Bella Kelly was born in 1915 in Mount Barker, which is in Minang country in the South Coast region of Western Australia. Kelly was the daughter of Billy Colbung (dec.) and Mina Bayla Brockman (dec.), who were members of the Wardandi people and originated from the southwest region of Western Australia. Kelly’s birth name was Isobel Colbung. Kelly spent her childhood in the bush, and would sometimes draw pictures in the sand while she sat around the campfire with her elders. Her parents earned an income from selling kangaroo skins to buyers who visited the region around Cranbrook (40 kilometres north of Mount Barker). In later years, her father worked as a labourer on George Warburton’s farm in Mount Barker. Kelly did not attend school, but in her early teenage years taught herself to read from comic books (The Albany Advertiser, 6 March 1967). After her parents passed away, she moved to Kojonup, and while she was a teenager she was employed as a domestic at the Carrolup Native Settlement, responsible for cooking and housemaid duties.
Kelly painted consistently throughout her life. Her earliest creative works, made in her youth, were charcoal drawings and paintings on paperbark, but in her late 30s she began to paint with acrylic on canvas, and would go on to work with watercolours and gouache. This transition was, in part, made possible by the paint supplies Kelly received from a doctor in Mount Barker for whom she worked as a domestic from the 1960s. Dr Bourke, who also cared for one of Kelly’s grandchildren over several years, ultimately acquired a large collection of Kelly’s paintings over the period that she was employed by him (Krakouer, pers. comm. 2009). For the most part, her paintings depict the Stirling Ranges, often foregrounded by the trunks and branches of the Jarrah and Karri eucalypts of the area. The Stirling Ranges, also known to Noongars as the Blue Ranges, sit just to the northeast of Mount Barker where Kelly was born, and are part of the Minang people’s traditional country. They are visible from many of the towns where Kelly lived during most of her life. In the book Koorah Coolingah (Children Long Ago) (2006), her daughter Cheryl Narkle states that “...it’s always been the Stirling Ranges. There was something there that she’s telling us about what’s around Mount Barker, where she walked… where they camped at all their settlements and all that.” (Pushman & Wally 2006, pg 71).
Kelly worked as both a domestic and a farm labourer on properties throughout the Great Southern and the South Coast regions, travelling between Albany, Mount Barker, Katanning, Wagin, Narrogin and other towns. Like her father, she worked on the Warburton property in Mount Barker (later the site of Goundrey Wines), where she was employed in both the 1940s and in the 1970s by Kitty Warburton, the daughter of George Warburton. Kelly’s grandson Jerry Narkle, who visits many properties in the region in his capacity as an Indigenous heritage officer, related to the author that he frequently meets landowners who knew or know of Kelly, and many of them own her paintings or recall her creating art while working on their properties. A small shack in which Kelly used to live opposite the Warburton’s property is now heritage listed with the Department of Indigenous Affairs in Western Australia (J. Narkle, pers. comm. 2009).
Kelly painted in a naturalistic style, employed a vivid palette and used a small brush to pick up highlights on ridge tops, leaves and tree bark. She usually painted indoors, drawing entirely from her intuitive knowledge of, and love for, the Stirling Ranges. Her strong emotional identification with her country is conveyed in her intuitive use of colour and the dream-like appearance of many of her works. Jerry Narkle, who grew up with Kelly during the 1970s and 1980s, described her patient and dedicated approach to her art, and the fact that she would remain utterly absorbed in her painting for full days with few breaks (pers. comm. 2009).
