Steve Vivian, Kaye Brown’s lost work for the Adelaide Biennial was inspired by the creations of her ancestors, 4 May 2024

In a basement room of the Museum of South Australia, catalogued on shelves more than 3,000 kilometres from their place of origin, is one of the largest collection of Tiwi artefacts on record.

The items were gathered from the islands in 1954 when ethnologist Charles Mountford led an expedition north at the direction of the Australian Geographic Society.

The haul, enough to furnish over 120 metres of shelving at the museum, and viewable by appointment, includes the artwork of Kaye Brown’s ancestors.

“I wanted to see the old paintings and all the carvings,” said Brown, who recently visited the collection with her family.

The family group hail from Paluwiyanga (Goose Creek) on Melville Island and paint at Jilamara Arts, an Aboriginal-owned collective in the community of Milikapiti.

“And to see more skill. I want to know what they used to put the bark together, to make a basket,” she said.

“I think they give us more knowledge, what they had, and we try to pass the knowledge to the kids.”

The family group viewed the vast historical archive before flying back to the Tiwis and responding with new works for this year’s Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art.

For members of the public accessing the collection, details about the objects are piecemeal – but visits from people with cultural knowledge, like Brown, can begin to fill in the gaps.

“Some of these collections were collected in a previous era, where there was minimal information recorded about the Tiwi people who were making it,” Will Heathcote, the coordinator of Jilamara Arts, said.

“Some of them are housed in warehouses with archive information that hasn’t really been revisited for over 50 years.

“Most of it was focused on the process of acquiring objects and storing them away.”

Heathcote said it was critical that people still connected to these artefacts were able to engage with collections housed in museums and galleries across Australia.

“As generations are getting older it becomes increasingly important for people to be travelling to these areas and accessing these materials and contributing to the knowledge around them,” he said.

Pedro Wonaeamirri, a senior Tiwi artist, spent two weeks at the Art Gallery of NSW last year adding cultural information to the gallery’s archives of Tiwi objects.

Back in 2018, Wonaeamirri inspected Tiwi burial poles at the Vatican, which catholic missionaries on the Tiwis brought to the Holy See following colonisation.

As well as updating archive information, the designs Wonaeamirri saw when accessing the historical materials, Heathcote said, have influenced his artwork.

“It creates dialogues … and this feeds back into what artists make,” Heathcote said.

In Adelaide, Brown, holding bark paintings made by her ancestors around the year of her birth, was able to do the same.

She would go on to produce a significant collection of new work, including seven large bark paintings as well as ironwood tutini poles.

Brown’s work, speaking across generations, and completed just before the Adelaide Biennial’s deadline, was one of the most ambitious recent bark projects to come from the Tiwis, Jilamara said.

In transit from the Tiwi Islands to the gallery, the truck transporting the artwork caught fire. The freight company told Jilamara all the work inside the truck had been destroyed.

“It’s pretty devastating. In some respects, that can be looked at as cargo with a monetary value, and in other respects it’s priceless work by an older artist that won’t get that kind of public celebration that it deserves or was about to be a part of,” Heathcote said.

Brown said she “didn’t feel too bad” about the loss of the paintings.

“Accidents do happen,” she said.

Brown and her family group decided to still travel to Adelaide, where they performed at the biennial’s opening, shared insights into the lost work and discussed the museum’s Tiwi collection.

Jilamara Arts has printed a small publication “telling the story and sharing images of the works”, which can be found at the gallery.

After delivering on her original commission that never made it to Adelaide, Brown, in the weeks after the accident, told the gallery that “something will come of it”.

A small selection of artwork referencing Brown’s project is on display as part of the Adelaide Biennale, open until June 2.