Aboriginal Art including the Wallent collection of Hermannsburg watercolours and ephemera

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Lot 169
  • 169

ALBERT NAMATJIRA

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Description

  • Albert Namatjira
  • COMMEMORATIVE CARVED BOOMERANG (HERMANNSBURG WATER SCHEME) 1935

  • Bears inscription ‘Hermannsburg Water Scheme, made by Albert’ and the date ‘1/10/1935’ on the reverse

  • Incised wood

  • Length: 56.5 cm

Provenance

Gifted to F.C.G. Wallent at Hermannsburg, Northern Territory, 1935
Wallent Collection, South Australia

Catalogue Note

The boomerang was made to commemorate the opening of the pipeline which brought water from Kaporilja Springs to Hermannsburg on 1 October 1935. The artist Violet Teague (1872-1951), who had visited Hermansburg in the early 1930s, and her sister Una Teague had staged an exhibition to raise funds for the building of the pipeline. The boomerang depicts seven men laying the pipeline; each person is alternately shown as a ‘lifter’ or a ‘carrier’, one standing over the pipe, the next beneath

Cf. A similar boomerang in the Battarbee Collection at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, is illustrated in French, A., Seeing the Centre: The Art of Albert Namatjira, 1902-1959, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p.8