For Noongar artists practicing today, Kelly is strongly associated with the renowned Carrolup children artists who produced, exhibited and sold work to great acclaim in Australia and overseas under the guidance of Noel and Lily White, who taught at the Carrolup Native Settlement school in the 1940s and early 1950s. Kelly had worked at Carrolup as a teenager, and returned there later in life, in the 1980s. Furthermore, her four sons from her marriage to Henry Kelly: Flemming Kelly, Goldie Kelly, Greg Kelly and Simpson Kelly (all deceased) were taken away from her and spent part of their childhood at the Carrolup Native Settlement. Kelly remained in close proximity to the settlement for a number of years after her boys were taken away (C. Narkle, Pers. comm. 2009). Goldie, Greg and Simpson all painted at some stage in their lives, and a work by Simpson that was created at Carrolup when he was twelve years old (in 1948) is in the collection of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology. Kelly was creating work long before the Carrolup School began and seems to have been largely self-taught. However the stylistic affinities between her works and those of some of the Carrolup children, and the profound influence her practice has had on later generations of Noongar artists who work in the Carrolup style lead to her being regarded as an integral part of the Carrolup legacy.
Kelly had three daughters and a son with her second partner, Largy Narkle, whom she met in the late 1940s: Cheryl Narkle, Lorrice Kelly (Lorrice kept her mother’s name), Caroline Narkle and Geoffrey Narkle (dec.). The Narkle children were removed from her care and raised in Wandering Mission, also known as the St Francis Xavier Mission, in Wandering. Geoffrey Narkle went on to become a well-known artist himself, and Caroline Narkle is also a practicing artist who paints in association with Mungart Boodja Art Centre in Katanning. The exhibition catalogue South West Central (2003) quotes the following statement from Geoffrey Narkle about his mother:
“Bella Kelly painted to escape many social and political pressures of her time; [having had] her children stolen from her, she found a form of peace in her many landscapes, and she found great joy as many sat and watched her paint as she shared many of her stories. Bella Kelly will always be remembered for her love for her Noongar/Nyoongar people and her great love for her beautiful South-West country” (in Croft & Gooding 2003, pg 43).
Kelly’s experience of losing her children, and the difficulty of rebuilding relationships with those children in later life, is partially narrated in the play King Hit, which was co-written by Geoffrey Narkle and David Milroy in 2002. It dramatises Geoffrey’s life story from growing up with his mother, father and siblings on Clayton Road Reserve just outside of Narrogin, to being taken with his sisters to Wandering Mission, to touring as a boxer with George Stewart’s boxing troupe.
Kelly first exhibited her paintings in 1970 with her son Goldie in Perth. Other exhibitions followed, including one with her son Geoffrey at the Waterman’s Restaurant in Mount Barker in 1977, and a 1991 exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre in which her paintings were shown alongside artwork by Alma Toomath and Michelle Broun. However Kelly’s works circulated widely outside of formal exhibitions. She sold her work through shops in Perth, like Inada Aboriginal Arts, and in the towns where she worked, such as a shop run by Noongar artist and writer Maxine Fumagalli in the town of Denmark. She would also sell individual works to farmers to support her family when she was short of money. Her works are on the walls of many households in Western Australia and have been acquired by interstate and international visitors to the Great Southern, Southwest and South Coast regions, having appealed strongly to Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike. Among the collectors who acquired her work was Perth art entrepreneur and collector Mary Mácha. In 1988, Kelly received the NAIDOC (National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) Aboriginal Artist of the Year Award.
Kelly spent most of her later years in Mt Barker amongst her family, until she passed away in Perth in 1994. In a conversation with the author (2009), Caroline Narkle described how Kelly kept making work right up until the year of her death, and how her grandchildren loved to sit and watch her paint. She remains a greatly revered artist in Western Australia, having been a source of inspiration to Noongar artists such as Lance Chadd, Athol Farmer, Roma Winmar, and Charlie Colbung (her grand-nephew). Her works are in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Berndt Museum of Anthropology, and are kept on permanent display in the Albany Regional Hospital and the Mt Barker Senior High School.
Exhibitions in which her works have been shown posthumously include 'Aboriginal artists of the South-West: Past and Present’ (2000) at the Lawrence Wilson Gallery, The University of Western Australia, and 'South West Central: Indigenous art from south Western Australia 1833-2002’ (2003) at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. In 2009 her works were included in the Brisbane Powerhouse exhibition 'The Legacy of Koorah Coolingah (The Legend of Children Long Ago)’, in which original works of the Carrolup school were shown alongside contemporary Noongar artists who have been influenced by their work.
