Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Painters Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above 6th February 1990

EXHIBITED
Paintings and Sculpture by Lin Onus, Painters Gallery, Sydney, May – June 1990

Growing up in Melbourne with a Yorta Yorta father from Cummeragunja in New South Wales and a mother of Scottish descent, Lin Onus was preoccupied by a sense of not 'belonging'. He had no ancestral or cultural ties to the white, middle-class Melbourne suburb he grew up in, experiencing frequent incidences of racism which escalated to physical altercations at school and were the catalyst for his eventual expulsion. Thanks to the tireless work that his parents, Bill Onus and Mary McLintock Kelly were doing as determined political campaigners for social change and in part to his own experiences of racism, Onus was inspired to find his own public voice through art.1

Onus' father Bill and uncle, Aaron Briggs, were important influences in educating him about his Indigenous heritage and through regular tripsto their ancestral homeland of Cummeragunja and Barmah Forest on the Murray River, he developed deep spiritual ties to this country which would regularly become the subject of his work. Another significant spiritual and cultural journey in his exploration of his Indigenousidentity came through a trip to Maningrida in Arnhem Land in 1986 where he was to make a lifelong and deeply important connection with bark painter and respected elder, Jack Wunuwun. In recognition of the close ties that would develop, Wunuwun was to adopt Onus into the Murrungun Djinang clan. Wunuwun was an innovative painter who drew on European influences and 'firmly believed that art was a powerful means by which to reconcile Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia'.2

Through his influence, Onus was to further develop his own stylistic language incorporating Indigenous and European elements and iconography for which are the hallmarks of his oeuvre. Wamut and Warru features a young Tikiri, Onus' son, following a trip to Maningrida with his father. Wamut is the Dhuwa skin name given to Tiriki by Jack Wunuwun. The two had a grandfather-grandson relationship. Warru is the campfire. On the opening night of the Painters Gallery exhibition where this work featured, Onus described how, around a campfire one night he was struck by the significance of the journey that he had taken with his son. Tikiri had received traditional teachings in Maningrida represented by the fire, which had been passed down through generations from the ever-present Ancestors, represented by the blue dots in the sky, always in the background. Their wisdom can be accessed through Ceremony and teachings.3

1. Frances Lindsay AM in Lin Onus: Yinya Wala, exh. cat., p. 6
2. Wally Caruana et al., Old Masters: Australia's Great Bark Artists, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2013, p. 231
3. Personal recollection of the present owner of the work in conversation with the artist