Laarri Art Centre (GIRRWARLI), Yiyili, Kimberley, Western Australia
As a boy on Louisa Downs Station in the 1950s, Mervyn Street used charcoal and pencil to draw cowboys and cattle wranglers on the welded steel panels of a large water tank on the property. His father John built fences and tanks on the station and received no wages. Street grew up to become one of the most significant Gooniyandi painters and carvers working today, a fluent speaker teaching his language at Yiyili School, the author of Know Your Granny, and the lead claimant in the Stolen Wages Class Action against the State of Western Australia, which settled in 2024 for $180 million. His solo exhibition Stolen Wages opened at Fremantle Arts Centre in February 2025. The community of Yiyili, where Street lives and works, was established in 1981 on land excised from Louisa Downs Station, after equal pay legislation in the late 1960s led station owners to tell Aboriginal workers to leave. Norman Cox, Mervyn Street and other Gooniyandi elders, supported by Steve Hawke, petitioned the State Government for their own community; the excision was granted in 1986.
Laarri Art Centre, now operating as GIRRWARLI Art and Cultural Centre Inc., is located within the Yiyili School, 5km off the Great Northern Highway and approximately 110km west of Halls Creek in the Kimberley. The gallery opened in 1998 and was formally established in 1999 in collaboration between Yiyili Community School and Yiyili Community Aboriginal Corporation. Laarri is a Gooniyandi word. Artists work in acrylic and natural ochre pigments on canvas, and produce traditional artefacts including No. 7 boomerangs, clapping sticks and painted boab nuts. Themes draw on Gooniyandi Dreaming, bush tucker and bush medicine, seasonal landscapes of Lambardi country and the Marrara River, and the station history that shaped this community. Yiyili serves as a local centre for the surrounding homelands of Ganinya, Goolgaradah, Kurinyjarn, Moongardie, Girriyoowa (Pullout Springs) and Rocky Springs, and Louisa Downs Station is now owned and operated by locals.
Laarri Art Centre at a glance
- Location: Yiyili Aboriginal Community, 5km off Great Northern Highway, 110km west of Halls Creek, Kimberley, Western Australia
- Language group: Gooniyandi; Lambardi country, Marrara River region
- Established: Gallery opened 1998; formally established 1999; now operating as GIRRWARLI Art and Cultural Centre Inc.
- Art forms: Acrylic and natural ochre on canvas; boomerangs, clapping sticks, painted boab nuts
- Themes: Gooniyandi Dreaming, bush tucker and bush medicine, station history, country and seasonal landscape
- Notable artists: Mervyn Street, carver, painter, author and language teacher; lead claimant in the Stolen Wages Class Action, settled 2024
- Access: Weekdays 9am to 2pm; weekends by appointment; 4WD recommended
