Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey (1924–85) was born on Mornington Island before European missionaries and colonial squatter-settlers established a strong presence in the Gulf of Carpentaria. His mother, Kuthakin (later renamed Minnie), selected a small stretch of coast fringed with pandanus palms to give birth, a place known as Gara Gara (Karrakarra), near Goobirah Point (Kupare). He was born around September, when the pandanus tree was in full fruit, and the event is chronicled in Goobalathaldin’s Birth Day 1984, one of his largest and most important paintings, in which he is held aloft by a family member and presented to his kin and Country.
Traditionally, Lardil people took the name of their birth site, so Roughsey was called Gara Gara for the first few years of his life. The family lived a traditional lifestyle until Roughsey was around eight years old, when he was taken to the newly established Presbyterian mission. Although the mission was adjacent to the community, boys were only allowed to visit their families twice a week and on special occasions. Around this time, Roughsey was given the name ‘Dick’. His father’s names were Goobalathaldin (meaning ‘deep sea’) and Kiwarbija, which translates loosely as ‘rough seas’. The anglicised form, Roughsey, was given to the family as a surname.
Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey ‘(Women singing Djarada love songs)’
Like many Aboriginal boys, Dick was educated at the mission until his early teenage years, before being sent out to work on cattle stations and later as a deckhand on a supply boat that transported goods from Thursday Island to towns and communities throughout the Gulf. Through these travels, Roughsey made friends and joined ceremony in Yirrkala in Arnhem Land. Importantly, this is also where he first observed artists working on bark paintings.
Apart from a number of isolated examples of bark paintings by Dick’s older brother Lindsay (Burrud), which he made for the anthropologist Norman Tindale in 1960, there was no established tradition on Mornington Island of painting on bark panels. The brothers set about creating their own unique style of painting, distinctive in its use of stark white backgrounds over which traditional Lardil stories are painted using silhouetted figures. Few trees in the southern Gulf were suitable for bark painting, so the artist and pilot Percy Trezise (1923–2005) — with whom Roughsey established a close friendship after the pair met in 1962 — would often cut the barks near his home in Cairns and deliver the panels to Karumba during his weekly DC3 flight service to the town.
Victorian-born Trezise became a pivotal artistic influence on Roughsey. Together they drew up a ten-year plan for Roughsey to become an artist; in the first five years he would paint in a ‘traditional’ style, focusing on his own Lardil stories, before beginning to paint in a Western style. This was likely the first time an Aboriginal person had devised a career plan to become an artist. Trezise helped Roughsey exhibit his work and introduced him to many of his art world contacts. In turn, Roughsey accompanied Trezise on trips through Cape York, acting as a guide and cultural intermediary in documenting numerous rock art galleries scattered throughout the escarpment, and talking to local traditional owners about their sacred stories.
Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey ‘Strange procession passing by’
Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey ‘Tribe on the move in the past, Cape York’
Roughsey also spent time with Queensland artist Ray Crooke, whom he met when Crooke visited Mornington Island. Crooke helped Roughsey hone his oil painting techniques — which by the mid 1960s were taking on a touch of Paul Gauguin, reflecting Crooke’s influence — and these works were soon shown in a commercial exhibition in Canberra.
Roughsey’s figurative paintings continued to flourish and became popular throughout Queensland. His works often create a sense of including the viewer in the narrative, and this conscious framing conveys something of how Roughsey’s work and life was marked by generosity. Indeed, his paintings invite viewers to look closely and to learn more about Aboriginal traditions, cultural narratives and histories.
Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey and Percy Trezise ‘Goorialla was in a great rage…’
The Rainbow Serpent
In the 1970s, Roughsey and Trezise began transferring this knowledge into children’s picture books, a format uniquely suited to Roughsey’s naive, narrative landscapes. His best-known book, The Rainbow Serpent, first published in 1975, is still in print today. For thousands of children and families, it has been an important first encounter with Indigenous Australian culture.
RELATED Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey
From his birth by a beach on a small island in one of Australia’s most isolated areas to his advocacy work in Canberra as the foundation chair of the Aboriginal Arts Board for the Australia Council for the Arts, Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey was an important artist and cultural leader at a time of incredible change. ‘Stories of this Land’ recognises the life and work of this proud Lardil man, who took his people’s culture and stories to the world.
Bruce Johnson McLean is former Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, QAGOMA. He is a member of the Wierdi (Wirrid) people of the Birri Gubbi nation of Wribpid (central Queensland).
‘Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey: Stories of this Land’ / Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane / 30 March until 18 August 2019 / The first major retrospective celebrating the work and life of Roughsey (1920-1985).
‘Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey: Stories of this Land’ is a collaboration between Cairns Art Gallery and QAGOMA.
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land upon which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution Indigenous people make to the art and culture of this country.
It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs on the QAGOMA Blog...
A selection of Indigenous art takes movement, both literal and figurative, as its theme, inspired by the well-known song of the same name, featuring ceramics, sculpture, etchings, photography and painting by artists across Queensland whose works are underpinned by the desire for engagement and justice.
