ARTWORK STORY
I grew up in a forest of tall trees where beautiful wildflowers were everywhere. My grandmother remembered when there were many waratahs in our forest. She also remembered how poachers came often and took them all to sell in Sydney. Soon there were no waratahs left in our forest.
I understood these stories because when I was growing up there were still beautiful wildflowers everywhere. That is why I painted the series Where the Wildflowers Once Grew — to remember and to explain what happened to the wildflowers and to the waratahs. The wildflowers disappeared suddenly when huge machines came in and thinned the forest, leaving only the very largest trees. Later even some of those large trees were cut down for timber. The machines scraped away a foot of the rich rainforest soil that had been full of minerals.
The Waratah Forest is my imagining of what our forest once looked like. In this series of paintings I created a fantasy forest of giant waratahs where Aboriginal people live like kings among Aboriginal fairies.
ARTWORK STORY
I grew up in a forest of tall trees where beautiful wildflowers were everywhere. My grandmother remembered when there were many waratahs in our forest. She also remembered how poachers came often and took them all to sell in Sydney. Soon there were no waratahs left in our forest.
I understood these stories because when I was growing up there were still beautiful wildflowers everywhere. That is why I painted the series Where the Wildflowers Once Grew — to remember and to explain what happened to the wildflowers and to the waratahs. The wildflowers disappeared suddenly when huge machines came in and thinned the forest, leaving only the very largest trees. Later even some of those large trees were cut down for timber. The machines scraped away a foot of the rich rainforest soil that had been full of minerals.
The Waratah Forest is my imagining of what our forest once looked like. In this series of paintings I created a fantasy forest of giant waratahs where Aboriginal people live like kings among Aboriginal fairies.
