Clifford Brooks, Wiluna, 2006:
My old man [Rover] told me, ‘We gotta do painting and tell our stories through there’. Might as well do it through arts so the whole world can hear us.
Rover Thomas is one of Australia’s most important artists. One of the first two Indigenous artists to represent Australia at the 1990 Venice Biennale, his paintings sparked a greater appreciation of Aboriginal art, both nationally and internationally.
Although he found fame late in life as an East Kimberley artist, Rover was a desert man, and the story of his life is interwoven with that of the Canning Stock Route. Rover was born in the 1920s and raised in the Country around the middle stretches of the stock route.
After his parents died, he was picked up by a drover, Wally Dowling, and taken north to Billiluna and the Kimberley. He became a stockman himself, and eventually married and settled at Turkey Creek. There, in the 1970s, he pioneered the East Kimberley school of ochre painting on canvas.
Rover’s desert family moved in other directions, settling in faraway missions and stations. Rover’s brother Charlie moved south to Jigalong. His sister Nyuju Stumpy Brown moved to Fitzroy Crossing, and another sister, Kupi, walked west to La Grange mission (Bidyadanga) with her daughter, Miyapu Mary Meribida. Nyuju, Mary and Charlie’s son, Clifford Brooks, all became artists in their own right.
In this way, the story of Rover Thomas is more than one man’s remarkable life. His story reveals the personal impact that the stock route had on the historical movement of Aboriginal families, and the extraordinary artistic movements that followed in their tracks.
![An ochre on stretched canvas white dot and line painting with a black background. A yellow and pink line is painted around the artwork, bordered by white dots. The yellow like spirals in the lower left corner. - click to view larger image](https://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0009/714573/2.jpg)
Canning Stock Route by Rover Thomas
![A painting on canvas with brown and black concentric rings that run diagonally from the top left corner to the lower right corner connected by three parallel wavy brown lines with yellow dots between. At the lower left and upper right is a concentric brown, yellow and black circle with lines radiating out from it. Each line terminates in a smaller concentric ring in brown, black and yellow. Along the centre edge on each side is a row of three concentric circles in brown, black and yellow. The background is made up of small maze-like line filled sections in gold colour on black. - click to view larger image](https://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0010/714574/3.jpg)
Canning Stock Route Country by Clifford Brooks
![A vertically striped painting on brown linen in black and maroon with four stripes in yellow down the centre. The strip is punctuated by brown and black circles. Top left is an oval filled with small brown boomerang-like shapes and red dots. - click to view larger image](https://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0011/714575/4.jpg)
Blood on the Ground, Wells 33-41 by Clifford Brooks
![A painting on brown linen with a black background overlaid with vertical stripes in dark red with two narrow vertical sections in orange stripes. In between these orange sections there is a wavy vertical row of brown and black circles. - click to view larger image](https://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0003/714576/5.jpg)
My Father Looking for his Brother by Clifford Brooks
![A rectangular painting on canvas with a wavy line of concentric brown, black and yellow circles running diagonally down the painting from top left to bottom right. There is a white shape with yellow edging near the bottom right of the painting. The background has three different coloured sections with maze like line patterns across all of them. The top is white and brown, the middle is orange and black and the lower section is yellow and brown. - click to view larger image](https://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0004/714577/6.jpg)
Lake Disappointment by Clifford Brooks
![An orange toned textured painting on canvas with two white edged ovals in a horizontal line. The background is dark orange dotted in the upper right corner and lighter in lower left. The two ovals have a blue green background edged with white dots, with a central dotted white section leaving a very thin section of the blue showing. - click to view larger image](https://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0005/714578/7.jpg)
Pumnu by Mary Meribida
![A framed multicoloured acrylic on canvas line painting. It features a thick orange line in the centre, purple corners, large blue dots and a black curved line. Many of the features in the artwork are bordered by a light brown line. - click to view larger image](https://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0006/714579/8.jpg)
Kukapanyu by Nyuju Stumpy Brown
![A textured chocolate brown toned painting on canvas with a design of concentric ovals which have been scribed with a blunt instrument into the layer of paint. In the small spaces between the ovals are raised dots in brown. - click to view larger image](https://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0007/714580/9.jpg)
Warla by Billy Thomas
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