), Sharjah Art Foundation, emirate of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, 7 February – 11 June 2023 (as ‘Untitled’)

Literature

Neale, M., Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere, Paintings from Utopia, Macmillan Publishers, Melbourne, 1998, cat. 54, pl. 67, pp. 43 (illus., detail), 60, 106 – 107 (illus.)

Neale, M. (ed.), Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, National Museum of Australia and the National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan, 2008, cat. C–10, pp. 149 (illus.), 162 (illus.), 237

This work is accompanied by a copy of the certificate of authenticity from Mulga Bore Artists.

Emily Kam Kngwarreye

Alhalkere (I), 1992

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

163.0 x 297.0 cm

Janet Holmes à Court Collection, Perth

© Emily Kam Kngwarreye/Copyright Agency 2025

Deeply rooted in the Anmatyerr land of her ancestors to whom she paid respect through a lifetime of devotion to women’s ceremony in song, dance and the ceremonial painting of bodies, the art of Emily Kam Kngwarreye reveals a deep affinity to the country and the everchanging desert landscape in her father and grandfather’s Country of Alhalker. The youngest of three children, Kngwarreye chronicled on canvas this triangular-shaped country – the place she was born, and where she lived in the ways of the eastern Anmatyerr. In the 1930s, the traditional life of the Anmatyerr and Alyawarr people was forever disrupted when the borders of the Utopia pastoral lease were drawn across their lands. Over time, many local people, including Kngwarreye, found periodic work on the emergent pastoral stations. Sixty years later, in 1977, Kngwarreye was introduced to batik as part of adult education classes held on Utopia Station hosted by Jenny Green and Julia Murray, and a decade on, in 1988 – 89, Emily painted her first work on canvas, sparking a meteoric rise to fame.

Kngwarreye’s brush strokes reveal a strength and sureness of hand that delivers an exuberance of gesture. Her paintings are constructed of various elements that over time were added to, or eliminated from, the surface of the canvas. Underlying grids structure the compositions, sequences of dots aligned between or over lines, dashes and linear marks, meandering lines, and areas of dots applied on dots that allow a buildup of layers of colour. These elements constitute the artist’s lexicon and are used separately or in varying combinations, thus allowing her work to evolve and be constantly fresh.

This vibrant painting belongs to a group of works produced between the beginning of 1992 and the end of 1993 that have been described as her ‘high-colourist period.’ 1 This phase of production was characterised by a succession of intensely bright paintings executed in a multi-coloured palette where vibrant hues are sandwiched into squares and oblongs which lead the eye up, down and across the surface in a staccato movement.2 In this work, painted for Rodney Gooch’s Mulga Bore artists in August 1992,

irregular shapes pulsate with intuitive combinations of hot pinks, citric oranges, deep blues and maroons colliding together yet contained by the rectangular shape of the canvas. These blocks of colour are formed by building-up layers of dots resulting in solid forms – a deviation from her earlier more pointillist application of dots where each defined layer of dots was expressed in the canvas.

Significantly, Untitled (Awelye), 1992 was created at a time when Kngwarreye’s painting was itself undergoing a process of transformation, with the artist abandoning the background tracery of the underlying yam roots (a consistent compositional device in her earlier paintings) and transitioning instead into fields of pure dots. Her mark-making also became looser and more expressive. Kngwarreye’s expression in paint was less inhibited; lines and dots were blurred into expansive gestures with blocks of colour replacing dots and sinuous lines. This was also a time when Kngwarreye experimented with colour and broadened her palette beyond traditional earthy hues and their derivatives, to incorporate vivid oranges, blues, greens, maroons, and pinks, as featured here. Kngwarreye suggests not only a sense of delight in the colours of the landscape; rather, now colour itself becomes both the impetus for – and subject of – such paintings.

Untitled (Awelye), 1992 belongs among a sequence of major works on a similar scale in which Kngwarreye celebrates the natural bounty of the desert in favorable seasons. Related works in this series include Alhalkere (I) painted in the winter of 1992 and held in the Janet Holmes à Court collection, Perth3; Alhalkere (V), 1992 (private collection)4; and the Alhalkere Suite, painted in October of that year, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.5

1. Neale, M., (ed.), Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, National Museum of Australia and the National Museum of Art, Osaka, p. 149

2. ibid.

3. See ibid, plate C-2, pp. 150 – 151 (illus.)

4. See ibid, plate C-4, p. 155 (illus.)

5. See ibid, plate C-7, pp. 156 – 157 (illus.)

Crispin Gutteridge

Emily Kam Kngwarreye, 1992

Photographer: Christopher Hodges

© Utopia Art Sydney

Rover Thomas (Joolama) (c.1926 – 1998)

Bow River Country, 1996

natural earth pigments and resins on canvas

76.0 x 96.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, Warringari Arts cat. S663 and Red Rock Art cat. KP196

Estimate: $60,000 – 80,000

Provenance

Private collection

Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 27 June 2000, lot 347 (as ‘Kukatja/Bow River Country’)

Caruana & Reid Fine Art, Sydney

Private collection, Western Australia, acquired from the above in 2004

Exhibited

Important Aboriginal Art, Caruana & Reid Fine Art, Sydney, November 2004

When he was a young man Rover Thomas worked as a stockman on several cattle stations in the East Kimberley. Bow River Station was one of these. Rover remembered his time at Bow River as the ‘good old days’. Occasional visits back to this place inspired him to paint it. In this map-like picture, Rover Thomas employs an impasto technique of paint application that lends the work a considered and deliberate aspect, yet it contains the vitality of his intuitive, unpredictable compositions.

Wally Caruana

Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford

(1922 – 2007)

Dingo Dreaming, 2001

natural earth pigments and synthetic binder on Belgian linen

122.0 x 135.0 cm

signed with initials verso: PB bears inscription verso: artist’s name, title and Jirrawun Arts cat. PB 8 2001-114

Estimate: $100,000 – 140,000

Provenance

Jirrawun Arts, Kununurra, Western Australia

RAFT Artspace, Alice Springs, Northern Territory

Private collection

GRANTPIRRIE Gallery, Sydney

Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2007

A Secondary Eye, Brisbane

Private collection, Brisbane, acquired from the above in 2022

Exhibited

Goowoomji Paddy Bedford, RAFT Artspace, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, October 2001

Country & Western: Landscape Re-imagined 1988 - 2013, Perc

Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, 24 July - 20 September 2015, and touring to: S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 30 October – 6 December 2015, Blue Mountains City Art Gallery, New South Wales, 8 January – 6 March 2016, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, New South Wales, 19 March – 8 May 2016; Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, 13 May – 3 July 2016; Orange Regional Gallery, New South Wales, 8 July – 28 August, 2016; Cairns Regional Gallery, Queensland, 16 September – 13 November 2016; and Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 26 November – 19 March 2017

A Secondary Eye at Sydney Contemporary 2022, Carriageworks, Sydney, 8 – 11 September 2022

Paddy Bedford: Spirit & Truth, D’Lan Contemporary, Frieze Masters, London, 9 – 13 October 2024

Literature

Michael, L. (ed.), Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 150 (illus.)

Wilson, G., Country & Western: Landscape Re-imagined, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, 2015, p. 57 (illus.)

Crafting his own unique representations of country, the paintings of Paddy Bedford evoke rocky escarpments, rivers and other amorphous features of the Kimberley landscape, whilst at the same time containing a learned and poetical knowledge of the land and its creation stories. His formal language is characterised by a symbiotic relationship between bold forms and an elegant, balanced composition. While Bedford’s early paintings engaged the use of natural ochres to depict his environment, his later works

employed a more restrained and pared-back palette, initially using only black and white, but later incorporating yellow, grey and pink washes, applied to the canvas before the previously administered layer of paint had dried, a process known as ‘wet on wet’.

Known as Goowoomji-Nyunkuny in his Gija language, Paddy Bedford is recognized as one of the most important Indigenous Australian artists. Painting his first works on discarded building materials in 1998, aged 75, he soon became noticed as an innovator and influential artist through his unique depictions of East Kimberley indigenous history which evolve the artistic tradition forged earlier by Rover Thomas and Paddy Jaminji. Born and raised on Bedford Station where he worked for rations as a stockman, Bedford also spent time on Greenvale and Bow River Stations before returning to his place of birth. As with most Aboriginal people in the eastern Kimberley, Bedford continued traditional practices and ceremony which provided the opportunities for him to paint. His first paintings in the public domain were made when he joined the Jirrawun group of artists established by Freddie Timms at Rugun (Crocodile Hole) in 1997, becoming one of the senior artists of the group.

Dingo Dreaming, 2001 relates to an episode from the dreaming or Ngarranggarni in Gija language that took place at the site of Garndiwarl, located to the south-west of Bedford Downs on a part of what is now Lansdown Station – the birthplace of the artist’s mother and one of the dreaming sites of the ancestral dingo marranyi who travelled though this country when he was a man in the ancient times before being turned into a rock at the site of Gernawarliyan, (also known as Camel Gap). Notably, the name of this place is taken from a type of tree used to make spear throwers or woomeras known as the bats-wing coral tree or Garndiwarl (Erythrina verspertillo).

Bedford painted with a deep sense of cultural responsibility. Throughout much of his professional practice this respected senior Gija artist and lawman painted stories from the countries of his mother, father, and uncle. He was major custodian of three significant sites – Emu Dreaming, Bush Turkey Dreaming and Cockatoo Dreaming – and his idiosyncratic depictions of these bestows a visual re-presentation of Indigenous cultural memory that contributes to a growing body of work promoting the decolonisation of Australian history.

Crispin Gutteridge

Timothy Cook born 1958

Kulama, 2014

natural earth pigments and natural binders on linen

184.0 x 244.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Jilamara Arts and Crafts cat. 226–14

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Provenance

Jilamara Arts and Crafts, Melville Island, Northern Territory Private collection, Melbourne

Timothy Cook is renowned for his paintings of the traditional Kulama (or yam) ceremony, an annual celebration of life for the Tiwi people and an important initiation ritual for young men. The ceremony occurs late in the wet season, in conjunction with the yearly tiyoni (yam) harvest period, that coincides with a time when a halo appears around the moon (Japara). Kulama runs for three days and nights with ritual body painting, dancing and singing, and yams specially prepared for cooking and eating. Although it is understood that Cook was not initiated, Kulama remains the recurring motif in his mature work.

Kulama, 2014 is an expansive and powerful painting charged with energy. Painted on a black ground (a reference to the usual practice of body painting), the composition features large

concentric circles in single uneven lines that push out from the centre motif, mimicking the circles on the ground used in the Kulama ceremony. The circles are infilled either with bands of thick white and yellow ochre, or swathed with a spread of red, yellow and white ochre dots. With its floating expanses of white and black, the painting radiates a glittering, almost celestial power symbolic of the sky, stars and moon. The concentric circles in the centre of the work thus may represent the shape of the yam, the illuminated dancing ground, or the halo of the full moon.

Timothy Cook was the winner of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Art Award (NATSIAA) in 2012, and has been shortlisted for many others, including the Hadley Art Award in 2019, the Wynne Prize in 2020, and the Sulman Prize in 2023.

18 Kitty Kantilla (Kutuwulumi Purawarrumpatu) (c.1928 – 2003)

Parlini Jilamara, 2002

natural earth pigments and synthetic binder on linen 98.0 x 76.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Jilamara Arts and Crafts cat. 162–02

Estimate: $30,000 – 40,000

Provenance

Jilamara Arts and Crafts, Melville Island, Northern Territory (stamped verso)

Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2002

Joel Fine Art, Melbourne, 3 June 2008, lot 12

Private collection, Melbourne

‘I will paint until the day I die.’1

‘Kitty Kantilla was one of Australia’s most remarkable Indigenous artists, celebrated for her innovation, unique style and mastery of a range of mediums... She produced an extraordinary body of work from the 1970s until her last days in 2003. In her hands the magic of Tiwi culture was translated into works of international significance.’ 2

‘Her poetics of intimacy taught the art world that quality is not contingent upon scale. Her means were few: she needed only dots, lines and ochre colours to create infinite variations of rhythm, balance and beauty, of which no two are exactly alike. Kantilla’s works, like those of early European modernists, do not map space or tell a story, but radically affirm the painted surface and thereby guarantee the autonomy of art. Yet the power and inwardness of Kantilla’s innovative art hinges on its deep resonance with customary ritual. For the viewer, Kantilla’s inescapably modern works are also highly charged with ceremony, with something spiritual and untouchable…

Kantilla’s sophisticated form of abstraction eludes explanation in terms of narrative because she strenuously pursued her art from deep within her culture. By painting, Kantilla was also singing and dancing: she sensed and invoked holistically, through a special music of natural ochre and design, the decorated objects, the painted dancers and their kinetic movement, the percussive rhythm and dynamism of ceremony. This was her Tiwi-ness, her identity: it drove her to make art and was her special form of activism; painting was central to her identity...’3

1. Kantilla, cited in Ryan, J., ‘Kitty Kantilla’, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007 at http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/kittykantilla/background.html

2. ‘KITTY KANTILLA’, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007 at http://archive. artgallery.nsw.gov.au/media/archives_2007/kitty_kantilla/

3. Ryan, op. cit.

19 Mathaman Marika (c.1916

– 1970)

Bremer Island battle, c.1961

natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark

144.5 x 73.0 cm (irregular)

bears inscription on label verso: artist’s name and a description of the story depicted

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Provenance

Executed at Yirrkala, North East Arnhem-Land, Northern Territory

J. A. Davidson Collection, Melbourne Argus Gallery, Melbourne

Alan Boxer Collection, Canberra

Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 24 June 2002, lot 53

Private collection, Sydney

This work is accompanied by text on a distressed label verso which states:

‘This is sacred to the Rirratjingu tribe and is at Bremer Island (just off the coast of Yirrkala, North East Arnhem Land). The top section shows two men Woorolonga and Danaitschanga, paddling in a canoe to the Cape Wilberforce. Here they meet Buglitbi, their brother who tells them that an enemy tribe is approaching. The figures carrying spears and woomeras are the enemy and the seated figures are women watching on. The bottom picture shows the two men and their two wives returning to Bremer Is. in a canoe where they wait for the enemy. Buglitbi arrives soon after in his canoe which he leaves anchored out with his son minding it. Buglitbi tells them that the enemy is near so Woorolonga and Danaitschanga pick up their spears and woomeras (lower right) and run to the beach. But Buglitbi is a traitor and he throws a spear at their backs. Danaitschanga is killed. Woorolonga swims out to Buglitbi’s canoe but Buglitbi calls out to his son to pull the anchor up and to kill his uncle. The enemy arrives and takes the wounded man onto the shore and spear him until he dies. Then they take the two bodies to the cemetery (rectangle). Their sister, who is also Buglitbi’s wife, starts to wail.

The enemy tribe sit around with their spears sticking up in the ground beside them. Then they go to another place and make camp.’

