Artist’s Statement

Dinah Garadji
1921 - 2006
Ngukurr, Roper River
Language: Wandarrang/Mara/Yugul Clan: Marawalwal

Selected Exhibitions:
1994 Shades of Ochre Gallery Darwin NT
May 1995 Shades of Ochre Gallery Darwin NT
Joshua Sisters' Exhibition
April 1998 Group Exhibition Rebecca Hossack Gallery - London
May 1998 Karen Brown Gallery Darwin NT Joshua Sisters Exhibition
September 1998 Karen Brown Gallery NT Dinah Garadji Recent works
first solo exhibition
February 1999 Wentworth Hotel Sydney NSW Karen Brown Gallery
Group Exhibition
May 1999 Karen Brown Gallery Darwin NT Dinah Garadji
September 1999
16th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Inslander Art Award 1999 Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory
September 2000
17th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Inslander Art Award 2000 Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory
October 2000 Melbourne Art Fair 2000 Group Exhibition
Royal Exhibition Building
Melbourne Vic
June 2001 Karen Brown Gallery Darwin NT Group Show
October 2001 Karen Brown Gallery Darwin NT Solo Exhibition - Dinah Garadji
'Designs of my Country'
August 2002 Melbourne Art Fair 2002Royal Exhibition Building Melbourne, Victoria
2003 Karen Brown Gallery Darwin NT Selected Artists - 'Strong Women'
2004 Parliament House Darwin NT Selected Artists
Karen Brown Collection
Kerry Stokes Collection
National Gallery of Victoria
Laverty Collection
Private Collectors Nationally and Internationally

Dinah was a senior member of the Ngukurr Community. She was born at Milinybarrwarr, the old CMS mission downstream from Ngukurr in the early 20's - about 1921. Dinah went to school at the old mission. She started painting in the early 90's and continued to develop her style and use of bright acrylics to depict the country that she loved and knew so well. Dinah was an established artist with many exhibitions to her credit.
Dinah Garadji's works are a style combining structure and freedom. Her first paintings have more figurative elements and reference to particular location sites while many of her later works are total abstractions.
Dinah referred to many of her paintings as ‘patterns and designs’. Within these works there is a strong sense of country and place.Dinah painted constantly and derived great pleasure from the outpouring of her life experiences onto the canvas. As an Artist she was increasingly experimental in her approach and style.

Dinah Garadji was one of five sisters collectively known as ‘the Joshua’s’, although they each paint under different surnames. (1 Known not only for their distinctive individual painting styles the sisters are comprehensively involved in the Roper River’s Ngukurr community, being traditional owners, community elders, great grandmothers, teachers and artists. They are actively involved in language and culture programs teaching both English and traditional languages at the Ngukurr school. Multi-lingual themselves, they and their extended families include speakers of the Alawa, Mara, Mangarayi, Ngandi, Nunggubuyu and Warndarang languages, reflecting the diversity and post-colonial history of the Roper River region. Kriol has long been the lingua franca of this area, virtually from the beginning of the twentieth century when the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) was established on what is now the Ngukurr town site.

The Roper River region had a bloody contact history. Two decades of conflict with pastoralists at the end of the nineteenth century culminated in the early twentieth century in the violent policies of a large cattle syndicate, the Eastern and African Cold Storage Company which leased some fifty thousand square kilometers, comprising the entire eastern half of Arnhem Land and virtually all the land of the seven tribal groups at Ngukurr today (2). Following the alienation of their traditional lands, many Aboriginal families coalesced around the CMS post (1908) for the stability and protection it afforded.

There were two mission eras, which serve as historical markers for local people, the ‘old mission’ period spanning from 1906 until World War II when the floods wiped it out during the 1939/40 wet season. The Joshua sisters were raised and educated at the ‘new mission’ and maintain a strong affiliation with the Anglican faith, Dinah Garadji herself being a deaconess of St. Matthews at Ngukurr.

Ngukurr has been a well-known regional centre for Aboriginal art since its most celebrated talent, Ginger Riley Muduwalawala and fellow artist, Djambu Barra Barra, entered brilliantly coloured figurative works in the 1987 National Aboriginal Art Award. Their entries held considerable shock value for what was then a fairly conservative audience. Relative newcomers, Dinah Garadji and her sisters work in the new ‘tradition’ established by Riley, Barra Barra and the late Willie Gudabi and his wife Moima who formed the nucleus of the first generation of Ngukurr artists. There are clear continuities in Dinah Garadji’s work, in the use of bright colours, a scenic landscape style and a penchant for fearless innovations. Whilst the scene appears to be a faithful reflection of place, based on Garadji’s own description, Two Steep Hills displays a degree of topographical licence, giving prime space to it’s most important feature: water.

Garadji has painted a number of abstract works, which she declares to be simply ‘designs’ with no further meaning or story. The triangular pattern around Two Steep Hills is similar to a framing convention that Riley sometimes adopts. In his work, patterned borders contain a symbolic reference to ‘body designs’. For Garadji their function is purely decorative. I like the design…the triangle is a design, it’s like a fence around that painting.

© Anne Brody, Associate Curator, Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth, April 2005
Source: H2O A Miscellany of Works from the Kerry Stokes Collection, Australian Capital Equity, West Perth 2000, pp. 104 – 105

(1). Gertie Huddleston, Angelina George, Betty Roberts and Eva Rogers who died in 2002.
(2). John Sandefur. ‘Aspects of the socio-political history of Ngukurr (Roper River) and its effects on language change’. In Aboriginal History, Volume Nine, Australian National University, Canberra 1985, p. 210.