Nancy McDinny
Born 1958 Madarini (Fretel Island), Australia
Lives and works in Wandangula (Police Lagoon) and Gulmerrogin (Darwin), Australia
Garrwa / Yanyuwa 

Jurlayarriyarri (Morning Glory) 2025
acrylic and ink on canvas
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
Courtesy of the artist and Karen Brown Fine Art, Darwin 

In 2022 Dr Robyn Smith, a historian from the University of Newcastle, identified what the Indigenous communities of the Gulf of Carpentaria already knew, that an attempted Aboriginal massacre took place in the region as recently as 1981. The events, an unsolved mass poisoning that led to the death of an Aboriginal man and woman and hospitalisation for many others, is only one incident in the long history of violence in the Gulf country since colonisation. 

Evidence has identified more than 100 massacres having taken place in the Northern Territory from 1827 to the 1920s, a legacy of colonial brutality that has continued into modern times with increasingly intense mining, industrialised farming and institutionalised racism, displacing many Indigenous peoples. For Garrwa/Yanyuwa artist Nancy McDinny, many of whose ancestors were killed or removed during the pastoral “development” of the Northern Territory, addressing these historical atrocities and their contemporary reverberations is vital for preserving both culture and memory. 

In Jurlayarriyarri (Morning Glory) she depicts English ships charting a course toward a land they will forcefully and irrevocably reshape with rifles and unfettered violence. However, in McDinny’s largest work to date, these harbingers are dwarfed by an abundance of fluttering clouds overhead. Stretching a height of eight metres these ‘roll clouds’ – meteorological and cultural icons of the Gulf – speak to the overwhelming endurance of Country and its people, embodying what McDinny describes as “…the true story of them old people. When they were powerful old people, didn’t know how to speak English but used to talk in language, saying, We not going to give away our land. This is our land. It belong here.”