Noŋgirrŋa

Marawili

(c.1939 – 2023)

Baratjala, 2018

natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark

222.0 x 71.0 cm (irregular)

bears inscription verso: Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre cat. 3310–18

bears inscription on label verso: artist’s name and Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre cat. 3310–18 bears inscription on label verso: Alcaston Gallery cat. AK21535

Estimate: $40,000 – 60,000

Provenance

Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala, Northern Territory Private collection, Adelaide, acquired from the above in 2020

Exhibited

Noŋgirrŋa Marawili – Baratjala: Sea Spray and Lightning Strike, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, 21 November – 21 December 2018, cat. 8 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

Tarnanthi, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 18 October 2019 –27 January 2020

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre.

Noŋgirrŋa Marawili’s lines and dotted chains of white clay radiating from the intense black rock forms cover the natural raw bark surface of Baratjala, 2018. This network of jagged parallel lines upon a monumental sheet of gently undulating stringybark evoke the movement of water at Baratjala, where the artist camped as a child. Painted with swift confidence, the painting preserves smudged fingerprints and uneven brushstrokes which attest to the artist’s hand and physical presence. Her art is intuitive and immediate. It is characterised by modified forms of sacred clan crosshatching and sections of open space, anticanonical for Arnhem land bark painting. Baratjala, 2018 like many of Noŋgirrŋa’s mature works, demonstrates a bold divergence in Yolŋu art towards personal expression, liberated from the male responsibility of upholding of strictly codified practice but continuing to assert sovereignty over country.

The past two decades have seen an explosion of innovation in the development of Yolŋu bark painting, an avant-garde movement led by senior female practitioners working respectfully within the laws of their ancient culture while harnessing the potency of their individual artistic voices. The concrete courtyard of BukuLarrŋgay Mulka Centre, a community-run arts centre in Yirrkala, has been the nexus of this movement, fostering a collaborative environment for artists such as sisters Gulumbu and Nyapanyapa Yunipiŋu and Noŋgirrŋa Marawili. Their secular and boldly

contemporary works on bark and on larrakitj (memorial poles) have become renowned both nationally and internationally, keenly collected by national institutions and private collectors alike.

Noŋgirrŋa was born to an important Yolŋu family, one of many children of famed warrior-leader Mundukul Marawili of the Madarrpa clan. Her father died when she was young, never witnessing a time in which women were permitted to paint and before he could teach Noŋgirrŋa the sacred miny’tji designs of their people transmitted through countless generations. Without the authority to use these detailed ceremonial markings, crucial for painting the sites and songlines of the Madarrpa clan lands, Noŋgirrŋa’s artwork focusses instead on warraŋul (outside meaning) and associated sites of lesser sanctity, while remaining faithful to the Yolŋu belief system.

The Madarrpa are Yirritja moiety saltwater people, with their lands extending from Blue Mud Bay into the cyclonic and tidal waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria, beneath which Mundukul, the ancestral lightning snake lives. For Noŋgirrŋa, while the men are entitled to sing the songlines of the ‘big waters’ of the sacred snake, she can paint ‘ideas, from the waters that form the outside part of the story.’ 1 While the spraying and rippling movements and exchanges of energy between the water and lightning form the subject matter and linear designs in most of Noŋgirrŋa’s paintings2, the large circles and rectangles represent the sacred rocks set in deep water at Baratjala, a significant place of knowledge for her clan. Also, the title of this work, ‘Baratjala’ was an anchorage point for Macassan trepangers from Sulawesi, who visited the area and interacted with the Yolŋu for several centuries until the early 20th century.

Noŋgirrŋa has painted this area of coastline since 2011, and her critical acclaim has brought significant attention to Yolŋu art and this remote area of the Northern Territory. Her late husband, Djutadjutja Munuŋgurr of the Djapu clan, also had secondary custodianship of Baratjala, reflecting a reciprocal relationship between the two clans. By virtue of Noŋgirrŋa’s respectful adherence to Yolŋu law and customs, she has been recognised by her people as caretaker and quiet custodian of Baratjala. Her role in the community as a senior Elder is to uphold this ancient area of cross-cultural connection and keep it alive, both physically and cosmologically.

1. The artist, quoted in Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, University of Virginia [https:// madayin.kluge-ruhe.org/experience/pieces/baratjala-baratjala-2/ ] (accessed 20/02/23)

2. The Top End of the Northern Territory experiences an extraordinarily high number of daily lightning strikes during the wet season from November to April.

Lucie Reeves-Smith

21 Balang Nakurulk (Mr Mawurndjul) (1952 – 2024)

Ngalyod, 1993

natural earth pigments on eucalyptus tetradonta bark

198.0 x 66.0 cm (irregular)

bears inscription on label verso: artist’s name, medium, language group and Maningrida Arts and Culture cat. 1233

Estimate: $50,000 – 70,000

Provenance

Maningrida Arts and Culture, Maningrida, Northern Territory Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in December 2007

Exhibited

John Mawurndjul, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in association with Maningrida Arts and Culture, Melbourne, 20 November – 22 December 2007

Literature

Kohen, A., Taylor, L., and Altman, J., John Mawurndjul, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 2007, p. 31 (illus.)

‘My head is full up with ideas.’1

Original and uniquely Australian, the art of Balang Nakurulk (Mr Mawurndjul) was the culmination of decades of learning and the fine-tuning of his craft over time, resulting in a distinct record of country and an individual style of storytelling subtly contained within his intricate and beautiful paintings on bark.

Since he first began painting in the late 1970s, Balang quietly transformed Kuningku bark painting. His early works of figures and creatures in Kuningku mythology evolved into a more metaphysical representation of specific sites, events and landscape that serve as a link between the spiritual and human worlds. Nowhere is this evolution more evident than in his renditions of Ngalyod, The Rainbow Serpent – an omnipotent and significant creature in Kuninjku cosmology associated with the creation of all sacred sites, djang, in Kuninjku clan lands.

‘I always thought about Ngalyod and how to paint it… In [early] pictures, I use dot infill like the old people, but now I have changed, I have my own style, my own ideas, you don’t see dot infill anymore… I went and painted bigger barks… Ngalyod is very powerful and dangerous... I paint her from my thoughts.’ 2

Ngalyod appears as a subject in his early paintings but as Balang’s knowledge grows through the guidance of his late elder brother, Jimmy Njiminjuma, and his participation in ritual ceremonies, his work reflects the more transformative power of Ngalyod. His paintings become representative of the destructive potential of this being and ‘many of his works, particularly the Ngalyod paintings, act as definitive warnings to family, friends and visitors alike, illustrating the vengeful capacity of beings to punish transgressors or those who do not have ritual authority.’3

‘Rainbow Serpents are found in many places in both dua and yirridjdja moiety. They live in the earth under the ground or in bodies of water at places such as Dilebang or Benedjangngarlwend.

The white clay in the ground at Kudjarnngal is the faeces of the serpent. Waterlilies at certain places tell us that the Rainbow Serpent lives there. When the wet season storms come, we can see her in the sky (as a Rainbow). She makes the rain. When the floodwaters of the wet season rise, we say the Rainbow Serpent is making the electrical storms of the monsoon wet season. Rainbow Serpents are dangerous, just like crocodiles, they can kill people and other animals.’4

As Mawurndjul relates above, Ngalyod resides in the waterholes and water courses. Waterlilies growing around their edges may indicate the presence of Ngalyod and Kuninjku are careful not

to damage the lilies or disturb the still bodies of water so as not to anger the spirit. The power of Ngalyod is evident in this early version from 1993 which features the profile of the Serpent’s head clearly distinguished in vivid white clay to the top of the bark, while its powerful curling body pushes out to the borders of the bark support covered with shimmering fields of ochre rarrk extending to the corners. Creatures and plants from the waterhole are pushed to the bottom of the composition, and energy radiates from the painting – indicating the potential power within that is both lifegiving and rejuvenating, and, at the same time, destructive.

Balang’s paintings have pioneered a new interpretation of Kuningku clan sites and djang that inspire the next generation of bark painters. Constantly striving for new ways to interpret country, his innovative use of rarrk to map important locations is evident in the fine lineal clan designs spread across the surface of his paintings, creating shifting patterns of grids that are rendered in fine interlocking lines. As Hetti Perkins writes ‘His works, lovingly crafted and sculpted depictions of flora and fauna, ancestral events, supernatural beings, significant sites and encrypted ceremonial designs are at once country and mnemonic of country.’ 5

Balang’s art is universally celebrated and accordingly, has been included in many seminal exhibitions at major galleries and museums, both within Australia and abroad, including: Dreamings, New York (1988); Crossroads, Japan (1992); and Aratjara: Art of the first Australians, Germany and England (1993 – 94). ln 2000, his work was featured at the Sydney Biennale and in 2004, twentytwo of Balang’s works were curated by Hetti Perkins in Crossing Country at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Significantly, Balang has also been honoured with two major retrospective exhibitions of his work: rarrk – John Mawurndjul: Journey Through Time in Northern Australia at the Musee Jean Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland in 2005, and John Mawurndjul, I am the Old and the New, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2018. The recipient of four Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, and the winner of the prestigious Clemenger Prize at the National Gallery of Victoria in in 2003, Balang was awarded an Order of Australia in 2010 ‘for service to the preservation of Aboriginal culture as the foremost exponent of the Rarrk visual art style.’6

1. Mawurndjul, cited in John Mawurndjul, I am the Old and the New, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2018, p. 336

2. Mawurndjul, Interview with Apolline Kohen, cited in Kaufmann, C., et al., rarrk – John Mawurndjul: Journey Through Time in Northern Australia, Crawford House Publishing Australia, Belair, South Australia, 2005, pp. 25 – 26

3. Perkins H., ‘Mardayin Maestro’ in John Mawurndjul, I am the Old and the New, op. cit., p. 26

4. Mawurndjul, cited in John Mawurndjul, ibid., p. 200

5. Perkins, op. cit., p. 21

6. https://honours.pmc.gov.au/honours/search?searchText=john%20Mawurndjul (accessed 15 February 2025)

Crispin Gutteridge

Balang Nakurulk (Mr Mawurndjul)

Ngalyod, c.1981

natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark

120.0 x 61.5 cm

Berndt Museum Collection, The University of Western Australia, Perth

© Balang Nakurulk (Mr Mawurndjul)/Copyright Agency 2025

Balang Nakurulk (Mr Mawurndjul)

Ngalyod Rainbow Serpent, 2004 natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark

148.0 x 63.0 cm

Private collection

© Balang Nakurulk (Mr Mawurndjul)/Copyright Agency 2025

Balang Nakurulk (Mr Mawurndjul) (1952 – 2024)

Milmilngkan site, 2008

natural earth pigments with synthetic binder on eucalyptus tetradonta bark

130.0 x 53.0 cm (irregular)

bears inscription on label attached verso: artist’s name, subject, medium, size, language group and Maningrida Arts and Culture cat. 1239–08

Estimate: $18,000 – 25,000

Provenance

Maningrida Arts and Culture, Maningrida, Northern Territory (label attached verso)

Private collection, New South Wales Cooee Art, Sydney, 27 November 2018, lot 44 (as ‘Mardayin at Dilebang’)

Private collection, Sydney

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Maningrida Arts and Culture which states:

‘John Mawurndjul has depicted Mardayin at Milmilngkan. The billabong at Milmilngkan is where Ngalyod – the rainbow serpent – resides under the water.

Kuninjku people say there are two Rainbow serpents. One is Yingarna who is said to have been the original creator of all ancestral beings, the ‘first mother’. Yingarna’s first born is the Rainbow serpent called Ngalyod. Yingarna – the rainbow serpent – or her son Ngalyod are common subject on contemporary Kuninjku bark paintings.

Ngalyod is very important in Kuninjku cosmology and is associated with the creation of all sacred sites, djang, in Kuninjku clan lands. For example, ancestral stories relate how creators or ancestral beings had travelled across the country and had angered Ngalyod who swallowed them and returned to the earth to create the site. Today, Ngalyod protects these sites and its power is present in each one. Ngalyod has both powers of creation and destruction and is most strongly associated with rain, monsoon seasons and rainbows which are a manifestation of Ngalyod’s power and presence. Ngalyod is associated with the destructive power of the storms and with plenty of the wet season, being both a destroyer and a giver of life. Ngalyod’s power controls the fertility of the country and the seasons.

John Mawurndjul lives at Milmilngkan near this billabong and says that underneath the water lies the power of Ngalyod. In this painting, he depicts the power of the place with rarrk – cross-hatching – which contains Mardayin power.’

Makinti Napanangka

(c.1930 – 2011)

Lupulnga, 2004

synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen 121.5 x 92.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Papunya Tula Artists cat. MN0408018

Estimate: $18,000 – 25,000

Provenance

Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory Suzanne O’Connell Gallery, Brisbane Private collection, Canberra, acquired from the above in 2011

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists which states:

‘This painting depicts designs associated with the rockhole site of Lupulnga, south of the Kintore community. The Peewee (small bird) Dreaming is associated with this site. A group of women visited the site before continuing their travels north to Kintore. The lines in the painting represent spun hair-string which is used in the making of hair-belts worn during the ceremonies associated with the area.’

24

Doreen

Reid Nakamarra

(c.1955 – 2009)

Untitled, 2007

synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

182.0 x 120.5 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Papunya Tula Artists cat. DR0712084

Estimate: $30,000 – 40,000

Provenance

Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited

Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards 2009, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 25 July – 15 November 2009 (label attached verso)

Related Work

Untitled, 2007, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 183.0 x 244.0 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, illus. in Clark, D., and Jenkins, S., Culture warriors: Australian Indigenous art triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2007, pp. 133

In 1996, Doreen Reid was one of a small group of women at Kiwirrkurra who painted their first paintings for Papunya Tula Artists. Over time her compositional range developed along with her output, and by 2003, she had developed a paredback minimalist style reflecting her individual interpretation of traditional stories. Characterised by fine dichromatic linework and subtle shifts of colour, such transition saw Nakamarra now producing meandering zigzag compositions resulting in intricately optical paintings, exemplified here by Untitled, 2007.

Paul Sweeney, then long-term Manager of Papunya Tula Artists, wrote in the exhibition catalogue for Culture Warriors: Australian Indigenous Art Triennial in 2007 that ‘Nakamarra is a quiet achiever who has been gradually honing her skills over the last decade. Her

combination of fine brushwork and precise technique has ensured that even her smallest works are highly detailed. On the larger formats, her current style of finely drawn zigzags, combined with broken lines of alternate coloured dotting, creates an optical effect in which the canvas appears to rise and fall like a series of meandering ridges and valleys. These are tali, or sandhills, which surround all the major women’s sites at Kiwirrkurra that Doreen refers to in her work. Doreen has expanded on the theme and recently introduced an even more subtle use of colour, using two or sometimes three slight tonal variations, and combining them with the complex, wavering line work that has become synonymous with her signature pieces.1

Crispin Gutteridge

1. Sweeney, P., ‘Doreen Reid Nakamarra’ in Clark, D., and Jenkins, S., Culture Warriors: Australian Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2007, p. 132

Makinti Napanangka (c.1930 – 2011)

Peewee, 2002

synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen 153.0 x 122.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Papunya Tula Artists cat. MN0208047

Estimate: $30,000 – 40,000

Provenance

Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne Private collection, Victoria Lawson~Menzies, Sydney, 14 November 2007, lot 56 Private collection, Melbourne Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited

Annual Collectors’ Exhibition, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 1 October – 8 November 2008

Senior Pintupi artist Makinti Napanangka was born at Mangarri, near Lake Macdonald, on the border of the Northern Territory and Western Australia. She was one of the original women who joined in the mid-1990s the artistic movement at Papunya Tula Arts, the crucible of contemporary Indigenous painting. Developing from the painting assistance many women already provided to their male relatives in Balgo, Warmun and Utopia in the mid-1980s, some art centres began to encourage works made independently by female artists, almost twenty years after the expressions of the Western Desert artists.1 The late flowering of female painting at Papunya was fostered by workshops and cultural exchanges between the women of the settlement at Walungurru (Kintore) and their kinswomen at Ikuntji Women’s Centre at Haasts Bluff.2 Here, Napanganka and her peers pioneered a new form of Western Desert painting characterised by free-form expressive brushwork, strong saturated colours and richly textured surfaces. Diverging from the men’s schematic and austere paintings of Dreaming Law, the women’s vital and radiant paintings express the jubilation of ceremonies at sacred sites on Country, a daring second wave of artistic revolution.

