Design and Art Australia Online

Lucy Williams Connelly, basket-weaver and painter, was born in Narrandera, New South Wales, in 1940. She is a descendant of the Waradgeri people and also has Mexican gypsy heritage on her mother’s side, and Scottish and English heritage on her father’s side. Lucy’s father was a shearer and a country musician and her childhood was spent travelling around New South Wales in a horse and wagon with her parents and many brothers and sisters. When Lucy was 16 years old her family passed through Swan Hill in Victoria. After finding a job with an English family as a live-in carer for an elderly man, she managed to convince her mother to let her stay in the town. She got married soon after to Mar-ice Neil Connelly, a dairy farmer, and went on to raise six children in Swan Hill.

Lucy’s father was a painter and craftsman who often stayed with her in his later years. Together with the family they would go fishing in the Murray/Murrumbidgee region of New South Wales and Victoria and collect the bent roots of trees submerged in the river. These would then be cut up and made into boomerangs, snakes and walking sticks. They would also collect wood to make didgeridoos, bark paintings, trays, and other objects. Lucy and her father would decorate these objects by burning the wood with a piece of wire that had been heated in a tin of coal. Images of Aboriginal people with their tents and humpies, and native animals such as kangaroos, porcupines and emus would be 'burned in’ to the wood. Lucy was also taught by her father’s cousin, Sam Kirby, to carve emu eggs, a very slow and delicate task.

Lucy began making woven baskets when she and her friend Ivy Bell were taught basketry techniques by members of the Country Women’s Association (CWA) in Bendigo and Horsham in the early 1970s. Over the years she developed her own style of basket making and continued to experiment with different kinds of stitches. Some of her baskets are made from pine needles, which are collected from the base of the pine tree, tied in bundles and soaked in hot water. The pine-needles are criss-crossed with a raffia thread structure made by turning the basket around and around like a spider’s web. Lucy also collects Cummbungi, which is a reed that stands 8 to 10 feet tall on the channel and damn banks and lake shores near her home. She described to the author that you should never collect the reeds, which are dug out of the mud, on your own because “there are plenty of snakes around!”. After being collected, Cummbungi is soaked in a bath overnight and wrapped up in a sheet to keep damp. The reeds are rubbed with a rag until they are silky like a ribbon and then woven while still wet and flexible. Lucy has also integrated long grasses and flowers into her baskets. She regularly participates in weaving workshops and takes great pleasure in learning the diverse weaving techniques that have been practiced by Indigenous people around the country. She dedicates many hours to her craft but rarely sells her baskets; in keeping with her family’s philosophy of sharing and giving her baskets have found their way into homes across Australia as gifts and as donations to charity.

Lucy also paints, using ochres and water-based paints on canvas, board and bark. She described to the author how she draws inspirations from places she sees when she’s travelling around New South Wales. She is often woken in the night by a clear and intense vision of what she has seen and gets up to paint in the early hours of the morning.

Lucy worked as a pre-school teacher for ten years in her 40s, and went on to be the coordinator of an Aboriginal childcare centre for a further ten years. She always loved being involved in the lives of children and her artistic knowledge and skills have figured strongly in her role as educator and elder. She is a frequent visitor to a number of schools in Swan Hill where she is often invited to demonstrate basket making and emu egg carving. When her children were young she made sure that they could be creative alongside her, and two of her daughters – Alva Connelly and Lorraine Connelly-Northey – are artists in their own right. As adults, her children continued to be a part of her bush expeditions to fish and collect supplies just as she had done with her father. As a child Lucy would watch and help her mother make clothes for the children, and in addition to her basket making, painting and carving, she crochets, knits, does fine needlework and makes paper and feather flowers, as did her mother. She has accumulated vast amounts of fabrics, wools, threads and other materials in preparation for future years of artistic practice.

Lucy participated in the 2006 exhibition “Tribal Expressions” at The Arts Centre in Melbourne, and her work is in the collection of the Koorie Heritage Trust, Melbourne.

Writers:

Fisher, Laura Note: In consultation with the artist

Date written:

2008

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed