ROCK HOLES AND COUNTRY NEAR THE OLGAS, 2008

Private Exhibition of Important Aboriginal Art
Melbourne
11 October 2011
33

BILL WHISKEY TJAPALTJARRI

(c.1920 - 2008)
ROCK HOLES AND COUNTRY NEAR THE OLGAS, 2008

synthetic polymer paint on linen

92.0 x 120.0 cm

inscribed verso: artist's name, title, size and Watiyawanu Artists of Amunturrungu cat. 10-08415

Provenance

Watiyawanu Artists of Amunturrungu, Mt Liebig
Private collection, South Australia

Catalogue text

Bill Whiskey's art deals almost exclusively with the ancestral white cockatoo story from his birthplace of Pirupa Alka, about 130 kilometers south of the Kata Tjuta (The Olgas). The story focuses on three birds - the white cockatoo and his friend the eagle and their adversary, the crow. Characterised by great subtlety and chromatic brilliance, Bill Whiskey's paintings map out the compositional elements of the story. Then in a painstaking manner, these elements are surrounded by a great multitude of white and coloured dots.

Born in about 1920, Bill Whiskey (Mininderi in Pitjantjatjara) was a small child when his family moved to Uluru in search of food and water. Here they had their fIrst contact with white people and white man's food. It was following the death of his father that Bill Whiskey, then aged in his late teens, walked to Haasts Bluff where he met his wife Colleen Nampitjinpa, a Luritja woman from Tjukula. Agile and of small stature, he had a broad flowing beard for which he gained white man's nickname Bill Whiskery, which promptly became abbreviated to Bill Whiskey, ironically as he was a teetotaller and non-smoker.

After many decades at Haasts Bluff, Bill Whiskey and his family moved to an outstation near Amunturrngu (Mt Liebig). In 2004 when in his mid eighties, he started to paint with acrylic paints on canvas for Watiyawanu Artists of the Amunturrngu Aboriginal Corporation, his paintings quickly became sought after and he achieved recognition as an important contemporary artist who in a brief painting career between 2004 and his death in 2008 created bold, colourful and distinctive compositions.