Vibrating with rhythmic free-hand striations of sunflower yellow and white, Peewee, 2002 is a mature, light-flooded work by Makinti Napanagka, painted after her vision had been restored following cataract surgery in 1999. This painting, like most in her oeuvre, refers to traditional life remembered and reestablished on country, and a sacred water source for which the artist has inherited custodianship in the temporal world. The Peewee (also known as the Magpielark, one of the Northern Territory’s native and protected species)

is associated with an important Dreaming at the rockhole site of Lupulnga, south of the Kintore community. Lupulnga and the Peewee Tjukurrpa are one of Napangka’s principal stories, featuring often in her paintings alongside designs associated with the travels of the Kungka Kutjarra (Two Ancestral Women), who sang the land and visited the site on their way north to Kaakuratintja, Lake Macdonald. The recurring and all-over thickly painted rows of quivering lines and arcs commemorate the ceremonies at this site, particularly evoking the movement of nymparra, the hand-spun hair-string skirts worn by lead dancers, including Napanangka herself. The viscous impasto of Napanangka’s paint and its haptic texture replicate the generous application of ochre body paint in these women’s ceremonies.3

Makinti Napanangka was quickly established as one of the most senior women painting with Papunya Tula, which she officially joined as a shareholder and independent artist in 1996. In 2000, her innovative and energetic work was included in the major retrospective exhibition Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and in 2003, in the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2008, Napanangka won the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, her untitled painting of Lupulnga acclaimed by judge Judy Watson for its ‘inner light, and [it] outshines everything else.’4

1. McLean, I., Rattling Spears. A History of Australian Indigenous Art, Reaktion Books, Melbourne, 2016, pp. 152 – 56

2. Perkins, H., and Fink, H. (eds.), Papunya Tula. Genesis and Genuis, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2000, p. 197

3. Perkins, H., and West, M. (eds.), One Sun, One Moon: Aboriginal Art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p. 187

4. The Courier Mail, Brisbane, 17 August 2008

Lucie Reeves-Smith

Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra (c.1932

– 2020)

Women’s travelling bush tucker ceremony, 1972

synthetic polymer paint on composition board

51.0 x 46.0 cm

Estimate: $15,000 – 20,000

Provenance

Private collection, purchased directly from the artist at Papunya in 1972

Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 28 June 1999, lot 79 (as ‘Untitled (Women’s Ceremony)’)

Private collection, Tasmania

Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 24 July 2007, lot 249

Private collection, Sydney

Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 18 May 2011, lot 155

Private collection, Melbourne

Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra was born at Kalipinypa, a major Water Dreaming site, northeast of Walungurru, in his mother’s country. When Long Jack was a teenager, he and his family group walked into Haasts Bluff, where he worked as a timber cutter and stockman. From 1962, he moved with his family to Papunya where he gained employment as a grounds man and was a member of the community council. A deeply religious man, he was both a missionary and pastor for the Western Desert People, as well as being highly learned in traditional culture.

In 1971, Tjakamarra, along with Billy Stockman, painted small murals around the Papunya School – preceding the major Honey Ant murals collaboration by Papunya artists. These early works were highly iconographic, often made up of simple geometric shapes, such as roundels, ovoid forms and crescent shapes. He painted water, Wallaby, Kingfisher, Dingo, Possum, Emu and Women’s Dreamings. Equally at home with Ngaliya/Warlpiri artists, such as Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, as he was with his Pintupi classificatory uncle, Uta Uta Tjangala, Women’s travelling bush tucker ceremony, 1972 was most likely painted in late 1972, with the symmetrical composition and mirroring components suggesting the strong influence of Kaapa.

Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri (c.1926

– 1998)

Untitled, 1987

synthetic polymer paint on linen

121.5 x 182.5 cm

bears inscription verso: Papunya Tula Artists cat. MN871234

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Provenance

Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1987

Related Works

For detailed analysis and several illustrations of related paintings depicting the artist’s Kangaroo Dreaming see O’ Halloran, A. B., The Master of Marnpi, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Pintupi man and award-winning Papunya Tula Artist, Sydney, 2018, pp. 181 – 187

This painting was originally sold with an accompanying certificate that stated:

‘The Two Kangaroo Dreaming at the site of Watukarrinya, to the south¬ east of the Kintore Community, is depicted in this painting. The roundel is a rockhole at the site. The straight lines are a windbreak, and the rectangular shapes show where the kangaroos slept. Because of the secret nature of the ceremonies associated with this site, the artist did not give any further detail.’

George Ward Tjungurrayi born

c.1945

Untitled, 2004

synthetic polymer paint on linen

183.0 x 244.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Papunya Tula Artists cat. GW0404200

Estimate: $50,000 – 70,000

Provenance

Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory Palya Art, Darwin Private collection, Adelaide, acquired from the above in 2005

When George Ward Tjungurrayi won the prestigious Wynne Prize for landscape painting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2004, he was at the time only the second Indigenous artist to be awarded that honour. Born in the desert in Western Australia, he is the half-brother of renown painters, Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi and Willy Tjungurrayi. Relocated with his family to the Papunya settlement by the Northern Territory Welfare Branch in the 1960s, Geroge Ward worked as a butcher and fencer. Moving in the 1980s to Kiwirrkura, deep in Pintupi territory, inspired him to begin painting. His first exhibition was held in 1990, and his work has since been shown in group and solo shows throughout Australia and around the world.

The Pintupi had a profound influence on the emergence of Western Desert art in Papunya from the early 1970s, with artists such as his half-brother Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, together with Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Uta Uta Tjangala and Antatjari Tjakamarra, rendering on board and canvas sacred accounts of the Tingari ancestors’ mythological creation stories and their effect on the natural landscape. Their success and resultant advocacy

for their people’s return to country lead to the establishment of the homeland settlements of Kintore and Kiwirrkura in the 1980s. Originally adapted from and reflecting the potency of ritual sand drawings and incised objects, the paintings of Western desert artist evolved over decades to become an internationally recognised contemporary art movement.

A captivating work, Untitled, 2004 is a fine example of the artist’s designs and mesmerising compositions – featuring compressed and expanding Tingari square designs of fine meandering black lines and shimmering stippled white dots on an ochre ground. Most likely depicting the site of Karrkurritinytja (Lake MacDonald), Untitled tells of the travels of the Tingari, as they moved across the landscape performing rituals and creating particular sites. On the most literal interpretation, like many other Western Desert paintings, this work can be read as a ‘map’, a topographical aerial view of ancestral lands combined with a codified mnemonic system of symbols conveying tjukurrpa and ceremonies associated with this site.

Crispin

Gutteridge

Angelina Pwerle (Ngale) born

c.1946

Anookitja (bush plum), 2019

synthetic polymer paint on linen 151.5 x 151.5 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, title, Artlore (Marc Gooch) cat. 1–419 and Niagara Galleries cat. 21403

Estimate: $45,000 – 65,000

Provenance

Painted at Rocket Range, Utopia, via Alice Springs, Northern Territory Niagara Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited

Angelina Pwerle: Bush Plum and Beyond, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 7 – 24 July 2021, cat. 3 (label attached verso)

Angelina Pwerle painted her first work on canvas, Rainbow Awelye, for ‘A Summer Project’ – the December 1988 Utopia art survey in new media (acrylic paint and canvas). The majority of artists participating in this landmark show were members of the Utopia Women’s Batik (UWB) Group with a decade of batik practice behind them. Angelina Pwerle was one of the few exceptions. For her, ‘A Summer Project’ presented, rather, the earliest opportunity she had to join with the larger UWB group before becoming a pre-eminent artist in her own right, as did a handful of others who emerged in the Project’s creative aftermath.

The first painting project was initiated by Rodney Gooch, the dynamic manager of CAAMA Shop, which was also the agency for Utopia artists.1 Gooch was pivotal in translating the distinguished Utopia batik movement into a new dimension. Paint and canvas were rapidly followed by other experimental projects and developments, including sculpture. It was in this fertile period of the 1990s that Angelina Pwerle, with the support of her Melbourne dealer, Niagara Galleries, established a singular presence in the fields of painting and sculpture. Pwerle (also known by the skin name Ngale) thus entered the new millennium as one of Utopia’s leading artists, with her figurative sculptures and mesmeric, often monumental paintings of Arnwekety (the ‘Bush Plum’) attracting a strong following. This creation story, belonging to the artist’s ancestral country, Ahalpere, was also central to a small school of Bush Plum painters based at Camel Camp where Angelina has mainly resided throughout her career.

However, in October 2016, following the death of her close friend, Gladdy Kemarre, who was also a celebrated painter of the Bush Plum, Angelina moved away from Camel Camp. Entering a period of deep mourning named ‘sorry business’, she initially relocated to a camp called New Store at Arlparra; after this transition, she

did not paint for her Artlore agents for over a year. Then, in March 2018, she moved to Rocket Range where she resumed painting in the supportive company of the Morton family with whom she shared a long association. The positive outcome of this move for Angelina is reflected in the energy, scale, and superb technical mastery of this large canvas painted a year later in April 2019.

Unique to Angelina Pwerle’s ‘Bush Plum’ paintings for Niagara Galleries is the use of a single wooden skewer to execute her signature dot work, differentiating the paintings from others in which she used bundles of skewers to achieve her all-over mark making. For this reason, she affectionately refers to Niagara Galleries director Bill Nuttall as ‘Bill one-stick’. Anookitja (bush plum), 2019 is a densely articulated single stick painting and one of the last in which she used this demanding technique.

Covered in the soft nebulae of fine marks that characterise earlier paintings, the surface of Anookitja (bush plum) is more strongly inflected. The canvas is a highly active field, an extract of country densely signposted with topographic elements—tracks, paths and mounds formed from dots. Fine angular road-like lines, short and long, criss-cross the canvas. Elsewhere, dots cluster in groups of greater or lesser transparency, anchoring the viewer to the surface or drawing the eye to looser aggregations that act like portals to the beyond. Unusual are the solitary, bright points of white, pinpricks lighting up the canvas like the desert outposts seen through the window of a plane at night – lights that make you wonder who is there and what is going on. Yet, however much Angelina Pwerle’s abstractions might draw the viewer into subjective reveries and speculation, they are nevertheless only ever about the real world of Arnwekety and Ahalpere, ancestor and country.

1. I would like to thank Artlore’s Marc Gooch and Janet Pierce for conversations about the work of Angelina Pwerle whom they represented for over fifteen years.

Anne Brody

Emily Kam Kngwarreye

(c.1910 – 1996)

Life cycle III, 1994

synthetic polymer paint on linen

121.0 x 91.5 cm

signed verso: Emlly [sic]

bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Delmore Gallery cat. 94G016

Estimate: $60,000 – 80,000

Provenance

Commissioned by Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs, Northern Territory in 1994

The Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 26 February 2017, lot 85 Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited on long term loan to the Aboriginal Art Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Emily Kngwarreye: Paintings and Prints from the Thomas Vroom Collection, Olsen Irwin Gallery, Sydney, 6 – 24 July 2016, cat. 11 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Delmore Gallery.

Undoubtedly one of Australia’s greatest painters of the twentieth century, Emily Kam Kngwarreye’s success came after a lifetime making art – initially in her role of ceremonial leader, painting the bodies of fellow Anmatjerre women for ceremony, subsequently as a prominent member of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group and finally, in the later years of her life, sustaining the unprecedented demand for her paintings following the successes of her early exhibitions.

Often a response to the everchanging landscape of her traditional homelands at Alhalker (Alalgura) close to Utopia, north east of Alice Springs, the paintings of country by Emily Kngwarreye record her acute observation, often in minute detail, of the shifting fluctuations in the state of the flora around her, alerting her to the readiness of bush food or medicinal plants. Painted in 1994, Life cycle III celebrates the post-summer dryness, where a muted carpet of scattered seeds and grasses dot the landscape yet despite the dryness, underground tuber vegetables and certain berries are ripe for picking. Judith Ryan notes that, ‘clearly Emily Kngwarreye was a mark-maker extraordinaire…. she ventured further with masses of dots and marks, making intimate and grand gestures layering and intensifying the dots to the exclusion of graphic elements.’ 1 Here the layers of white, yellow, purple, and burnt sienna dots, in many places applied by the artist using her fingers, faithfully evoke

the colours of her country, while the ground may be seen as the spread of the roots of Emily Kam Kngwarrere’s totemic yam plant underground, and the spread of ancestral forces through the earth.

The accompanying certificate notes, ‘On this canvas, the artist’s choice of yellow represents the most important plant in her custodianship, namely the ‘Anooralya’, a hardy and fertile plant that provides both a tuber vegetable and a seed-bearing flower called ‘kame’ – Emily’s tribal name. Other colours reflect the time of the season when particular bush flowers flourish. These flowers contain seeds that are collected to make types of seed cake, damper, medicines and love potions. The presence of purple symbolises the ‘nterkwe’, or bush plum, when plump and ripe enough to eat. The dots being placed in lines connect with the practice of anointing the body with lineal designs during ceremony, thus adding another dimension of celebration in the execution of this painting.

Ceremony reinforces through narrative, the significance of this knowledge. As well, it teaches basic social codes and obligations. Through her paintings, she serves to reinforce her knowledge amongst those who are to carry on after her.’ 2

Following in the wake of the success of Western Desert painting, Emily Kngwarreye became nationally and internationally recognised for the way in which her painting intuitively responded to her specific cultural experience. The many stylistic shifts she effortlessly adopted allowed her work to evolve yet be constantly fresh.

1. Ryan, J. cited in Isaacs, J. et al., Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, p. 77

2. Taken from the accompanying certificate of authenticity from Delmore Gallery.

Crispin Gutteridge

Boxer Milner Tjampitjin

(c.1934 – 2009)

Kururrungka, 2001

synthetic polymer paint on linen

150.0 x 100.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Warlayirti Artists cat. 43/01

Estimate: $15,000 – 20,000

Provenance

Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills, Western Australia Palya Art, Darwin Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2001

Related Work

Purkitji (Sturt Creek), 2001, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 180.0 x 120.0 cm, in the collection of Fiona Brockhoff, illus. in Carty, J., Balgo: Creating Country, UWA Press, Crawley, 2021, p. 247

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Warlayirti Artists which states:

‘Kururrungku is the community where Boxer presently lives, west of Balgo at the top of the Canning Stock Route in WA. This painting represents both the place and land of Kururrungku “this is the ground where we stop here”. Boxer’s use of colours represents the vegetation and bushes in the late dry and early wet season.’

