Fine Art Gallery

Artist Profile

Lin Onus played a pivotal role in the recognition of Aboriginal art as an expression of a contemporary and dynamic living culture. Prior to his premature death at just 47, he was a prominent, strident, yet non-confrontational agent in renegotiating the history of colonial and Aboriginal Australia. His father, Bill Onus, was the founder of the Aboriginal Advancement League in Victoria and a prominent maker of artefacts in Melbourne. Growing up as a young Koori man, Lin lived in a cultural environment that encouraged and facilitated exposure to visiting Aboriginal artists, including Albert Namatjira. Onus began his artistic life assisting his father in decorating artefacts, going on to develop skills working on metal and painting with airbrush as a panel beater; by 1974 he was painting watercolours and photorealist landscapes. In the 1970s he completed a set of paintings on the first Aboriginal guerilla fighter Mosquito, which holds pride of place on the walls of the Advancement League in Melbourne, to this day.

Onus, an eloquent speaker, rose to prominence from the early 1980s as an advocate for the Aboriginal arts movement and an important player in the development of the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council. Although represented by Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne and Painter’s Gallery in Sydney, his career as an artist languished until in 1986, when he visited Maningrida in Arnhem Land. His outlook on both life and painting substantially shifted. During his stay at Gamerdi, an outstation from Maningrida, he was accepted as a son to renowned cultural custodians Jack Wunuwun and John Bullun Bulun who gave him permission to depict stories and use clan designs in his work that would enable him to develop the distinctive visual language that characterized much of his future work. His art practice from this period on has been described as a 'kind of post-modern Bowerbird Dreaming' (Nicholls 2001: 536) – unique synthesis of Western and Aboriginal systems of organizing space, vision and design. In many of these works, figurative elements are depicted in traditional form as they appear, often with deft subtlety, within a photorealist landscape. This led one critic to comment that in Onus’s work 'landscape art is no longer an unconscious carrier of myths of domination … (but) demands the artist deconstruct in some manner these approaches and display an awareness of history and ideology' (Radon 1997: 16). In these works Onus was imparting his knowledge that beyond the immediately apparent there is another dimension, a Dreaming reality that anyone can become aware of if only they open their eyes and their minds to its presence.

Onus’s installation Fruit Bats was exhibited in the Australian Perspecta 1991, consisting of a hills hoist carrying a multitude of fiberglass bats, painted with rarrk, a ceremonial Arhnem Land crosshatch design. In his many depictions Barmah Forrest, the flooded Eucalypts near his Yorta Yorta homeland at Cumerangunja, there are often cross hatched-fish beneath the water’s surface or in one work a jigsaw puzzle piece of the panoramic landscape misshapen, unable to fit, a comment on the irreperable damage to the Murray river ecosystem. Onus, a great communicator, was acutely aware of the desire amongst non-Aboriginal viewers to understand the meaning of the concept of the Dreaming.