Kunwinjku Bim

The National Gallery of Victoria places great significance on the opening of its new gallery of Aboriginal and Oceanic art. Appropriately, the first year’s program for this gallery will exclusively present Aboriginal art. The Gallery is pleased to be devoting a newly designed permanent space for the display of Aboriginal art and the art of Pacific cultures. Under its new program, the Gallery will place special emphasis on bringing to the attention of the general public those qualities of vitality and renewal so strongly evident in Aboriginal aesthetic traditions.

In 1974, the Aboriginal Arts Board acquired a major collection of Oenpelli paintings from the Anglican Church Missionary Society’s Sydney gallery. In 1977, fifty-two of these paintings went on tour to major centres in Australia and Europe in the exhibition Oenpelli Paintings on Bark. Two years later, in 1979, the Aboriginal Arts Board published Oenpelli Bark Paintings which illustrated and documented a larger selection of works from their collection. Kunwinjku Bim comprises the 1977 exhibition collection with a further selection of eight paintings from the same period. Also included in the exhibition are two groups of paintings which provide an interesting historical perspective on the contemporary works: five of these, collected by Spencer and Cahill, at Oenpelli circa 1912, have been generously loaned by the Museum of Victoria and the remaining five, collected by Mountford circa 1948, are from the Gallery’s own collection.

On this occasion the earlier exhibition has been retitled in order to focus attention on the artists, all Kunwinjku language speakers. This change of focus is not intended to diminish the significance of Oenpelli as the place where the artists produced these works at a particular period – that era in the late 60s and early 70s when Oenpelli was both a centre and synonym for the western Arnhem land painting style. Rather, it is to direct attention to the importance of the Kunwinjku people and their art within a wider context. Today, artists who live in those regions marked by Croker and Goulburn Islands in the north, the Tomkinson River in the east, Bamyili and Katherine in the south, and Oenpelli in the west all share certain painting characteristics which distinguish a western Arnhem Land style and the men who produce these paintings often come together to perform ceremonies and can speak or hear the Kunwinku language.

Annemarie Brody & Patrick McCaughey, Kunwinjku Bim: Western Arnhem Land Paintings from the collection of the Aboriginal Arts Board, National Gallery of Victoria, 1984