YELDA, WELL 33 ON THE CANNING STOCK ROUTE, 1989
ROVER THOMAS (JOOLAMA)
natural earth pigments and bush gum on canvas
60.0 x 105.0 cm
bears inscription verso: YELDA by Rover Thomas / Mary Macha 1989
Commissioned by Mary Macha, Perth (Stock number 1889)
Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above
Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2008
Yelda, Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route, 1989 is an intensely personal and autobiographical painting in that Rover Thomas has depicted the place where he was born and where his parents died and are buried. Yelda (Yalda/Yalta) is a soakage near Kunawarritji, also known as Well 33 on the central section of the Canning Stock Route. Rover Thomas’ mother, Ngakuyipa, belonged to the Kukatja group and his father, Lanikan Thomas, was a Wangkajunka man who reportedly assisted Alfred Canning as a guide to survey the Route in 1907. A severe drought in the late 1930s left Rover Thomas’s family destitute, on the point of starvation: some relatives headed north-east to Bililuna at the head of the Stock Route. Rover, then aged about eleven, remained as his mother died first, then his father. It was at Yelda that in 1942 the renowned stockman Wally Dowling picked up the young lad and took him to join his extended family on Bililuna Station on the south-eastern edge of the Kimberley where he grew up to become a stockman and fencer, and later in life a painter.
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0The composition of the present work is dominated by lines of white pigment and red ochre outlined in black and white dots set against a typical thinly painted but visually rich ground. The application of paint is characteristic of Rover’s gestural bravura, of his assured and intuitive genius. An annotated diagram of the painting drawn by Mary Macha, Rover Thomas’s agent and friend, indicates that the circular form in the lower left represents the soakage at Yelda (‘Rover’s country’ in the diagram) above which ‘Tank 33’ is located. The horizontal white meandering line emanating from the soak represents a river which is surrounded by a white meander that depicts sand dunes, while the red and yellow ochred ground of the canvas is described as desert country.
Related paintings by Rover Thomas include Canning Stock Route, also painted in 1989, in the Janet Holmes à Court Collection. Featured in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route at the National Museum of Australia in 2010, this related work most likely depicts the same soakage at Yelda.
WALLY CARUANA