Boxer Milner’s paintings of water, storms, rain, flowing rivers and floods are unique in the canon of Balgo art. Born on banks of a river in the 1930s, he spent much of his life as a stockman on Sturt Creek Station and indeed, it was only when he was too old to continue that life that he took up painting. While other Balgo artists were painting rock holes and water sources found underground, Boxer was painting water coming from the sky and flowing across the landscape. ‘He was painting the force of water, not its eternal qualities but its transformative ones – the way it shapes the land and the people who belong to it.’ 1 Boxer painted mostly Purkitji, the flood plain that extends out from Sturt Creek, and Walyarra, the flooding, but also other watery sites such as Lake Gregory and the rivers and tributaries that emerge after rain.

A renowned colourist, he shunned the traditional ochres and desert palette, instead mixing multiple shades of pink, blue, yellow, green and purple applied to the canvas in fields of intense close dotting. His painting often features extensive areas of white used either to highlight a dominant motif or as a way to reinforce the design. His works are idiosyncratic yet founded in tradition, as John Carty notes: ‘…The forms in Boxer’s paintings are the relationship between tradition and innovation, between memory and landscape and between self and world.’ 2

1. Carty, J., Balgo: Creating Country, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, 2021, p. 249

2. ibid., p. 257

Crispin Gutteridge

Murtiyarru Sunfly Tjampitjin

(c.1916 – 1996)

Moorun near Lake Mackay: Sandhills during flooded summer rains, 1993

synthetic polymer paint on canvas 89.5 x 59.5 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Warlayirti Artists cat. 426/93

Estimate: $15,000 – 20,000

Provenance

Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills, Western Australia James and Wendy Cowan Collection, New South Wales Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 24 March 2010, lot 71 Private collection, Melbourne

This painting is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Warlayirti Artists which states:

‘Sunfly has painted a story about his country. He has shown the sand hills during the flooding summer rains. These seasonal rains bring a flush of new grass which attracts the marla (wallaby) which is hunted for food.’

33 Elizabeth Nyumi Nungurrayi (1947

– 2019)

Parwalla, 2005

synthetic polymer paint on linen 150.0 x 100.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size, Warlayirti Artists cat. 941/05 and cat. 3518/06

Estimate: $10,000 – 15,000

Provenance

Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills, Western Australia Private collection, Melbourne Bonham’s, Melbourne, 22 July 2020, lot 31 Private collection, Melbourne

This painting depicts the country of Elizabeth’s father. This country is known for Parwalla and is located far to the south of Balgo in the Great Sandy Desert, west of the community of Kiwirrkurra. The landscape of the area is dominated by tali, or sand dunes. The Parwalla area is a swampy area, filling a huge area with water after the wet season rain. These wet season rains result in an abundance of good bush tucker. The majority of the painting shows the different bush foods, including kantjili, or bush raisin, and minyili. Women, the U shapes, with their wana (digging sticks) and coolimons (sic) are also depicted. The white colour, which dominates the painting, represents the spinifex which grows strong and seeds after the wet season rains. These seeds are white in colour, and grow so thickly they obscure the ground and other plants below.

Eubena Nampitjin (c.1921 – 2013)

Kinyu, 2005

synthetic polymer paint on linen

180.0 x 150.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Warlayirti Artists cat. 268/05

Estimate: $18,000 – 25,000

Provenance

Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills, Western Australia

Private collection

Sotheby’s, Sydney, 20 October 2008, lot 136

Private collection, Melbourne

Nampitjin’s deep knowledge of country, the contours of the terrain, the sacred places and the ancestral beliefs is revealed in her fluent application of luminous colour. ‘I like painting from my heart. My uncle gave me maparn (traditional healing powers) and I have strong spirit. I like to do paintings, big ones, to keep my spirit strong.’ 1 Nampitjin was a senior law woman and one of the most respected figures in the Balgo community.

Born at Tjinndjaldpa, south of Jupiter Well in the Great Sandy Desert, Nampitjin grew up around Kunawarritji (well 33) further to the west. She moved to Wirrimanu, the present site of the Balgo community in 1964. When her husband Purungu Tjakata Tjapaltjarri passed away, she married Wimmitji Tjapangati. While Tjapangati painted at the Adult Education Centre, Nampitjin taught young girls how to dance and paint for ceremonies, and after encouragement from the Warlpiri women, Nampitjin eventually began to paint alongside her husband. By the mid1980s, she had produced several works that were included in the

1986 exhibition Art of the Great Sandy Desert organized by the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Further impetus to paint came in 1989 when the new arts organisation, Warlayirti Artists, was formed, providing her with the infrastructure and support to pursue her love of painting and enabling her to focus on major Dreaming Stories.

The white spirit dingo ‘Kinyu’ has been a powerful and constant presence in Eubena’s life and here she has painted her country south-west of Balgo close to Kunawarritji, the home of Kinyu, along the middle stretches of the Canning Stock Route. The majority of the painting shows the tali (sandhills) that dominate this country, while the central circle is Tjurrnu (soakwater) named Midjul, where Kinyu the spirit dog lives. Eubena would often cover Midjul with leaves so Kinyu wouldn’t come out and would also leave gifts of goanna for Kinyu.

1. Williamson, S., and Togni, S., (eds.), Eubena

Art and Life,

Artists, Balgo, 2005, p. 19

Nampitjin;

Warlayirti

Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri (c.1920 – 2008)

Country near The Olgas, 2006

synthetic polymer paint on linen

150.0 x 150.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, title, size and Watiyawanu Artists of Amunturrungu cat. 77–06194

Estimate: $25,000 – 30,000

Provenance

Watiyawanu Artists of Amunturrungu, Mount Liebig (Yamunturrngu), Northern Territory

Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne

Private collection, Melbourne

Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 5 June 2012, lot 73

Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited

Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri, Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne, 5 – 26 July 2006, cat. 2

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Watiyawanu Artists of Amunturrungu.

‘That cocky and crow and eagle that’s Whiskey, that’s the essence of Whiskey, that’s his spirit, that’s who he is.’1

Country near The Olgas, 2006 is a fine example of Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri’s shimmering aerial paintings of his birth country Pirupa Akla, located west of Uluru. Completed in his second year of practice when the artist was in his late eighties, this work refers to the physical landscape, and to the spirits residing there – specifically, the White Cockatoo story which originated from Pirupa Akla, a creation story of the cockatoo, the eagle and their adversary, the crow. The battle between the birds resulted in the formation of various topographical features such as the rock holes upon which the artist and his family depended, and which therefore served as a constant focus in Tjapaltjarri’s work.

This painting is significant not just for the way it reveals Tjapaltjarri’s skill for handling scale in a spontaneous fashion, but also because it demonstrates how his signature ‘style’ was fully (and uncannily) articulated from the outset. As Nicolas Kachel recalls, ‘…In December 2004, Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri walked into the painting room at Mount Leibig, previously the exclusive reserve

of women, and requested canvases and paints for himself. And so, at 85 years, he became an artist.’ 2 Although he had previously painted intricate dot designs on spears and small nulla-nullas, from 2004 to 2008 he produced a body of work that was astounding in its vigour, pulsating colour and often monumental scale.

Exceptional for the unique manner in which the artist has here built up an extremely thick and complex surface, Country near The Olgas is composed of dotting of varied size and density that seems to swarm across the surface. The sheer profusion of dots is not employed as infill, but rather, sets up swirling optical rhythms that release and transmit the key narrative elements concerning the white cockatoo, the eagle and the crow. At the same time, these vibrating swaths of varied dotting invoke the vast expanses of country, linking features such as the dazzling white rock of the cockatoo, the rockpools, the scattered shards of glistening white stone, and other tell-tale signs of the furious battle of ancestral birds that formed his country.

1.

Tjapaltjarri, John Gordon Gallery, Coffs Harbour, 2007, n.p. Crispin Gutteridge

Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri cited in Thornton, R. (director), That Old Man, documentary distributed by Thorny Vision, New South Wales, 2009

2. Kachel, N., Bill Whiskey

Brook Andrew born 1970

AUSTRALIA II: Peace, 2012

mixed media on Belgian linen

200.0 x 300.0 cm edition of 3 + 2AP

Estimate: $35,000 – 45,000

Provenance

Collection of the artist, Melbourne Artevent, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 16 October 2012, lot 5, donated by the above Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited

2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1 March – 11 May 2014 (another example)

Literature

Mitzevich, N., 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014, pp. 12 – 13 (illus., another example), 62 (dated as 2013)

Related Works

AUSTRALIA IV, 2013, mixed media on Belgian linen, 200.0 x 300.0 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth AUSTRALIA VI: Theatre and Remembrance of Death, 2014, mixed media on Belgian linen, 200.0 x 300.0 cm, edition 1/3 + 2AP, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

While searching for anonymous ethnographic portraits of his Indigenous forebears in the imperial university museums of London in 2007, contemporary Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal artist, Brook Andrew, stumbled upon a little-known colonial document which led him to interrogate – ‘where is truth in representation when myth-making is integral to history?’ 1 – in two suites of monumental works: The Island and Australia. The album of prints he had found was commissioned by Prussian geologist and naturalist William Blandowski, illustrating his encounters with First Nations Australians during the 1850s, a time of significant ecological and social change. The chosen vignettes, filtered through the lens of the outsider and coloured by Romantic European notions of the ‘noble savage’, depict what the explorer had considered the most bizarre and dramatic aspects of Aboriginal life. They present a fanciful story of first contact, copied and retold several times, tinted with the same gothic fantasy of John Glover’s contemporaneous paintings of Tasmania’s Palawa enjoying full possession of their homelands during a violent chapter of Australian history.

Brook Andrew’s impressive tableau, AUSTRALIA II: Peace, 2012 elevates to a grand scale Blandowski’s image of a mysterious diplomatic ceremony of Wiradjuri men on the Bogan River in North-West New South Wales.2 This work is one of six scenes ( AUSTRALIA I – VI, 2012 – 2014) that re-present etchings by Gustav Mützel, a German artist who never stepped foot on the Australian continent. Commissioned by Blandowski to immortalise

Brook Andrew AUSTRALIA VI Theatre and remembrance of death, 2014 from the series AUSTRALIA mixed media on Belgian linen

200.2 x 300.0 cm

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © Brook Andrew/Copyright Agency 2025

the findings of his expedition to the Murray Darling basin in 1856 – 57, Mützel used original ethnographic sketches executed by Blandowski himself and his colleague Gerard Kreft to create composite illustrations ten years after the original expedition. The drawings since lost, these images today remain in minuscule photographic albumen prints published in Blandowski’s illustrated account, Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen, 1862, only two full copies of which are extant in libraries in Europe.3 Largely unseen by Australian people, Indigenous or otherwise, their revelation by modern-day scholars and artists allows for a crucial post-colonial critique of narrative and image-making.

Appropriated and transformed by Andrew, Mützel’s minute bookplate has been enlarged to a vast scale and applied by a screen-printing process to a coloured foil support, a dazzling format. Presenting their ‘primitive’ warrior virility in stiffly theatrical stances, the composition mirrors Neoclassical history paintings in the highest ranks of the French Salon. A young boy, his chest adorned with a large leafy branch, is flanked by two men, each with a hand on his shoulder, in a tense conversation with a third man carrying smoking sticks. The drama of this cultural performance remains mysterious and opaque, its sacred nature supposedly concealed to uninitiated viewers.

The notes accompanying Blandowski’s sketch describe an offering of a boy as ‘a peace emissary’ and surprisingly reveal that this encounter was not observed directly. It derives instead

from Sir Thomas Mitchell’s observation during his second exploration expedition following the Bogan River downstream to its confluence with the Darling some twenty years before, in 1835. Interestingly, the published record of Mitchell’s exploration in 1839 was accompanied by the first version of this image – a detailed engraving by G. Barnard derived from Mitchell’s own drawing. Within this print, titled ‘First Meeting with the Chief of the Bogan Tribe’ we see more clearly the emu feathers and body paint adorning the bodies of the men, the Chief on the right, and the green boughs that covered the ‘very fine’ boy’s body, although his ‘holiday look of gladness’ described in the account is not so discernable.4 In this ‘original image’ and in Blandowski’s version, there are several additional figures: the explorer Mitchell and his horse, and a seated Indigenous man and dog, all of whom Andrew has removed from his monumental composition.

Plucking the ‘noble savage’ out from colonial archives, Andrew’s AUSTRALIA II places them instead in images of a heroic scale hitherto denied to ‘ethnographic’ subjects. Harnessed by a highly reflective gold foil, the light of discovery shines unevenly across the surface of the artwork. The glittering surface, scratched away by Andrew in several areas, alludes to the idealism of peace ceremonies in an untouched arcadia. An expression of Enlightenment humanism,

Gustav Mützel (German, 1839 – 1893)

Aborigines of Australia […to the boy on the Bodan], 1862 published in William Blandowski’s illustrated account, Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen [Australia in 142 Photographic Illustrations]

these images nevertheless placed the European explorer at the apex and centre, observing and analysing for posterity those cultures on the periphery. By removing these European interlocutors from the composition, Andrew questions the very nature of representation and the interaction of divergent colonial agendas.

Following their successful first presentation at Dark Heart: The 2014 Adelaide Biennial, one example from this series, the disquieting AUSTRALIA VI: Theatre of Death and Remembrance, was acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Since November 2021, it has been included in the current re-hang of the gallery’s Grand Courts, placed amongst idealised Impressionist landscapes by white settlers such as Arthur Streeton and Sydney Long which – devoid of their Indigenous inhabitants – have defined national imagery for the better part of the last hundred years.

