Papered Over: The Forgotten Yolngu Artworks in the John Money Collection at Eastern Southalnd Gallery, New Zealand

Abstract

This thesis addresses a little-known collection of fifty-nine acrylic polymer paint and ink works on paper produced on Elcho Island, in north-east Arnhem Land in the period 1968–1971 by three Yolngu artists: George Liwukang Bukurlatjpi, Peter Wadaymu Ganambarr and Harry Djingulul Gandangu. The Elcho Island Pictures are held by Eastern Southland Gallery in Gore, New Zealand, having been gifted to the Gallery in 2002 by their promoter and collector Dr John Money, a naturalised US citizen originally from New Zealand.

The Pictures are pioneering for the use of such introduced art materials at that point in time. The Pictures also are episodic in that a combination of external commercial and cultural forces acted to discourage the continued use of such materials. The Pictures have largely passed out of memory. It will be argued that the Elcho Island Pictures are as significant in the Indigenous art canon as are the celebrated Yirrkala Drawings of 1947 and Papunya Boards of 1971–72.

The principal aims of this project are two-fold. Firstly, the full story of how the Pictures came into being will be told for the first time, and innovations in style and subject matter examined and compared with the prevailing form of painting in earth pigments on bark. Secondly, that body of knowledge will be applied to contemporary scholarship about curation of Indigenous art as the basis of a potential subsequent project seeking to reconnect customary owners with the cultural heritage embodied by the Pictures, namely the artists’ descendants, Yirritja and Dhuwa Elders on Elcho Island, and Yolngu more generally.