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BUGALTJI - LISSADELL COUNTRY 1986

MEASUREMENTS

90 by 180 cm

Bears code number TRRRR/ RT21086 on reverse of stretcher together with Lauraine Diggins Fine Art label with artist's name, title, size and catalogue number 970062 on reverse
Natural earth pigments and bush gum on canvas

PROVENANCE
Painted in 1986 for Mary Macha Laurraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne
EXHIBITED
19th and 20th century Australian Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Australian Antique and Fine Art Dealers' Fair, Sydney, and Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 1997, catalogue number 75 Cf. For an earlier, more rudimentary but emblematic painting of the same site see 'Pompeys Pillar (Pangkalji)', 1983, in Thomas, R. with K. Akerman, M. Macha, W. Christensen and W. Caruana, Roads Cross: The paintings of Rover Thomas, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, p.11, illus., for a painting of similar textural qualities and compositional structure see 'Lake Argyle', 1986, ibid., p.17, illus.; Another painting of this site, 'Bungguldgee', c.1985, is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia. See also Carrigan, B., Rover Thomas: I want to paint, Holmes à Court Gallery, Perth, 2003 The painting depicts a site in the Kurirr Kurirr (Krill Krill) song cycle that is part of the artist's Dreaming relating to Cyclone Tracy and the destruction of the city of Darwin. Pangkalji (or Bugaltji) is the name of the ancestral Bat and the place on Lissadell Station known as Pompeys Pillar. By comparison to 'Pompeys Pillar (Pangkalji)', 1983, 'Bugaltji - Lissadell Country', 1986, is an expansive treatment of the site and the events associated with it, showing more detail of the topography and Pompeys Pillar within it. The application of the paint - areas of layered washes of colour applied by gestural brushstrokes and divided by lines of dots in encrusted white pigment - is characteristic of the artist's major works Thirty-one verses of the Kurirr Kurirr songs as sung by Rover and recorded by Dr Will Christenson of Perth in 1983 are published in Thomas et al, 1994, pp.25-27. Verse 22 describes the devil devil Jimpi and the spirit of the dead woman 'at Pangkalji (Pompeys Pillar), home of the legendary Bat (Pangkalji) and the Blue-Tongued Lizard (Lumuku). Lumuku looks at the bats flying in, out and around the pillar' The Kurirr Kurirr Dreaming was revealed to Rover by the spirit of an aunt who had died of injuries received in a car crash on a road flooded by the rains of the cyclone. The accident occurred at the road junction near Turkey Creek. The woman was taken to Perth by the Royal Flying Doctor Service, but she passed away while the plane was above a whirlpool off the coast of Broome which is the home of an ancestral Rainbow Serpent. The spirit of the dead woman then began the long journey across the Kimberley from the west to her home at Warmun (next to Turkey Creek) in the east. She was accompanied by two other spirits or devil devils; Jimpi the first companion, takes her as far as Mount Cockburn, near Wyndham, and is replaced by another devil devil, Manginta. From here, Manginta and the woman's spirit travel north to Kununurra where they observe the cyclone destroying Darwin. Indigenous elders across the Kimberley interpreted this event as another ancestral Rainbow Serpent (known by several names, but Rover called it Wungurr) warning Indigenous people throughout the region to maintain their cultural practices in an environment where European influence was growing stronger. To the elders, Darwin symbolized the centre or capital of European culture in northern Australia. Rover received this Dreaming and the related ceremony, songs and images for painted boards that participants carried across their shoulders in the ritual