1. Andrew, B., ‘Remember How We See: The Island’, in Allen, H., Australia: William Blandowski’s Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2010, p. 165

2. Allen, ibid., p. 96

3. Allen, H., ‘Authorship and Ownership in Blandowski’s Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen’, Australasian Historical Archaeology, Sydney, vol. 24, 2006, p. 32

4. Mitchell, T. L., ‘Three Expeditions Into the Interior of Eastern Australia with Descriptions of the Recently Explored Region of Australia Felix, and of the Present Colony of New South Wales, vol. 1’ in Journal of an Expedition Sent to Explore the Course of the River Darling, in 1835, by Order of the British Government, 2nd rev., T. & W. Boone, London, 1839, p. 194

Lucie Reeves-Smith

Danie Mellor born 1971

A Western spectacle, 2008

mixed media on paper

102.0 x 102.0 cm

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Provenance

Caruana & Reid Fine Art, Sydney Private collection, Western Australia, acquired from the above in 2008

Exhibited

Danie Mellor: The Great Creative Golden Age of Long Ago and Here and Now, Caruana & Reid Fine Art in association with Holmes à Court Gallery, Perth, 18 September – 12 October 2008

Danie Mellor born 1971

Perpetual (ngaray), 2022

photographic print on mirror polished stainless steel

122.0 x 160.0 cm

edition: 2/3 + 2 AP signed and dated on label verso: Danie Mellor / 2022

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Provenance

N.Smith Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited

PHOTO2022, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 29 April – 21 May 2022 (another example)

Danie Mellor: Recent Works, N.Smith Gallery, Sydney, 29 March –29 April 2023 (another example)

Serpent: Aboriginal Art from Australia, Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Marrakech, Morocco, 21 July 2023 – 28 January 2024 (another example)

Literature

Stephens, A., ‘More than meets the eye: Danie Mellor captures the things we cannot see’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 28 April 2022, https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/ more-than-meets-the-eye-danie-mellor-captures-the-things-wecannot-see-20220421-p5af8p.html (accessed February 2025)

Cox, M., (et al.), Serpent: Aboriginal Art from Australia, Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Marrakech, 2023

Related Works

Another example of this work is held in the collection of Fondation Opale, Switzerland

Another example of the Perpetual suite is held in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

Michael Cook born 1968

Natures mortes, 2021

suite of 8 inkjet prints on paper

91.0 x 122.0 cm (each)

edition: AP 1/2 aside from an edition of 7 each bear artist’s thumbprint, signed, numbered, dated and inscribed with title on artist’s label verso

Estimate: $40,000 – 60,000 (8)

Provenance

Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane

Private collection, Queensland, acquired from the above in 2021

Exhibited

Natures mortes, Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane, 17 March –1 May 2021 (another example)

Natures mortes, Living Country, Deletaille Gallery, Brussels, Belgium, 11 February – 28 May 2022 (another example)

MICHAEL COOK : NATURES MORTES, Noosa Regional Gallery, Queensland, 16 July – 4 September 2022 (another example)

HOTA Collects: Punching Up | 21st Century Indigenous Photography, HOTA Gallery, Gold Coast, Queensland, 19 October – 20 November 2022 (another example)

Still Life Now, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 24 September 2022 – 19 February 2023 (other examples of Nature Morte (Agriculture) and Nature Morte (Blackbird))

Related Works

Another example of this suite is held in the collection of HOTA Gallery, Gold Coast, Queensland

Other examples of images from this suite are held in the collections of Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, and Yarilla Arts and Museum, Coffs Harbour, New South Wales

Nature Morte (Aliment)

Nature Morte (Veiled Bird)

Brisbane-based artist Michael Cook’s photographic works, always sumptuously presented and carefully staged, address personal and socio-political issues of post-colonial identity in Australia. The figurative works which brought him critical acclaim early in his career – Undiscovered, 2010; Civilised, 2013; Majority Rule, 2014; Object, 2014, and Invasion, 2017 – oscillated between different cultural perspectives and introduced surreal and imaginary imagery in order to disarm and amuse viewers. The recent Natures mortes, 2021 presents a departure from this technique, concealing behind its polished traditional veneer an incisive and mournful perspective on the cumulative devastation wrought by Australian colonisation. Produced amidst rolling COVID pandemic lockdowns where life stood still, Cook’s suite of eight Natures mortes are dense allegorical tableaux whose stillness and glistening penumbra lure the viewer to slowly consider the incongruous objects and their relationships – unlocking multiple layers of symbolic social commentary.

In Natures mortes, Michael Cook borrows artistic conventions from 17th century Europe and applies these to bountiful and dramatically lit arrangements of native Australian flora and fauna. The term Natures mortes is borrowed from French, designating the artistic form of still life with the literal meaning of ‘dead nature’. Cook appropriates the aesthetic codes of Golden Age Dutch still life painting funded by pre-industrial and colonial expansion, where painters warned in their vanitas and memento mori paintings of the perils of greed and pride, and the inevitable transience of life. Now, over two hundred years later, and from an opposing post-colonial perspective, Cook reuses these stylistic codes to address similar, updated social issues, addressing them in separate individual vignettes: climate responsibility, biodiversity, religion, addiction and natural resource depletion.

Exploitation’s mouth-watering display of oil-slicked seafood, inedible for the native heron in the centre of the composition, addresses an unsustainable depletion of fossil fuels and its environmental implications. Colonisation, however, is more literal in its symbolic accoutrements of the European age of enlightenment (books, maps, inkwell, swords, spy glasses), which the artist has juxtaposed with a damaged shield standing in for the lost Gweagal shield, witness to violent encounters at the British landing in Botany Bay.1 Agriculture, in its arid and beige arrangement, shows the damage caused by land reclamation and unsustainable farming practices upholding the false god of a baked loaf of bread. Around this central image introduced

predators and pests like the barn owl, beetles and mice feast on broken blades of native Kangaroo Grass. The influence of Bruce Pascoe’s 2014 book, Dark Emu, detailing the misconceptions about indigenous agricultural land management is perceptible in this image, and quotes from the text were reprinted in the catalogue essay for the first exhibition of Natures mortes at Andrew Baker Gallery. Blackbird is a devastating memento mori, recounting the practice of ‘blackbirding’: the entrapment, lured by music, of South Sea Islanders who were forced into indentured servitude in the burgeoning Queensland sugar plantations of the 18th and 19th century. Veiled Bird, shrouded with the leaves of the dried native lily, abandons her glistening eggs, waylaid by the temptations of substance abuse, symbolised by the broken poppy stems, a snuffed-out candle and mysterious phials lurking on the edges of the velvety darkness.

Using his twenty years’ experience as a commercial fashion photographer to orchestrate each of these stylised table-top cornucopias, Cook populates these still lives with native fauna, in heroic positions in the centre of each image. Under the auspices of Artspace’s collaborative project 52 Actions, Cook presented a 23 second time-lapse video of the creative process of the studio photography Blackbird, Flora, Aliment 2 In it, we can deduce that the animals within Blackbird (red and yellow-tailed black cockatoos and a cane toad) and Aliment (an emu), were not physically present in either a live or taxidermised form, but were masterfully digitally introduced into the image in post-production.

Natures mortes is reported to have been Cook’s most successful body of work to date, with all three edition sizes sold out.3 The works are well represented in Cook’s home state of Queensland, with examples acquired by the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art and a full suite acquired by the new Home of the Arts (HoTA) at Surfers Paradise. Significantly, Veiled Bird, was also the winner of 2021 acquisitive National Still Life Award at Yarilla Art and Museum, in Coffs Harbour.

1. Fairley, G., ‘Exhibition Review: Michael Cook Natures mortes at Andrew Baker Art Dealer (QLD)’, ArtsHub, 7 April 2021

2. 52 Actions, Artspace, Sydney, 2021; see https://www.artspace.org.au/52-actions/52actions/michael-cook (accessed February 2024)

3. Hawkins, S., ‘Michael Cook’, Head On Foundation Magazine, 26 November 2021: see https://headon.org.au/magazine/michael-cook (accessed February 2024) and Michael Cook, Natures Mortes at https://www.michaelcook.net.au/projects/natures-mortes (accessed February 2024)

Lucie Reeves-Smith

Nature Morte (Blackbird)

Nature Morte (Agriculture)

Nature Morte (Religion)

Nature Morte (Colonisation)

Nature Morte (Exploitation)

Nature Morte (Flora)

Christian Thompson born 1978

Rocks on your belly, 2013

from the ‘Pagan Sun’ series

Type C print on Fuji Pearl Metallic Paper

122.0 x 122.0 cm edition of 5 + 2AP

Estimate: $10,000 – 15,000

Provenance

Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above

Exhibited

Pagan Sun: Christian Thompson, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 30 October – 23 November 2013 (another example)

Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, Cairns, Queensland, 25 – 27 July 2024 (another example)

Christian Thompson: Artist in residence, Turner Galleries, Perth, 16 October – 14 November 2015 (another example)

Birds: Flight Paths in Australian Art, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, 2 December 2016 – 12 February 2017 (another example)

Literature

Nelson, R., ‘Visual arts review: This ghost of a bird-man is artist Christian Thompson’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 13 November 2013 (illus., another example), https:// www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/visualarts-review-this-ghost-of-a-birdman-is-artist-christianthompson-20131112-2xeej.html (accessed February 2025)

Art Almanac, Sydney, July 2014, cover (illus., another example), p. 35 (illus., another example)

Carter, D., ‘Passion for learning and art at heart of Cairns Indigenous Art Fair’, Cairns Post, Queensland, 26 July 2014 (illus., another example), https://www.cairnspost.com.au/lifestyle/passion-forlearning-and-art-at-heart-of-cairns-indigenous-art-fair/news-story /6efc1ac7d03b8ce1831d5020c2af3241 (accessed February 2025)

Ashley, M., ‘They carry our spirits and even clean our teeth: so what is it about birds?’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 22 November 2016 (illus., another example), https:// www.smh.com.au/entertainment/they-carry-our-spiritsand-even-clean-our-teeth-so-what-is-it-about-birds20161121-gsu117.html (accessed February 2025)

Lennan, J., ‘The inner heartbreak of birds is revealed by Flight Paths In Australian Art’, Australian Financial Review, 25 November 2016 (illus., another example), https://www.afr.com/life-andluxury/arts-and-culture/the-inner-lives-of-birds--on-showin-mornington-20161118-gssuc9 (accessed February 2025)

George Ward Tjungurrayi

born c.1945

Untitled (Tingari at Kaakuratintja), 2005

synthetic polymer paint on linen

213.5 x 280.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Papunya Tula Artists cat. GW0501225

Estimate: $50,000 – 70,000

Provenance

Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory

Charles Perkins Children’s Trust – Pool Party Auction, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 3 November 2005, lot 30 Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above

Literature

Pool Party Art Auction catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, cat. 30, n.p. (illus.)

As a youth, George Ward Tjungurrayi, was taken to Papunya from his homelands west of Lake Macdonald in 1963 along with his family as part of Jeremy Long’s Welfare Branch patrols. Born in bush near Lararra (east of Tjukurla) Western Australia in 1947, his formative years were spent in the desert with his older half bothers Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi (a founding member of the Papunya Art movement in the early 1970s) and Willy Tjungurrayi, also a prominent artist. At Papunya, George worked as a fencer and butcher in the community kitchen. He married Nangawarre Ward Napurrula, and they had two children, moving to various Western Australian communities before staying for a few years from 1981 in the newly established Pintupi community of Kintore, just over the Northern Territory border and closer to his traditional homelands. There George was inspired by the art of his brothers who had become two of Papunya Tula’s leading artists. George and family moved further west to the new settlement of Kiwirrkurra in Western Australian and it was here that he officially began painting with Papunya Tula Artists. Characterised by shifting forms and mesmerising surfaces, the paintings of Geroge were soon coveted with his first

solo exhibition held in 1990. George progressed to become one of Papunya Tula’s leading artists and his work has since been shown in several group and solo shows throughout Australia and abroad.

Significantly, Untitled (Tingari at Kaakuratintja), 2005 was commissioned by Papunya Tula Artists and donated to the ‘Pool Party’ fundraising auction held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in November 2005. A mesmerising and arresting work, it offers a monumental example of the artist’s multi layered compositions.

‘Depicting the site of Karrkurritinytja (the large salt-lake of Lake MacDonald) where in mythological times a large group of Tingari ancestors travelled to this site from Kulkuta, southwest of the Tjukula community in Western Australia. After visiting the site of Nyumpu, the men continued east to Karrkurritinytja. However, when they arrived, they were attacked by a huge snake which came out of a deep hole. The men fought the snake but were eventually killed by it.’ 1

1. See artwork catalogue entry in Pool Party Art Auction Catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, p. 19

Crispin Gutteridge

Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula

(1942 – 2001)

Straightening spears, 2000

synthetic polymer paint on linen

151.5 x 183.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Papunya Tula Artists cat. TT200004136

Estimate: $35,000 – 45,000

Provenance

Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney

First introduced by the artist as a theme in his painting in 1990, ‘Spear Straightening’ is a subject Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula has returned to time and time again. As curator Hetti Perkins notes in relation to Tjupurrula’s spear straightening paintings, ‘while the role of the artist may be grounded in his or her relatedness to country... the aesthetic expression of this relationship is not necessarily bound by the parameters of traditional design.’ 1

Tjupurrula’s spear straightening paintings are made up of parallel lines of alternating colour. Constructed using a technique where the artist applies paint in sections rather than in one continuous line, his works have a constantly varying surface giving them a sense of depth and shifting undulations. This painting is a magnificent example of both the subject matter and the artist’s technique with the repeated lines of varying colour across the canvas creating a unique variegated surface.

Notably, Papunya Tula Artists described the subject matter of this painting thus: ‘During Mythological times a group of men camped at the site of Illyingaungau near the secret cave of Mitukatjirri, south-east of the Kintore community. The rows of dots throughout this painting represent spears which the men are straightening. This is done by slightly warming the spear over a fire and straightening the spear while it is warm. These men were preparing their spears as they had heard of a possible confrontation with a group of men from the Tjikari area further to the north.’

1.

Perkins, H., One Sun, One Moon: Aboriginal Art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p. 184

Joseph Jurra Tjapaltjarri born

c.1950

Untitled (Tingari painting), 2001

synthetic polymer paint on linen 152.0 x 183.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Papunya Tula Artists cat. JJ0103194

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Provenance

Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory William Mora Galleries, Melbourne (stamped verso) Private collection, Melbourne acquired from the above

44 Patrick Olodoodi Tjungurrayi (c.1935

– 2017)

Untitled, 2004

synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen 121.0 x 152.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Papunya Tula Artists cat. PT0409035

Estimate: $18,000 – 25,000

Provenance

Painted at Kintore, Northern Territory in 2004 Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory Shaun Dennison, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists which states:

‘This painting depicts designs associated with the soakage water site of Puntujtalka (Jupiter Well). In mythological times a large group of Tingari Men camped at this site before travelling south to the lake site of Ngarru.

Since events associated with the Tingari Cycle are of a secret nature no further detail was given. Generally, the Tingari are a group of mythical characters of the Dreaming who travelled over vast stretches of the country, performing rituals and creating and shaping particular sites.

The Tingari Men were usually followed by Tingari Women and accompanied by novices and their travels and adventures are enshrined in a number of song cycles. These mythologies form part of the teachings of the post initiatory youths today as well as providing explanations for contemporary customs.’

Daniel Walbidi born 1983

Ilyarra, 2005

synthetic polymer paint on canvas 83.0 x 136.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, date, medium, size and Short Street Gallery cat. 10148

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Provenance

Short Street Gallery, Broome, Western Australia Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 22 October 2011, lot 28 Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited

22nd Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 12 August – 23 October 2005

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Short Street Gallery which states:

‘This Ilyarra, the birth place of my father, also this is where the Seven Sisters landed and passed through here.’

