Rover Thomas was born at Gunawaggi, Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route. His mother, Ngakuyipa (Nita) was a Kukatja woman, the two fathers who brought him up were Lanikan Thomas and Sundown, both Wangkajunga men.
When he was ten, he moved with his parents to Billuna Station in the Kimberley, where he began to work as a stockman. Here, sometime during World War II, he was initiated into traditional law. He later worked with a European fencing contractor before returning to Western Australia and the Bow River Station in the north-eastern Kimberley. He later worked at the Texas Downs Station and the Mabel Downs Station.
In early 1975 he came to live with the Warmun community at Turkey Creek. At this time Aboriginal people had finally been awarded equal pay with white workers and as a result many station owners expelled them from their properties.
In that year the Kurirr-Kurirr ceremony came to Rover Thomas in a dream, a series of visitations from a dead Kija Wula speaking woman, who told him of her travels over the land after her death. She had been critically injured in a road accident, and died as the Royal Flying Doctor Service flew her over the whirlpool Tawurrkurima/Jintiripul, the home of the Rainbow Snake. Thomas first made a series of song verses on these revelations, which became boards for dancers to hold in ceremonies. By the early 1980s Thomas began to paint larger interpretations of the dream of the old woman who told him of roads crossing, of past massacres and the Rainbow Serpent’s destruction of Darwin with the event known as Cyclone Tracy in December 1974.
Thomas also painted of massacres of Aboriginal people in the Kimberley. These events were sufficiently recent for him to have heard the stories directly from survivors.
In 1990 Rover Thomas and Trevor Nickolls became the first two Aboriginal artists to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale and in 1994 Roads Cross, a major survey of his work was exhibited at the National Gallery of Australia.
- Writers:
-
Joanna Mendelssohn
- Date written:
- 2022
- Last updated:
- 2022
