Provenance
Waringarri Arts, Kununurra, cat. no. PB1/101
Important Aboriginal Art, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 30 June 1997, lot 1
The Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands
Aboriginal Art - Thomas Vroom Collection, Sotheby's, London, 10 June 2015, lot 66
Private Collection, Sydney
Exhibited
Literature
Significant 2022, D’Lan Contemporary Pty Ltd, Melbourne, p. 93
Description
The description on the label on the reverse reads: 'This painting represents the country around Turkey Creek including the highway and the creek. The painting relates to a corroboree dreamed by Rover depicting the death of an old woman in a vehicle accident at the creek crossing. The corroboree goes on to tell of the journey of the woman's spirit back to her country.'.
Rover Thomas is regarded as the father of the modern painting movement in the eastern Kimberley region of northwest Australia. After decades of social and cultural disruption for Aboriginal people living in the region, a cultural renewal flourished in the wake of Cyclone Tracy which flattened the city of Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory, on Christmas Eve 1974. The cyclone continued to wreak havoc in the Kimberley. In a series of dream visitations in the following year, the spirit of a deceased aunt of Thomas' described to him her journey across the Kimberley, from west to east from where she witnessed the destruction of Darwin by an ancestral Rainbow Serpent in the guise of a cyclone. The catastrophic event was interpreted by Aboriginal elders across the Kimberley as a warning to maintain culture and language in the face on ever increasing effects of non-Aboriginal settlement in the area. Rover Thomas had revealed to him a ceremony–the Kurirr Kurirr–about the woman's spirit journey, including the songs, choreography and designs which were painted on boards carried by the performers. The painted boards eventually led to the creation of paintings in the same style that are not necessarily associated with the ceremony. Thomas' aunt was fatally injured in a car accident that occurred on a road near Turkey Creek that had been flooded by the cyclonic rains. She was being taken by the Flying Doctor service to hospital in Perth but she died along the way. Corroboree painting, 1985, depicts the scene of the car accident. Characteristically, Thomas' semi-abstract style of painting suggests a planar view of the landscape. Rather than depicting the event in figurative detail, Thomas paints the site where events occurred. To him, the land was a living entity that bears the scars and marks of all who pass through it.
Wally Caruana
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