46 Queenie McKenzie Nakarra

(c.1915 – 1998)

Untitled, 1996

natural earth pigments and synthetic binder on canvas

90.5 x 120.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Waringarri Aboriginal Arts cat. AP1488

Estimate: $18,000 – 25,000

Provenance

Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, Kununurra, Western Australia Private collection, Queensland Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 24 June 2002, lot 99 Private collection, Melbourne

47

Jack Britten Joolama (c.1925 – 2002)

Purnululu (The Bungle Bungles), 1993

natural earth pigments on canvas

120.0 x 160.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Waringarri Aboriginal Arts cats. S–2938 and AP–3417

Estimate: $25,000 – 35,000

Provenance

Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, Kununurra, Western Australia

Private collection, Switzerland

Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 24 July 2007, lot 35

The Estate of Dr Paul Sutherland, Sydney

Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 18 March 2020, lot 62

Private collection, Sydney

Jack Britten Joolama (c.1925 – 2002)

Jarlinji (Plains kangaroo), 1990

natural earth pigments on canvas

80.0 x 160.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Waringarri Aboriginal Arts cat. S–2921 and AP–3410

Estimate: $25,000 – 35,000

Provenance

Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, Kununurra, Western Australia Lindsay Street Gallery, Darwin Private collection, New South Wales Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 26 July 2004, lot 130 Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited

Recent Works by the Artists of Warmun Community, Turkey Creek, Western Australia, Lindsay Street Gallery, Darwin, 1991, cat. 22

This work was originally sold with a copy of the original certificate of authenticity from Waringarri Aboriginal Arts which stated in part:

‘This painting shows Garndi country near Port Headland. It is a dreaming place where the plains kangaroo (Jarlinji) started out to travel to the Kija country when he was a man in the dreamtime. He came from the west right up to Turkey Creek. The north/south highway runs through the picture and the road is intersected by a railway line. On the western side of the road are large rocks or hills and on the eastern side (represented at the bottom of the painting) are lots of small rocks standing upright. The rocks are decorated with the sacred patterns belonging to the plains kangaroo’

Jack Britten (Joolama) painted sites of spiritual significance for the Gija across the East Kimberly; Purnululu, Woorreranginy, Tickelara, Spring Creek and the upper reaches of the Ord River. In Jarlinji (Plains kangaroo), 1990, the roundels that decorate the rock surfaces depicted in the painting are based on body painting designs relating to the Jarliny or Jarlangarnany, the mythical Plains Kangaroo men. On their ancestral travels, four Jarliny men transformed into rocks when the last one of them looked back. A song about the Kangaroo translates as “They are all standing in a line on the mountain just like the reeds that grow in the water.” 1

1. Ryan, J., ‘Bones of Country: The East Kimberley Aesthetic’, in Ryan, J., and Akerman, K., Images of Power: Aboriginal Art of the Kimberley, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p. 42

49 Wawiriya Burton (1925 – 2021)

Ngayuku Ngura – My Country, 2018

synthetic polymer paint on linen 197.5 x 152.5 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Tjala Arts cat. 408–18

Estimate: $12,000 – 15,000

Provenance

Tjala Arts, Amata, South Australia Outstation Gallery, Darwin Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited

Tjala Arts 2018, Outstation Gallery, Darwin, 8 September –6 October 2018

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Tjala Arts which states:

‘In this painting Wawiriya has depicted her country. The different colours and designs represent variations in the landscape.’

50

Betty Muffler born 1944

Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country), 2016

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

110.0 x 168.5 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Iwantja Arts cat. 99–16

Estimate: $18,000 – 25,000

Provenance

Iwantja Arts, APY Lands, South Australia Yaama Ganu Gallery, Moree, New South Wales Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in June 2017

Exhibited

Celebrating the Artists, their Communities and Culture, Yaama Ganu Gallery, New South Wales, opened 12 May 2017

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Iwantja Arts which states:

‘Betty Muffler was born in the remote bush near Watarru near the border of South and Western Australia. Her parents passed away from sicknesses related to the Maralinga bombings in South Australia when she was a young girl, so she was cared for by her aunties and the missionaries at the Arnabella mission.

Betty’s father and sisters were skilled Ngangkari (traditional healers) and they passed on their knowledge to Betty. Throughout her adult life, Betty infamously traveled via donkey across the central desert extensively, providing support to Anangu with her Ngangkari practice.

Betty continues to work for clinics on the lands and hospitals supporting doctors and Anangu with healings for her people. Her paintings highlight her reverence for country, and the sacred sites that are relevant to her Ngangkari spirit.

“I used to be travelling all the time by donkeys, a long way from Watarru to Ernabella and staying with my aunties. My mama (father) and aunties were Ngangkari, they taught me how to heal people. Because I’ve got an eagles spirit I can stay at home here, and in my sleep I send my eagle spirit across the desert to look for sick people, then I land next to them and make them better. Ngangkari’s can see right through people to what sickness is inside, then we can heal them straight away.” ’

51 Peter Mungkuri (1946 – 2021)

Ngura (Country), 2018

ink and synthetic polymer paint on linen

152.0 x 198.5 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size, Iwantja Arts cat. 782–18 and Alcaston Gallery cat. AK21587

Estimate: $10,000 – 15,000

Provenance

Iwantja Arts, APY Lands, South Australia

Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne

Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above

Exhibited

Tjilpi & Pampa – Senior Iwantja Artists, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, 6 February – 9 March 2019, cat. 9 (illus. cover of exhibition catalogue)

Betty Chimney born 1957

Ngayuku Ngura (My Country), 2022

synthetic polymer paint on linen

153.0 x 122.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Iwantja Arts cat. 112–22

Estimate: $7,000 – 10,000

Provenance

Iwantja Arts, APY Lands, South Australia Outstation Gallery, Darwin Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited

Ngura kala kutjuparinganyi – Shifting colours of Country, Outstation Gallery, Darwin, 9 – 30 July 2022 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 21)

Sylvia Kanytjupai Ken born 1965

Ngayuku Ngura (My Country), 2012

synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

152.0 x 122.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Tjala Arts cat. 305–12

Estimate: $5,000 – 7,000

Provenance

Tjala Arts, Amata, South Australia

Desert Mob, Alice Springs, Northern Territory

Private collection, Melbourne

Thence by descent

Private collection, Melbourne

Tjungkara Ken born 1969

Seven Sisters, 2011

synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

122.0 x 198.5 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Tjala Arts cat. 204–11

Estimate: $8,000 – 12,000

Provenance

Tjala Arts, Amata, South Australia

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above

Thence by descent

Private collection, Melbourne

Emily

Kam

Kngwarreye (c.1910 – 1996)

Untitled (Awelye), 1994

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

76.0 x 61.0 cm

signed verso: Emlly [sic]

bears inscription verso: Delmore Gallery cat. 94H059

Estimate: $25,000 – 35,000

Provenance

Commissioned by Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs, Northern Territory in August 1994 Private collection, Canberra

Thence by descent Private collection, Canberra

Emily Kam Kngwarreye (c.1910 – 1996)

Untitled, 1994

synthetic polymer paint on linen

121.5 x 91.0 cm

signed lower right: Emlly [sic]

bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Delmore Gallery cat. 94I046

Estimate: $50,000 – 70,000

Provenance

Commissioned by Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs, Northern Territory in August 1994

Private collection

Lawson~Menzies, Sydney, 25 May 2004, lot 223 (as ‘My Country Body Paint’)

Private collection, New South Wales

Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs, Northern Territory

Private collection, USA

bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Delmore Gallery cat. 11C017

Estimate: $10,000 – 15,000

Angelina Pwerle (Ngale) born c.1946

Bush plum, 2011

synthetic polymer paint on linen

91.5 x 91.5 cm

Provenance

58 Kathleen Ngale (1930 – 2021)

Untitled, 2009

from the ‘Arnwekety (Bush Plum Dreaming)’ series

synthetic polymer paint on linen

121.0 x 121.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Delmore Gallery cat. 08L40

Estimate: $6,000 – 8,000

Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs, Northern Territory Private collection, Melbourne

Provenance

Wukun Wanambi (c.1962 – 2022)

Wawirritjpal, 2005

natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark

140.0 x 60.0 cm (irregular)

bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre cat. 2680L

Estimate: $6,000 – 8,000

Provenance

Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala, Northern Territory Niagara Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above 18 June 2005

Exhibited

Wukun Wanambi, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 31 May – 25 June 2005, cat. 6 (label attached verso)

Noŋgirrŋa Marawili

(c.1939 – 2023)

Yathikpa, 2013

natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark

183.0 x 83.0 cm (irregular)

bears inscription verso: Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre cat. 4431I bears inscription on label verso: artist’s name and Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre cat. 4431I bears inscription on label verso: Alcaston Gallery cat. AK18904

Estimate: $14,000 – 18,000

Provenance

Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala, Northern Territory Harvey Art Projects, Idaho, USA Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in April 2023

Exhibited

Noŋgirrŋa Marawili Yathikpa, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, 16 January – 14 February 2014

Luŋgurrma / North, Harvey Art Projects, Aspen, Colorado, USA, 9 January – 10 February 2015 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

Literature

Pinchbeck, C., (ed.), Noŋgirrŋa Marawili: From my Heart and Mind, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2018, pp. 77 (illus.), 114 (illus.)

Noŋgirrŋa Marawili’s Yathikpa, 2013 abounds with the energy of her Madarrpa clan coastal lands, an interconnected network of diamond shapes painted in ochre and charcoal, expand and contract across the bark. In recording adjacent sites of Yathikpa and Baratjala, located on Blue Mud Bay, Marawili asserts the secular nature of her painting, ‘I paint water designs – the water as it splashes onto the rocks at high tide…. the painting that I do is not sacred… The paintings I do are from the outside, Water, Rock, Rocks which stand strong and the waves which run and crash upon the rock, the Sea spray. This is the painting I do, but I know the sacred designs.’ 1

Marawili began painting in the 1990s as an assistant to her husband, Djutjadjutja Munuŋgurr, adding cross-hatching and in-fill according to his instructions, and over the next decade she would collaborate with him following established Yolŋu bark painting conventions. Marawili didn’t begin to emerge in her own right until 2005 when she became a regular painter at Buku-

Larrŋgay, but her most original works appeared from 2011 when she began to paint interpretations of her paternal lands. Her current work refers back to these areas, remembering ancient ways of living directly on country she grew up on as a child.

Marawili’s work has been the recipient of a number of awards, winning the NAATSIA Best Bark award in 2015 and again in 2019, and she has been the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2018. Her paintings were also included in major group exhibitions, such as Tarnathi, Art Gallery of South Australia (2019); NIRIN, Biennale of Sydney (2020); Know My Name: Australian Women Artists from 1900 to Now, National Gallery of Australia (2020 – 2021); and Bark Ladies, National Gallery of Victoria (2021 – 2022).

1. Pinchbeck, C. (ed.), Noŋgirrŋa Marawili. From My Heart and Mind, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2018, p. 21 Crispin Gutteridge

61 Balang Nakurulk (Mr Mawurndjul) (1952 – 2024)

Milmilngkan site, 2006

natural earth pigments on eucalyptus tetradonta bark

93.0 x 64.0 cm (irregular)

bears inscription on label verso: artist’s name, medium, language group and Maningrida Arts and Culture cat. 3842-06

Estimate: $10,000 – 15,000

Provenance

Maningrida Arts and Culture, Maningrida, Northern Territory (label attached verso)

Short Street Gallery, Broome, Western Australia (cat. 11367)

Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 2008

Exhibited

Maningrida Survey Show, Short Street Gallery, Broome, 2008, cat. 1

This work is accompanied by a certificate from Short Street Gallery which states:

‘John Mawurndjul has depicted sacred sites at Milmilngkan. This is the site at Milmilngkan and these represent water, you can see here. The water comes out (the little round dots are water/ springs). The water comes out at milmilngkan and there are springs there surrounded by water pandanus where the water comes out of the ground. This might be caused by rainbow serpents which live under the ground there. This is all cross-hatched here. The cross-hatching represents the country here. That’s what happens there, I’ve recently seen the water coming up out of the ground there. (as translated from John speaking language)’

Balang Nakurulk (Mr Mawurndjul) (1952 – 2024)

Mimih spirit figure, c.1998

natural earth pigments on carved hardwood

213.0 cm height

Estimate: $8,000 – 12,000

Provenance

Maningrida Arts and Culture, Maningrida, Northern Territory

Private collection

Joel Fine Art, Melbourne, 5 June 2007, lot 153

Private collection, Melbourne

Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 21 May 2019, lot 7

Private collection, Sydney

Owen Yalandja born 1960

Yawk Yawk, 2004

ochre and pigments with PVA fixative on carved kurrajong

207.0 cm height

Estimate: $5,000 – 7,000

Provenance

Maningrida Arts and Culture, Maningrida, Northern Territory (cat. 858-04)

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2004

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Maningrida Arts and Culture.

Mick Kubarkku (c.1922 – 2008)

Mimih spirit, 2003

natural earth pigments on carved and shaped wood

214.0 cm height

Estimate: $3,000 – 4,000

Provenance

Maningrida Arts and Culture, Maningrida, Northern Territory (cat. 4153-03)

Private collection, Melbourne

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Maningrida Arts and Culture.

65 Prince of Wales (Midpul) (c.1935 – 2002)

Body marks, 2000

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

60.5 x 45.5 cm (each)

65.0 x 99.5 cm (framed, overall)

Estimate: $8,000 – 12,000 (2)

Provenance

Commissioned by Karen Brown Gallery, Darwin (cats. KB1697 and KB1698)

Private collection, Adelaide, acquired from the above

66

Jan Billycan (Djan Namundie)

(c.1930 – 2015)

Untitled, 2007

synthetic polymer paint on linen

66.0 x 70.5 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, date, medium, size and Short Street Gallery cat. 24269

Estimate: $4,800 – 6,500

Provenance

Short Street Gallery, Broome, Western Australia

Tony Bond Art Dealer, Adelaide

The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Sydney, acquired from the above in April 2008

Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 28 November 2018, lot 74

Private collection, Sydney

Literature

Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia’s Remote Aboriginal Communities: The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, edition II, Kleimeyer Industries Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 2011, p. 175 (illus.)

This work is accompanied by a copy of the certificate of authenticity from Short Street Gallery.

Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills, Western Australia

Private collection, Melbourne

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

98.5 x 50.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Warlayirti Artists cat. 200/98

Estimate: $6,000 – 8,000

67

Eubena Nampitjin (c.1921 – 2013)

Mindiki Karu, 1998

Provenance

Boxer Milner Tjampitjin (c.1934 – 2009)

Lake Gregory, WA, 1997

synthetic polymer paint on linen 120.5 x 80.5 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Warlayirti Artists cat. 596/97

Estimate: $8,000 – 12,000

Provenance

Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills, Western Australia

Private collection, Melbourne

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Warlayirti Artists which states:

‘Boxer has painted a detailed depiction of the country in and around this important lake. The water level is shown quite low which allows us to see various waterholes, caves and islands. White sand is seen along the water line and areas of green grass can be seen growing on dry ground.’

69

Ginger Riley Munduwalawala (c.1936 – 2002)

Limmen Bight Country, 1990

synthetic polymer paint on plywood

34.0 x 60.5 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, title, size, medium and Alcaston Gallery cat. AK73

Estimate: $6,000 – 8,000

Provenance

Painted at Booraloola, Northern Territory William Mora Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited

Ginger Riley Munduwalawala – Limmen Bight Country: Works on Canvas, Paper and Board, William Mora Galleries, Melbourne, 20 October – 17 November 1990, cat. 6

Rammey Ramsey born c.1935

Untitled, 2009

gouache, ochres and pigment with synthetic binder on crescent board

50.5 x 76.0 cm

Estimate: $3,000 – 4,000

Provenance

Jirrawun Arts, Kununurra, Western Australia (cat. RR–2009–4–309G)

RAFT Artspace, Darwin

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2009

Exhibited

Rammey Ramsey: Small Boards, RAFT Artspace, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, 4 – 29 August 2009

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Jirrawun Arts.

