Fine Art Gallery

Artist Profile

Lofty Nadjamerrek was born and spent his youth at Kukkurlumurl and his clan lands in the Mann River region of Western Arnhem Land. It was amongst these rocky outcrops and caves, where they camped during the wet season, that Nabardayal's father, Yanjorluk, taught him the art of rock painting. Indeed a number of Yanjorluk and Nabardayal’s earliest cave paintings survive to this day, in the Kodwalehwaleh region of the Djordi clan estate.

Nabardayal left Arnhem Land as a teenager, migrating to the tin mining region of Maranboy, a two hundred kilometer walk to the south. He worked at the mine, where his European boss dubbed him Lofty, a reference to his tall stature, until the mine’s collapse in the face of the Federal Government’s equal pay legislation. Prior to this time, Indigenous workers were paid in rations and tobacco. Bardayal then took up stock work on various cattle stations until the onset of WWII. He left for the bush at one point, but was promptly brought back and forcibly made to work at the Army’s Stirling Mill near Mataranka. ‘We had to work, we were all frightened, there was nothing we could do and all that working has given me grey hair‘ (cited in West 1995: 8). With the end of the war Lofty returned to his clan lands and then into Oenpelli (Gunbalanya), where he worked as a buffalo-shooter. He married Mary Kalkiwarra, who gave birth to three of their eight children there. 

Though a number of anthropologists had visited Oenpelli and collected paintings on bark, beginning with Sir Baldwin Spencer in 1912, it was not until Peter Carrol had arrived that bark paintings were created ‘commercially’. Encouraged by Carol’s energy and enthusiasm, his linguistic interest in the culture, and a policy of paying 60% ‘up-front’ for bark paintings, Bardayal began to paint in earnest from 1969 onward. Even though there was a significant international demand for bark paintings at this time, no ‘official’ art centre existed in Oenpelli until 1989. Between 1970 and 1987 the Aboriginal Development Commission’s Aboriginal Arts and Crafts, later renamed Aboriginal Arts Australia, exhibited bark paintings in its galleries located in each of the capital cities. Lofty’s bark paintings were a familiar mainstay and ‘field operatives’ including Dorothy Bennett aided in their collection and documentation, with additional works being sent to dealers such as Jim Davidson in Melbourne and emerging privately owned outlets such as Sydney’s Coo-ee and Hogarth Galleries. During this period, Lofty’s career continued to blossom and receive recognition in group shows that focused on the art of the ‘Stone Country’ and the Oenpelli region in particular. By this time, with the encouragement toward self-determination initiated by the Whitlam government, Bardayal had moved from Oenpelli and lived at a number of outstations, before establishing his own at Malkawo in 1980. Tragically, in 1988 the family Lofty had been living with was shot, and this preempted his move to Kamarrkawarn, in his mother’s country on the Mann River, where he and his family resided until his death in October 2009.