Karntakarnta Billy Thomas
Born about 1920
Wangkajunga language group, Jungurrayi skin group
Fitzroy Crossing Community
Red Rock Gallery
Billy Thomas was born near Kulyayi (Well 42). His remarkable career includes working as a police tracker, a traditional healer, a stockman, and ultimately a renowned artist. He met Rover Thomas as a young man working cattle at Well 39 on the Canning Stock Route and they would go on to settle in the Kimberley, and find fame together late in life as ‘East Kimberley’ artists. Earlier Billy had worked as a police tracker, a traditional healer and a stockman — and had 12 children.
Warla
2008, by Billy Thomas
ochre on linen, 120×90 cm
Red Rock Gallery
National Museum of Australia
Warla are the salt lakes — like Lake Disappointment and the Percival Lakes. The warla in this painting is situated somewhere between wells 40 and 42, the same area where Clifford Brooks‘s father encountered a massacre site while in search of his brother Rover. The artist describes the warla in this painting as ‘flat like an airport’. Salt lakes were in fact used to land military supply planes during the reconditioning of the stock route in the 1940s. While still a teenager working as a stockman on the Canning Stock Route, the artist encountered Rover himself, filling water buckets with the drovers at Kukupanyu (Well 39).