Rammey Ramsey born c.1935

Untitled, 2007

ochres and pigment with synthetic binder on board

65.0 x 98.5 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Jirrawun Arts cat. RR–E

Estimate: $4,000 – 6,000

Jirrawun Arts, Kununurra, Western Australia

William Mora Galleries, Melbourne

Private collection, Melbourne

Provenance

72

Angelina George (1937 – 2014)

Near the ruined city, 2007

synthetic polymer paint on linen 120.0 x 120.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, date and Karen Brown Gallery cat. KB3244

Estimate: $6,000 – 8,000

Provenance

Painted in the Ngukurr region of south-eastern Arnhem Land Karen Brown Gallery, Darwin Private collection, Adelaide, acquired from the above in February 2008

73 Tommy Mitchell (c.1943 – 2013)

Walu, 2010

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

102.0 x 76.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Warakurna Artists cat. 296–10

Estimate: $5,000 – 7,000

Provenance

Warakurna Artists, Warakurna, Western Australia

Desert Mob, Alice Springs, Northern Territory

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2011

Thence by descent

Private collection, Melbourne

Double Wanjina, c.1978

natural earth pigments on carved and engraved wood

47.5 x 10.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name ‘Alec’

Estimate: $8,000 – 12,000

Provenance

The collection of Ray Saunders, Vancouver, Canada Rest Easy Auctions, Richmond, Canada, 2 January 2025, lot 60

Private collection, Canada

74 Alec Mingelmanganu (1905 – 1981)

75 Gloria Fletcher Thancoupie (1937 – 2011)

Untitled, c.1989

hand-built stoneware with incised designs decorated with slip and oxide 27.0 cm height signed on base: Thancoupie

Estimate: $5,000 – 7,000

Provenance

Aboriginal Artists Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1989

Related Work

For similar examples by the artist depicting the same subject matter see: Seear, L., and Ewington, J., (eds.), Bought to Light II: Contemporary Australian Art 1966 – 2006 from the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, Queensland Art Gallery Publishing, Brisbane, 2007, pp. 152 – 159

LIVE AUCTION | Sydney | 7 May 2025

John Brack

Iceland Poppies, 1954

oil on canvas, 81.5 x 48.5 cm

Estimate: $400,000 – 600,000

© courtesy of Helen Brack

Melbourne Preview

Tuesday 22 – Sunday 27 April

11.00 am – 6.00 pm daily

105 Commercial Rd, South Yarra, VIC Enquiries: 03 9865 6333

Sydney Preview

Thursday 1 – Tuesday 6 May

11.00 am – 6.00 pm daily

36 Gosbell St, Paddington, NSW Enquiries: 02 9287 0600

info@deutscherandhackett.com www.deutscherandhackett.com

prospective buyers and sellers guide

ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS CATALOGUE

1. PRIOR TO AUCTION

CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTIONS

Catalogues can be obtained at Deutscher and Hackett offices or by subscription (see the Catalogue Subscription Form at the back of this catalogue or online for more information).

PRE-SALE ESTIMATES

The price range estimated against each lot reflects the opinion of our art specialists as to the hammer price expected for the lot at auction and is informed by realised prices for comparable works as well as the particularities of each lot including condition, quality, provenance and rarity. While presale estimates are intended as a guide for prospective buyers, lots can be sold outside of these ranges. Pre-sale estimates include GST (if any) on a lot but do not include the buyer’s premium or other charges where applicable.

RESERVES

The reserve is the minimum price including GST (if any) that the vendor will accept for a lot and below which the lot will not normally be sold.

PRE-AUCTION VIEWINGS

In both Sydney and Melbourne pre-auction viewings are scheduled for several days in advance of each auction. Deutscher and Hackett specialists are available to give obligation free advice at viewings or by appointment and prospective buyers are strongly encouraged to thoroughly examine and request condition reports for potential purchases. Pre-auction viewings are open to the public and are free to attend.

SYMBOL KEY

▲ Unless ownership is clearly stated in the provenance, this symbol is used where a lot is offered which Deutscher and Hackett owns in whole or in part. In these instances, Deutscher and Hackett has a direct financial interest in the property or means that Deutscher and Hackett has guaranteed a minimum price.

● Used to indicate lots for sale without a reserve.

EXPLANATION OF CATALOGUING PRACTICE AND TERMS

All information published in Deutscher and Hackett catalogues represent statements of opinion and should not be relied upon as fact. All dimensions are listed in centimetres, height before width and are approximate. All prices are in Australian dollars.

ARTIST’S NAMES

All reference to artists make use of common and not full names in accordance with the standards outlined in the National Gallery of Australia reference publication Australian Art: Artist’s working names authority list. For instance, John Brack rather than Cecil John Brack; Roy de Maistre rather than Leroy Leveson Laurent De Maistre; Rosalie Gascoigne rather than Rosalie Norah Gascoigne.

Terms used in this catalogue have the meanings ascribed to them below:

a. NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work by the artist.

b. Attributed to NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, probably a work by the artist, in whole or in part.

c. Circle of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work showing the influence and style of the artist and of the artist’s period.

d. Studio/Workshop of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work possibly executed under the supervision of the artist.

e. School of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work by a follower or student of the artist.

f. Manner of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work created in the style, but not necessarily in the period, of the artist.

g. After NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a copy of a work by the artist.

h. “signed” / “dated” in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, the work has been signed/dated by the artist.

i. “bears signature” / “bears date” in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, the work has possibly been signed/dated by someone other than the artist.

PROVENANCE

Where appropriate, Deutscher and Hackett will include the known provenance, or history of ownership of lots. Non disclosure may indicate that prior owners are unknown or that the seller wishes to maintain confidentiality.

2. THE AUCTION

Auctions are open to the public and are free to attend. Deutscher and Hackett may exclude any person at any time in its discretion.

REGISTRATION

Bidders must register to bid prior to the commencement of an auction. Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion.

CONDUCT OF AUCTION

Lots are offered for sale on a consecutive basis. Deutscher and Hackett will determine the conduct of the auction in its absolute discretion, including the regulation of bidding. Consecutive or responsive bids may be placed by the auctioneer on behalf of the vendor up to the reserve.

ABSENTEE OR COMMISSION BIDS AND TELEPHONE BIDS

As a courtesy service, Deutscher and Hackett will make reasonable efforts to place bids for prospective buyers in absentia provided written or verbal instructions (as indicated on absentee bid forms included at the back of this catalogue or online) are received 24 hours prior to auction. Where successful, lots will be purchased at the lowest possible bid and in the event of identical absentee bids, the bid received earliest will take precedence. Deutscher and Hackett accepts no responsibility for errors and omissions in relation to this courtesy service and reserves the right to record telephone bids.

RESERVE

Unless indicated otherwise, all lots are subject to a confidential reserve price determined by the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett or the auctioneer may place any number of bids on behalf of the vendor below the reserve price and is not obliged to identify that the bids are being placed on behalf of the vendor.

BIDDING INCREMENTS

Bidding usually opens below the listed pre-sale estimate and proceeds in the following increments (the auctioneer may vary the bidding increments at his or her discretion):

$500 – 1,000 by $50

$1,000 – 2,000 by $100

$2,000 – 3,000 by $200

$3,000 – 5,000 by $200 / $500 / $800

$5,000 – 10,000 by $500

$10,000 – 20,000 by $1,000

$20,000 – 30,000 by $2,000

$30,000 – 50,000 by $2,000 / $5,000 / $8,000

$50,000 – 100,000 by $5,000

$100,000 – 200,000 by $10,000

$200,000 – 300,000 by $20,000

$300,000 – 500,000 by $20,000 / $50,000 / $80,000

$500,000 – 1,000,000 by $50,000

$1,000,000+ by $100,000

SUCCESSFUL BIDS

The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer indicates the final bid and the buyer assumes full responsibility for the lot from this time.

UNSOLD LOTS

Where a lot is unsold, the auctioneer will announce that the lot is “bought in”, “passed”, “withdrawn” or “returned to owner”.

3. AFTER THE AUCTION PAYMENTS

Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer. If payment is made by credit card the price will increase by any merchant fees payable by Deutscher and Hackett (1.15% (including GST) for Visa and Mastercard and 1.65% (including GST) for American Express). In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Cleared funds will be held in an interest bearing trust account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to retain any interest earned during this period. Payment by the vendor of any charge to Deutscher and Hackett is to be made within fourteen days of invoice.

PURCHASE PRICE AND BUYER’S PREMIUM

The purchase price will be the sum of the final bid price (including any GST) plus a buyer’s premium set at 25% (inclusive of GST) of the final bid price. Buyers may be liable for other charges reasonably incurred once ownership has passed.

GOODS AND SERVICES TAX

Buyers are required to pay a 10% G.S.T which sum is:

a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor; and b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and c. included in the buyer’s premium.

Where GST applies to some lots the final bid price will be inclusive of the applicable GST. If a buyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met.

COLLECTION

Lots paid for in full may be collected from Deutscher and Hackett premises the day after the auction occurs but lots paid for by cheque may not be collected until all funds have cleared. Proof of identification is required upon collection and lots not collected within seven days of the sale may incur costs associated with external storage and freight.

LOSS OR DAMAGE

Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on either the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made, or on collection by the buyer, whichever is earlier. The buyer is therefore encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from the payment due date.

TRANSPORT AND SHIPPING

Deutscher and Hackett directly offers services including storage, hanging and display, appraisals and valuations, collection management and research and in all instances will endeavour to coordinate or advise upon shipping and handling, insurance, transport, framing and conservation at the request and expense of the client. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept liability for the acts or omissions of contracted third parties.

EXPORT

Prospective bidders are advised to enquire about export licences — including endangered species licences and cultural heritage permits, where relevant — prior to bidding at auction. Telephone the Cultural Property and Gifts Section, Museums Section, Ministry for the Arts, on 1800 819 461 for further information. The delay or denial of such a licence will not be grounds for a rescission of sale.

COPYRIGHT

The copyright in the images and illustrations contained in this catalogue may be owned by third parties and used under licence by Deutscher and Hackett. As between Deutscher and Hackett and the buyer, Deutscher and Hackett retains all rights in the images and illustrations. Deutscher and Hackett retains copyright in the text contained in this catalogue. The buyer must not reproduce or otherwise use the images, illustrations or text without prior written consent.

conditions of auction and sale

ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS CATALOGUE

The terms and conditions of business set forth below are subject to amendment by verbal or written notice prior to and during the auction and sale. They constitute the entire contractual agreement with the buyer in respect to any lot offered at auction. By bidding at auction in any manner compliant with bidding procedures, the buyer and all bidders agree to be bound by these terms and conditions and the terms of the prospective buyers and sellers guide contained in this catalogue, as amended. To the extent that an agent acts on behalf of the buyer, liability for obligations arising from these conditions of business will pass to the buyer. Multiple buyers are jointly and severally liable for obligations arising from this agreement.

DEFINITIONS

1. Definition of terms:

a. The ‘buyer’ refers to the party with the highest accepted bid for any lot at auction and/or such party’s principal where bidding as agent.

b. The ‘vendor’ refers to the party consigning property for sale and/or such party’s principal where acting as agent.

c. ‘Deutscher and Hackett’ refers to Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd ACN 123 119 022, its subsidiaries, officers, employees and agents.

d. The ‘hammer price’ refers to the final bid price (including any GST) accepted by the auctioneer, or in the case of a post-auction sale, the agreed sale price (including any GST).

e. The ‘buyer’s premium’ refers to the 25% (inclusive of GST) payable by the buyer calculated as a percentage of the hammer price.

f. ‘GST’ refers to the goods and services tax imposed by the A New Tax System (Goods and Services) Act 1999 as amended.

g. The ‘lot’ refers to the item(s) described against any lot number in the catalogue.

h. The ‘reserve’ refers to the minimum price (including any GST) the consignor will accept for a lot.

PRELIMINARY CONDITIONS AND DISCLAIMER

2. Agency: Deutscher and Hackett acts as agent for the vendor and the contract of sale for the lot will be between the buyer and the vendor.

3. Property is sold ‘as is’: To the extent permitted by law:

a. no guarantees, warranties or representations are made (express or implied) by Deutscher and Hackett or the vendor in relation to the nature and condition of any lot; and

b. Deutscher and Hackett disclaims liability for any misrepresentations, errors or omissions, whether verbal or in writing, in the catalogue or any supplemental material.

All factual information provided by the vendor is merely passed on by Deutscher and Hackett from the vendor or other source. Deutscher and Hackett has made no attempt to verify this information. All additional statements of opinion represent the specialist opinions of Deutscher and Hackett employees and should not be relied upon as statements of fact.

4. Responsibility to inspect: Responsibility remains with the buyer to satisfy its, his or her self by inspection and evaluation prior to purchase as to the nature and condition of any property.

CONDITIONS AT AUCTION

5. Registration: Bidders must register to bid and obtain a bidder’s paddle prior to the commencement of the auction. Registration requires that bidders provide proof of identity and Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion.

6. Auctioneer’s discretion: Deutscher and Hackett reserves the right to absolute discretion over the conduct of the auction including the regulation of bidding and its increments. This discretion extends to the challenge or rejection of any bid, the right to withdraw any lot and the right to determine the successful bidder or reoffer a lot in the event of a dispute. The prospective buyers and sellers guide details an indicative process for the conduct of auctions. All parties are strongly urged to read the prospective buyers and sellers guide included in this catalogue.

7. Bidding: Deutscher and Hackett may sell each lot to the highest bidder at auction provided the reserve price has been met or where the net amount accounted to the vendor is at least equivalent to the net amount that would have been achieved for a sale at the reserve price. The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer marks the acceptance of the highest bid and the conclusion of a contract for sale between the vendor and the buyer. Unless otherwise agreed in writing with Deutscher and Hackett, the individual physically present at the auction who signals the bid accepts personal liability to pay the purchase price, including the buyer’s premium and all additional fees, taxes and charges.

GOODS AND SERVICES TAX

8. Amounts inclusive of GST: Unless otherwise specified, all amounts specified in this section as payable by the buyer, or otherwise used to calculate payment to Deutscher and Hackett, are inclusive of any GST component. Deutscher and Hackett will provide buyers with a tax invoice that meets the requirements of the Australian Taxation Office.

9. Application of GST to buyers: Buyers are required to pay a 10% GST which sum is:

a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor; and

b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and

c. included in the buyer’s premium.

If a buyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met.

POST-SALE CONDITONS

10. Post auction private sale: Should the lot fail to sell at auction, Deutscher and Hackett is authorised to sell the lot privately for a period of seven days in which event this agreement shall apply to the relevant buyer to the full extent of its provisions.