‘It’s not all that glitters is gold, half the story has never been told,
So now you see the light, stand up for your rights
Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights,
Get up, stand up, don’t give up the fight’
Recorded in 1973, the song ‘Get up, stand up’ by visionary Rastafarian musicians Bob Marley and The Wailers has long been synonymous with social resistance movements globally, including those within Indigenous Australia. Growing up in Jamaica in the 1950s and 60s, Marley was part of the black African diaspora, ‘that population throughout the world that had been scattered or colonized as the result of the slave trade and imperialism’. In the 1970s, recognising their commonalities, and at a time when Indigenous community services were being established across the country, many social movements in Australia adopted Marley’s reggae anthems as their own. His music and its themes of social justice lent a voice to the unheard and mobilised likeminded people searching for change.
Similarly, the works in ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ express their makers’ engagement with Indigenous cultural, familial and political movements. From depicting literal movements of the body — in dance and in protest — to figurative explorations of historical movements and events, this Collection exhibition focuses on the works of Indigenous Queensland artists who assert their sovereignty and seek political and social equality; an ongoing struggle that has gained a renewed sense of urgency with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Freedom of movement
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Indigenous people’s freedom of movement was severely restricted: communities were forcibly moved from their traditional lands to the reserves and missions created by the governments of the day; and children were removed from their families,in an attempt to break ancient lines of cultural knowledge and practices. Here, a group of contemporary paintings by Lardil artists Joelene Roughsey, Wunun Wayne Williams and Gordon Watt show ceremonial body markings and dancewear, celebrating their freedom to practise culture and symbolic of their ancestors’ free movement across the land. The freedom to dance and conduct ceremonies is further highlighted in ceramic works by Naomi Hobson, Lawrence Omeenyo and Janet Fieldhouse. Finally, as the name suggests, Patrick Thaiday’s Zugub (Dance Machines) 2011 are articulated sculptural objects activated by dancers during performances — the most literal embodiment of the theme.
Naomi Hobson Malkarti Poles (Dancing Poles) 2017
Janet Fieldhouse Dance series: Transformation 4 2009
Patrick Thaiday Zugub (Dance machines) 2011
Interruption of movement
Works point to the frontier era of Australian history and depict restrictions on freedom, but which also acknowledge the introduction of new artistic aesthetics, Based on his Elders’ early experiences, Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey’s illustrative history paintings offer glimpses of first contact with Europeans in the northern Cape. Vincent Serico’s Carnarvon collision (Big map) 2006 shares an important historical narrative, including both pleasantries and hostilities. And while Serico uses oral accounts of colonisation from his family and community to create new visual narratives, Danie Mellor takes advantage of existing colonial photography of his ancestors and their rainforest home, shown here in a blue palette inspired by the decoration on English Spode ware. D Harding’s abstract ochre painting We breathe together 2017 incorporates natural pigment from his ancestral region, Carnarvon Gorge, interrupted by a field of Rickett’s Blue laundry whitener, once a highly prized and traded item on the frontier, and for Harding, symbolic of the domestic labour that generations of his female ancestors were forced into under government policy.
Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey First Missionary, Mornington Island 1977
Vincent Serico Carnarvon collision (Big map) 2006
Danie Mellor The pleasure and vexation of history 2017
Involuntary movement
Reflecting their families’ experiences of involuntary movement off Country, away from family and onto missions and reserves, as per the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of Sale of Opium Act 1897, personal portraits by Vernon Ah Kee and Heather (Wunjarra) Koowootha expose the Act’s ongoing effects on community. The introduction of Christianity is a common thread in works by Archie Moore and Cornelius Richards, presenting complex perspectives on its arrival, which provided both sanctuary and oppression. Richards spent many years working with the Yarrabah Guyala Pottery from the 1980s onwards: as with Yarrabah, many other missions opened commercial operations involving art and craft. Artist Mervyn Riley also created works at the Barambah Pottery that are typical of the 1970s era. Due to their production-line manufacture, however, many objects produced at Barambah (now known as Cherbourg) lack artists’ inscriptions and instead credit ‘Cherbourg artists’ with their creation.
Vernon Ah Kee neither pride nor courage (detail) 2006
Heather Marie The story tellers 2017
A series of fibre works demonstrates the diversity of materials and techniques in Queensland fibre art practices, specifically bag-making. The rotating selection of works includes traditional forms and stitching, styles taught by missionaries, and contemporary experimentation. Examples range from Abe Muriata’s rainforest Jawun (bicornial baskets) to Jenny Mye and daughter-in-law Charlotte Mye’s polypropylene tape bags (used in place of customary coconut leaves); from Clara, Margaret, Doreen and Mynor Yam’s string bags associated with their home, Kowanyama, to Philomena Yeatman and Ruby Ludwick’s coiled palm-fibre works — a technique introduced to the regions; to Wilma Walker and Dorothy Short’s kakan and puunya (baskets), created from materials and techniques unique to their ancestors. These are complimented by Evelyn McGreen’s portfolio of prints, depicting the multitude of functions for a variety of basket shapes.
Evelyn McGreen Wawu bajin dhangay bulganghi (Strainer for washing clams and shellfish) 2010
Providing a darkly humorous conclusion to the group is Sue Elliott’s painting Christ I’m tired c.1993, which features the crisp use of the colloquialism with...
