East Kimberley Artists

My association with the East Kimberley artists began during the early 1980s, only a year or two after paintings by Rover Thomas and Paddy Jaminji were first seen by art collectors in Sydney and Melbourne. During the nascence of this art movement, Anne and I were in our mid 40s and we spent endless nights swagging out by the fire on gibber and pindan plains under a panoply of stars during early visits to Balgo Hills and Warmun. Looking back, I realise what an incredible privilege and eye-opening, life-changing, experience it was to sit beside Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie, Jack Britten, and their clansmen and women, as they retold stories of the brutality that began after gold was discovered in the region during the 1880s. How the Gidja and Mirruwong people had found their world shrinking and how they survived during the bloody confrontation that inevitably followed. I remember Queenie relating the story of the massacre that took place at Horse Creek after Paddy Rattigan’s father killed and gutted a bullock. Brutal in seeking retribution, the owner shot people one by one at close range. An old woman, on witnessing the death of the child she had been tending minutes before, and seeing the owner had run out of ammunition, handed him a bullet she’d had in the bag lying beside her. He loaded his rifle and shot her dead. At Ruby Plains near Halls Creek the owner and manager came across a group of Aboriginal men killing a bullock. He decapitated them and placed their heads in a hollow log. Their remains were later discovered beneath the encircling buzzards. Near Halls Creek their food was laced with strychnine. After WWII children of white fathers were removed from their Aboriginal mothers and chains were used to retain control of Aboriginal prisoners. Though these and other stories filled the canvasses that we showed in Turkey Creek exhibitions throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, there was no trace of malice in the artist’s work or her demeanour. Queenie, Rover, Jack, Henry and Freddie were always delighted to see us and generous in their welcoming presence during our many visits to the region. The decade before we first visited the Argyle diamond mine was established nearby. It brought plumbers, builders, electricians, and all manner of other trades on short term contract to Turkey Creek and they supplied tank and bore water, small one-room houses with running water, and buildings for police and administration. Though housing was still limited, and the building materials were cheap, the township had begun to take on a more permanent and established feel. Queenie loved to talk about the small one-room school she helped to establish. She had worked in the stock camps most of her life (and famously sewed up Rover’s head with a darning needle after he fell off his horse), and by then taught two-way culture to the next generation of Gidja. The community store had ended the need to make the long drive to Kununurra or Halls Creek for supplies, and a small satellite community was established at Frog Hollow, 20 Kms to the south where Jack Britten and Hector Jandanay lived. The township still didn’t become familiarly known as Warmun, until Rover Thomas named it so in the late 1970s following the destruction of Darwin, the Northern Capital, by Cyclone Tracy in 1973. Rover developed his Krill Krill ceremony during the following ten years and by the mid 1980s, the decreasing conflict made the population of Turkey Creek feel more stable, comfortable, and settled. It was in that context that art production began to flourish, well before any art centre was established. Who could possibly have imagined that a cyclone more than 1000 kms to the north, would give birth to the vibrant and enduring East Kimberley art movement that has developed since that time. – Adrian Newstead — Adrian Newstead