11. Payment: The buyer will not acquire title until payment has cleared in full. Interest at a rate of 17.5% p.a. will be charged over outstanding accounts where no extension of terms has been granted. Interest will be payable from the payment due date. With respect to each lot purchased, the buyer agrees to make the following payments within seven days from the date of sale:

a. The hammer price.

b. In exchange for services rendered by Deutscher and Hackett, a buyer’s premium calculated at 25% (inclusive of GST) of the hammer price.

c. Post sale packing, handling, shipping and storage where applicable.

d. If payment is made via Visa, Mastercard or American Express, any merchant fees payable by Deutscher and Hackett on the transaction as indicated in the prospective buyers and sellers guide. Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer using the form and/or trust account details provided at the back of this catalogue. In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Once funds have cleared, the proceeds of the sale less the buyer’s Premium, GST and any commission or costs charged as agreed will be remitted to the vendor within thirty-five days of the date of sale provided payment has been received in full. Funds will be held in an interest bearing account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to any interest earned during this period. Application for a cultural heritage export licence or any other licence in no way affects the buyer’s obligation to make payment or collection within the periods specified in sections 10 and 13a.

12. Risk and Title: Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on the earlier of:

a. the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made; and b. collection by the buyer.

The buyer assumes risk for the property in all respects from this date and neither Deutscher and Hackett nor the vendor will be liable for loss or damage occurring after the payment due date. The buyer is encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from this date. Title in the lot does not pass to the buyer, even if the lot is released to the buyer, until the buyer has paid all sums owing to Deutscher and Hackett. If a buyer makes a claim against Deutscher and Hackett for damage or loss after sale, the buyer’s premium and the final bid price shall be payable notwithstanding.

13. Freight:

a. The buyer may only remove a lot from the Deutscher and Hackett premises once payment has been cleared in full and must be removed no later than seven days after the date of sale. Should items not be removed by this time, storage and insurance costs may be charged to the buyer. If a lot has not been collected within 30 days after the date of sale and alternative arrangements have not been with Deutscher and Hackett, the lot may be re-sold by Deutscher and Hackett without reserve at the next auction and Deutscher and Hackett may set off any amounts owed for storage and insurance costs and its standard commission before remitting the proceeds to the buyer.

b. Buyers are required to make their own arrangements for packing, handling, shipping and transit insurance for their property. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept responsibility or liability for the acts or omissions of any third party, such as a shipping agent, whether or not such a party has been recommended or suggested by Deutscher and Hackett.

14. Limited Warranty of Authorship: If a buyer is able to establish that a lot is a forgery in accordance with these conditions for sale within five years of the date of sale, the buyer shall be entitled to rescind the sale and obtain a refund of the hammer price from the vendor. The buyer must return the lot in the state in which it was sold within fourteen days of notifying Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations. For a lot to be established as a forgery, the following conditions must be satisfied:

a. the buyer must supply two independent expert testimonies attesting to the forgery. Deutscher and Hackett is entitled to request further expert evidence where it deems the evidence provided to be unsatisfactory;

b. there must be no conflict of opinion among accepted experts in the field; and

c. the forgery must be able to be proven through means that at the time of publication of the catalogue were commonly employed and that will not damage or otherwise put the lot in jeopardy.

The limited warranty and the right to rescind the sale is not assignable and the buyer must have retained title to the lot without disposing of any interest in it up until the buyer notifies Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations. The buyer acknowledges that it has no rights directly against Deutscher and Hackett if a lot is established to be a forgery.

15. Termination, Breach and Legalities:

a. Deutscher and Hackett breach: To the extent permitted by law, the sole and maximum remedy to a buyer for breach of warranty is a refund of original purchase price, including buyer’s premium. In such an event the sale contract shall be rescinded and all costs associated with returning the property (in the state in which it was sold) to the premises of Deutscher and Hackett are to be borne by the buyer. Deutscher and Hackett is not liable for any indirect or consequential loss or damage for any matter arising directly or indirectly as a result of the sale.

b. Buyer breach: Deutscher and Hackett may, in addition to other remedies available by law, exercise one or more of the following rights or remedies for breach:

i. Cancel the sale and retain any payment or property in Deutscher and Hackett custody as collateral or liquidated damages.

ii. Charge the buyer interest at the rate of 2% above the rate fixed under section 2 of the Penalty Interest Rates Act 1984 (Vic).

iii. Resell the property without reserve at the next auction or privately on five days notice. Any disparity between sale and resale prices, including associated costs such as, but not limited to, legal, storage and sale expenses, will be to the account of the defaulting buyer.

iv. Apply any part payment received from the buyer in respect of any lots at its discretion.

v. Retain any of the buyer’s property held by Deutscher and Hackett until the buyer has satisfied its obligations to Deutscher and Hackett.

vi. Take any other action Deutscher and Hackett deems necessary or appropriate.

vii. Refuse to permit the buyer to participate in future auctions.

viii. Provide the vendor with the buyer’s details to permit the vendor to take action against the buyer to recover the money.

16. Governing law and jurisdiction: These terms and conditions and any matters concerned with the foregoing fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of the state in which the auction is held.

17. Severability: In the event that any provisions of this agreement should be found unenforceable in a court of law, that part shall be discounted and the remaining conditions shall continue in full force and effect to the extent permitted by law.

Telephone Bid Form

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Billing address (PO Box insufficient)

*Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars.

Please refer to the Prospective Buyers and Sellers Guide and the Conditions of Auction and Sale in this catalogue for information regarding sales.

By completing this form, I authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to contact me by telephone on the contact number(s) nominated. I understand it is my responsibility to enquire whether any Sale-Room Notices relate to any lot on which I intend to bid. I also understand that should my bid(s) be successful, a buyer’s premium of 25% (inclusive of GST), will be added to the final hammer price.

I accept that DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to its clients, that there are inherent risks to telephone bidding, and I will not hold DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT responsible for any error.

SALE CODE: Mermaid

SALE No.: 081

IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS ART

MELBOURNE AUCTION 26 MAR, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 – 75 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

please email, post or fax this completed form to:

DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD

SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

tel: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344

info@deutscherandhackett.com

INTERNAL USE ONLY

RECEIVED BY DATE TIME

SALE CODE: Mermaid

SALE No.: 081

IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS ART

MELBOURNE AUCTION

26 MAR, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 – 75 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

Absentee Bid Form

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Billing address (PO Box insufficient)

(required)

please email, post or fax this completed form to:

DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 105 COMMERCIAL RD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

tel: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344

info@deutscherandhackett.com

INTERNAL USE ONLY

RECEIVED BY

DATE TIME

*Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars.

Absentee bids must be received a minimum of twenty-four hours prior to auction. All absentee bids received will be confirmed by phone or fax. In the event that confirmation is not received, please resubmit or contact our office.

Please refer to the Prospective Buyers and Sellers Guide and the Conditions of Auction and Sale in this catalogue for information regarding sales. By completing this form, absentee bidders request and authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to place the following bids acting as agent on their behalf up to and including the maximum bid specified. Lots will be bought at the lowest possible bid authorised by a bidder in absentia.

Should the bid be successful, the buyer will be obliged to pay the final bid price plus buyer’s premium of 25% (inclusive of GST) of the final bid price. DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to clients and does not accept liability for errors and omissions in the execution of absentee bids.

Attendee Pre-Registration Form

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

SALE CODE: Mermaid SALE No.: 081

IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS ART

MELBOURNE AUCTION 26 MAR, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 – 75 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

please email, post or fax this completed form to:

DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 105 COMMERCIAL RD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

tel: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344

info@deutscherandhackett.com

7:00

–

Catalogue Subscription Form

info@deutscherandhackett.com

BARK SALON

THE IAN POTTER CENTRE: NGV AUSTRALIA, FED SQUARE NOW SHOWING, FREE ENTRY

Installation view of Bark Salon on display in Wurrdha Marra at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne. Photo: Garry Sommerfeld / NGV

Installation view of Yayoi Kusama’s The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally

Cover the Universe 2019 at Kusama’s solo exhibition Yayoi Kusama: All About Love Speaks Forever at Fosun Foundation, Shanghai. Collection of the artist ©️YAYOI KUSAMA

Ethel Carrick’s A market in Kairouan c1919–20 was purchased with the support of the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales through the Elizabeth Fyffe Bequest 2021 For further information or to discuss your bequest in confidence, visit agnsw.art/leave-a-gift or phone +61 2 9225 1746

TONY CLARK UNSCULPTED

University of Melbourne Museums and Collections

Tony Clark, Seated & Reclining 2008, acrylic on canvas. Buxton International Collection, Melbourne.

COPYRIGHT CREDITS

Lot 1 © Djerrkŋu Yunupiŋu, courtesy of Buku Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre

Lot 2 © Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Lot 3 © Vincent Namatjira/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 4 © Vincent Namatjira/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 5 © Estate of Sally Gabori/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 6 © Estate of Sally Gabori/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 7 © Estate of Prince of Wales and Karen Brown Gallery, Darwin

Lot 8 © Estate of Prince of Wales and Karen Brown Gallery, Darwin

Lot 9 © courtesy of The Estate of Ginger Riley and Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne

Lot 10 © Namatjira Legacy Trust/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 11 © Estate of Lin Onus/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 12 © Estate of Lin Onus/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 13 © Emily Kam Kngwarreye/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 14 © Emily Kam Kngwarreye/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 15 © Rover Thomas/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 16 © courtesy of The Estate of Paddy Bedford

Lot 17 © Timothy Cook/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 18 © Kitty Kantilla/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 19 © The Estate of Mathaman Marika, courtesy of Buku-Larrŋggay Mulka Centre

Lot 20 © The Estate of the Artist, courtesy of Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre

Lot 21 © Balang Nakurulk (Mr Mawurndjul)/ Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 22 © Balang Nakurulk (Mr Mawurndjul)/ Copyright Agency 2025

LOTS CONSIGNED BY GST REGISTERED ENTITIES

Lot 4 Vincent Namatjira

Lot 14 Emily Kam Kngwarreye

Lot 29 Angelina Pwerle (Ngale)

Lot 38 Danie Mellor

RESALE ROYALTY

Some lots consigned for this sale may be subject to the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009 (Cth). Any payments due under the obligations of the Act will be paid by the vendor.

Design and Photography: Danny Kneebone

© Published by Deutscher and Hackett Pty. Ltd. 2025 978-0-6457871-7-7

Lot 23 © Makinti Napanangka/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 24 © Doreen Reid Nakamarra/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 25 © Makinti Napanangka/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 26 © Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 27 © Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 28 © George Ward Tjungurrayi/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 29 © Angelina Pwerle (Ngale)/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 30 © Emily Kam Kngwarreye/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 31 © Boxer Milner Tjampitjin/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 32 © Murtiyarru Sunfly Tjampitjin/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 33 © Elizabeth Nyumi Nungurrayi/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 34 © Eubena Nampitjin/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 35 © Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 36 © Brook Andrew/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 37 © Danie Mellor

Lot 38 © Danie Mellor

Lot 39 © courtesy of the artist

Lot 40 © courtesy of the artist and Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin

Lot 41 © George Ward Tjungurrayi/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 42 © Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 43 © Joseph Jurra Tjapaltjarri/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 44 © Patrick Tjungarrayi/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 45 © Daniel Walbidi/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 46 © courtesy of The Estate of Queenie McKenzie

Lot 47 © Estate of Jack Britten

Lot 48 © Estate of Jack Britten

Lot 49 © Wawiriya Burton/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 50 © Betty Muffler/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 51 © Peter Mungkuri/Copyright Agency 2025

CULTURAL HERITAGE PERMITS

Under the provisions of the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act, 1986, buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items in this sale from the Cultural Property Section:

Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts

GPO Box 2154

Canberra ACT 2601

Email: movable.heritage@arts.gov.au

Phone: 1800 819 461

Lot 52 © Betty Chimney/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 53 © Sylvia Kanytjupai Ken/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 54 © Tjungkara Ken/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 55 © Emily Kam Kngwarreye/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 56 © Emily Kam Kngwarreye/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 57 © Angelina Pwerle (Ngale)/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 58 © The Artist/Licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency Limited

Lot 59 © courtesy of the artist and Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre

Lot 60 © The Estate of the Artist, courtesy of Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre

Lot 61 © Balang Nakurulk (Mr Mawurndjul)/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 62 © Balang Nakurulk (Mr Mawurndjul)/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 63 © Owen Yalandja/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 64 © Mick Kubarkku/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 65 © Estate of Prince of Wales and Karen Brown Gallery, Darwin

Lot 66 © Jan Billycan/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 67 © Eubena Nampitjin/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 68 © Boxer Milner Tjampitjin/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 69 © courtesy of The Estate of Ginger Riley and Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne

Lot 70 © Rammey Ramsey/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 71 © Rammey Ramsey/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 72 © Angelina George/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 73 © Tommy Mitchell/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 74 © Alec Mingelmanganu/Copyright Agency 2025

Lot 75 © Gloria Fletcher Thancoupie/Copyright Agency 2025

ANDREW, BROOK 36

BEDFORD, PADDY NYUNKUNY 16

BILLYCAN (DJAN NAMUNDIE), JAN 66

BRITTEN JOOLAMA, JACK 47, 48

BURTON, WAWIRIYA 49

CHIMNEY, BETTY 52

COOK, MICHAEL 39

COOK, TIMOTHY 17

GABORI, SALLY 5, 6

GEORGE, ANGELINA 72

KANTILLA, KITTY 18

KEN, SYLVIA KANYTJUPAI 53

KEN, TJUNGKARA 54

KNGWARREYE, EMILY KAM 13, 14, 30, 55, 56

KUBARKKU, MICK 64

MARAWILI, NOŊGIRRŊA 20, 60

MATHAMAN, MARIKA 19

McKENZIE NAKARRA, QUEENIE 46

MELLOR, DANIE 37, 38

MINGELMANGANU, ALEC 74

MITCHELL, TOMMY 73

MUFFLER, BETTY 50

MUNGKURI, PETER 51

MUNUŊGURR, DHAMBIT 2

NAKAMARRA, DOREEN REID 24

NAKURULK (MR MAWURNDJUL), BALANG 21, 22, 61, 62

NAMATJIRA, ALBERT 10

NAMATJIRA, VINCENT 3, 4

NAMPITJIN, EUBENA 34, 67

NAPANANGKA, MAKINTI 23, 25

NGALE, KATHLEEN 58

NUNGURRAYI, ELIZABETH NYUMI 33

LIN 11, 12

PRINCE OF WALES (MIDPUL) 7, 8, 65

PWERLE (NGALE), ANGELINA 29, 57

RAMSEY, RAMMEY 70, 71

RILEY MUNDUWALAWALA, GINGER 9, 69

THANCOUPIE, GLORIA FLETCHER 75

THOMAS (JOOLAMA), ROVER 15

THOMPSON, CHRISTIAN 40

TJAKAMARRA, LONG JACK PHILLIPUS 26

TJAMPITJIN, BOXER MILNER 31, 68

TJAMPITJIN, MURTIYARRU SUNFLY 32

TJAPALTJARRI, BILL WHISKEY 35

TJAPALTJARRI, JOSEPH JURRA 43

TJAPALTJARRI, MICK NAMARARI 27

TJUNGURRAYI, GEORGE WARD 28, 41

TJUNGURRAYI, PATRICK OLODOODI 44

TJUPURRULA, TURKEY TOLSON 42

DANIEL 45 WANAMBI, WUKUN 59

YALANDJA, OWEN 63

YUNUPIŊU, DJERRKŊU 1

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