Rover Thomas

The Kukatja-Wangkajunga stockman from the Great Sandy Desert who founded the East Kimberley painting movement

In 1975, equal pay legislation ended the pastoral industry's reliance on cheap Aboriginal labour, and thousands of stockmen were let go from Kimberley cattle stations. Rover Thomas was among them. He moved to Warmun (Turkey Creek), a small Gija community in the East Kimberley, where he had no connection to country but was accepted because of his kinship ties to the Texas Mob. He was around 49 years old, a lifetime of stockwork behind him, and he had never painted. Within a decade he would represent Australia at the Venice Biennale.

Thomas was born around 1926 near Gunawaggi, at Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia. His father was Wangkajunga and his mother Kukatja. When he was ten, the family walked north to Billiluna Station on the edge of the Kimberley, where he began work as a stockman. He spent the next thirty years moving across Kimberley cattle stations, including Texas Downs, becoming deeply familiar with the country he would later paint, though it was not his ancestral country. That detail matters: Thomas painted Gija country as an adopted man, with the authority given to him through ceremony and kinship, not by birth.

The event that changed everything was not Cyclone Tracy directly, but what came after it. In 1976, the spirit of Yawayimya, Thomas's deceased classificatory mother who had been killed in a car accident near Warmun, came to him in a dream. She sang to him the story of her spirit's journey after death, naming sites across the Kimberley as she travelled, and ending at Wyndham where she looked across the water and witnessed a great destruction, understood as Cyclone Tracy's devastation of Darwin. Thomas interpreted the cyclone as an ancestral warning: that Aboriginal culture needed to be renewed and defended. From this dream came the Krill Krill ceremony, developed with Gija ritual leader Paddy Jaminji and songman George Mung Mung. By 1979 it was ready to be performed publicly at a Kimberley Land Council meeting at Warmun.

The ceremony involved dancers carrying painted boards on their shoulders, each depicting significant sites and spirit beings from Yawayimya's journey. In the early years Thomas directed the painting of the boards, with his uncle Paddy Jaminji executing most of them. Around 1980-81 Thomas began painting the boards himself, and then canvases, developing the distinctive style that would define East Kimberley painting: broad flat areas of ochre, aerial map-like perspectives, minimal mark-making, and an almost overwhelming sense of specific place. He sourced pigments from the land itself in the early years, later moving to water-soluble pigments that improved adhesion while preserving the earthy matte finish.

Ruby Plains Massacre 1, ©Rover Thomas, 1985

The Krill Krill provided the framework for a broader subject matter. Thomas extended the ceremony's themes outward to encompass the frontier history of the Kimberley: the massacres, the forced removals, the conflicts between settlers and Aboriginal people that had occurred in the decades before his birth and been passed down through oral tradition. Works like Ruby Plains Massacre 1 (1985) and Camp at Mistake Creek are visual testimonies to events that official history had largely erased. Perth-based art consultant Mary Macha played a crucial role in getting his work into major collections from 1983, and art centre Waringarri Arts from 1986.

National recognition came through exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the National Gallery of Australia in the late 1980s. In 1990 Thomas and fellow Aboriginal artist Trevor Nickolls became the first Aboriginal Australians to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. That same year Thomas won the John McCaughey Prize for the best painting hung at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 1994 the NGA mounted his landmark retrospective, Roads Cross: The Paintings of Rover Thomas. His influence on East Kimberley artists including Queenie McKenzie, Freddie Timms, and Paddy Bedford was direct and lasting.

Comparisons to Mark Rothko followed Thomas to the National Gallery of Australia, where upon seeing Rothko's paintings he remarked: "That bugger paints like me." The comparison points to something real: both painters used broad, flat colour fields to create works of considerable emotional weight. But where Rothko's fields are purely abstract, Thomas's are specific. Every block of colour is a named place, a recorded event, a ceremony. The abstraction is a consequence of the tradition he painted within, not a stylistic choice borrowed from New York.

Rover Thomas died on 11 April 1998 at Warmun, aged around 72. He had painted for less than twenty years. The movement he started at Warmun, from those first ochre boards carried on dancers' shoulders, grew into one of the most significant regional art traditions in Australia. It continues.

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References and further reading

• Rover Thomas, Australian Dictionary of Biography — Suzanne Spunner, Australian National University
• Roads Cross: The Paintings of Rover Thomas, National Gallery of Australia — 1994 retrospective catalogue
• Rover Thomas, National Portrait Gallery
• Rover Thomas, Wikipedia
• Akerman, Kim. Roads Cross: The Paintings of Rover Thomas. National Gallery of Australia, 1994.