In September 1953, at nearly eighty years of age, Margaret Preston presented her final solo exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. It was opened by the art historian Bernard Smith and featured twenty-seven coloured stencil prints alongside three paintings. Among these was Banksia, one of Preston’s last major paintings, inspired by bark paintings Preston had seen at Groote Eylandt, home of the Anindilyakwa people.
This striking composition features three golden banksia flowers that are set against a black-and-white pattern resembling a stylised ribcage. Positioned within this skeletal framework, the blooms appear as vital organs within the torso, suggesting a botanical–anatomical visual analogy. As in much of Preston’s late work, native flora is transformed into a highly ordered composition in which colour, rhythm and pattern take precedence. The banksia becomes both plant specimen and modernist form, its distinctive structure celebrated through bold simplification.
The Margaret Preston exhibition includes Wadawurrung artist Dr Deanne Gilson’s Tjatjarrang (Elder Sister), Orange Banksia in Dilly Bag 2022, completed nearly seventy years after Preston’s Banksia, 1953, as part of a ten-still-life series titled Before Joseph Banks, Our Baskets and Plants Held Sacred Knowledge, 2022. While both paintings centre on the hardy native bloom, Dr Gilson offers a fundamentally different understanding of the banksia. Rather than isolating it as a formal motif, she has placed the flower within a woven dilly bag. Dr Gilson discusses this in her recent reflections:
‘Tjatjarrang (Elder Sister), Orange Banksia in Dilly Bag forms part of an ongoing series titled Baskets of Knowledge. Unlike Margaret Preston’s Banksia, I have used the basket as a metaphor for the body (ancestor/basket maker), with my painting highlighting Indigenous knowledges about trees, plants and connections to Country.’
Dr Gilson further explains the many practical uses of the species:
‘The banksia was used to make artefacts like spears, shields and coolamons, while the seed pods were used as water strainers and fire sticks. The nectar was drunk, or used as glue for artefacts, drum making, ochre painting and to seal possum skins for wet weather’
Rather than presenting the banksia as an aesthetic motif, Dr Gilson acknowledges it as a source of material, and of environmental and ancestral knowledge accumulated across generations. The woven basket reinforces these connections, highlighting the role of women in sustaining cultural practice.
In seeking to develop a distinctly Australian modern art, Preston drew on First Nations motifs and visual traditions as part of her artistic language without considering the cultural significance of the communities from which she appropriated. Dr Gilson notes:
‘Preston has explored Indigenous symbols and motifs for personal and decorative reasons by including traditional marks and totems purely to create her own new style of ‘Australiana’. Removing the person from the object and the connection to Country.’
Viewed together, Preston’s Banksia and Dr Gilson’s Tjatjarrang (Elder Sister), Orange Banksia in Dilly Bag reveal how a single plant can embody different ways of seeing. Preston celebrates the banksia’s remarkable visual form, while Dr Gilson emphasises histories of use, situating the banksia within enduring relationships to Country and cultural continuity.
Beckett Rozentals is NGV Senior Curator, Australian Art.
Dr Deanne Gilson is a proud Wadawurrung woman, multidisciplinary visual artist and Blak designer.
The NGV warmly thanks the Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists for acquiring Dr Deanne Gilson’s Tjatjarrang (Elder Sister), Orange Banksia in Dilly Bag 2022 for the Collection.
This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 60 Sep-Oct 2026.