About the room
This gallery presents rare works by Anindilyakwa artists from Groote Eylandt held in the Leonhard Adam Collection. In the 1940s, Adam, a recently arrived refugee from Europe during the Second World War, joined the University of Melbourne and later worked as the curator of the anthropological collections. He advocated for the University to establish an international collection of Indigenous art and a gallery for its display. To this end, in 1946, Adam acquired a collection of 36 Anindilyakwa bark paintings from Fred Gray, a pearl and trepang trader who had established the Umbakumba settlement on an old Macassan trading post on Groote Eylandt.
Anindilyakwa art is distinguished in the history of Indigenous art by its finely silhouetted images of animals, fish and seacraft floating against manganese black or yellow backgrounds. The iconography relates to the rock art of the archipelago, and often depicts contact imagery; for instance, the early Dutch sea vessels and Macassan trepangers who visited Groote Eylandt from southern Sulawesi.
Diverse iconography, encompassing sea creatures, birds, animal tracks, Macassan praus, mission boats, ceremonial participants, ancestral creators and the Milky Way, tumble freely across the stringybark surfaces of the eleven artists’ works.
Fifteen works are by Minimini Numalkikiya Mamarika, who moved between figuration and abstraction, symbolism and realism, and employed both planar and frontal perspectives.
