Untitled (Big Boss with Whip)

Nancy McDinny [Nangalama] is a Yanuwa and Garawa woman, who was born in 1957 on Fetrel Island, in the Gulf of Carpentaria (NT). Nancy is an established artist and a respected keeper of language and cultural knowledge. In her paintings she shares Dreaming stories, and the traditions that have been handed down to her from her parents and grandparents. Nancy is an outspoken advocate for her people and country; she is a major voice in the Frack-Free and anti-mining movements and her recent works often depict these themes. In 2006, McDinny exhibited this work in her solo exhibition "Making Contact: New Works from Nancy McDinny", which was a historic exhibition that explored her then new works of art that offered a rare and privledged visual account of European colonisation from an Indigenous perspective.

'Untitled (Big Boss with Whip)' illustrates a dramatic turning point in the history of black-white relations in the Northern Territory, when non-Aboriginal Australian settlers were finally held accountable for their brutal and violent treatment of Aboriginal people.

The following account of McDinny's family was written down by Dr Sean Kerins, anthropologist at the Australian National University, and was published in Art Monthly Australasia, 2013/2014 (266, Curious Summer, pp. 50): "This painting depicts violence in 1955 when McDinny's father, mother, two older sisters and grandparents were working on Eva Downs station on the Barkly Tablelands. On the morning of 9 September her grandfather’s wife, Dolly Ross, was told to cook some food for the stock camp. Answering that she was too ill, the manager went to fetch a gun. Terrified, she fled with her husband Jim Ross and his teenage brother, Munro, intending to walk to the Anthony Lagoon police station seventy-five kilometers away. Later that morning they were found by the station manager and four European stockmen, all on horses. An argument occurred and all three were savagely flogged with stockwhips to force them back to the homestead. The feisty Dolly Ross, who took no nonsense from anyone, black or white, took a more defiant stance than Jim, and was flogged severely. Along the way back to the homestead, McDinny’s father, Dunny Nyliba McDinny, and uncle, Isaac Walayungkuma, tried to intervene and were also whipped. It was then that a revolver was pulled by one of the Europeans and two shots fired."

"After seeing a large hole being dug on 15 September, and assuming they were to be killed, all twelve Aboriginal people living on the station, including a number of small children, slipped away in the night. In fear for their lives they travelled by night and hid by day until, three days later, having no food and litter water, with Dolly and Jim suffering severely from their injuries, the party could go no further. It was decided that Isaac and Dinny, being the strongest, but with wounds on their own, would carry on and try to get help, though Anthony Lagoon was only fifty kilometres away. All were eventually rescued, the last of them arriving at the police station on 19 September."

"Constable Ron Corbin treated their wounds, as some were suppurating, and then he counted and photographed them. He found that Jim Ross had 47wounds, Dolly 21, Isaac 9, Monro 6, and Dinny 4. Police documents tendered before the court described holes “in the flesh deep enough for part of an adult’s finger to be inserted in them”."

It is important to note that these white men were charged for their crimes. As historian Tony Roberts remarked on the case: “The Judgement was a watershed in black-white relations, serving notice to station managers and stockmen that the old days, the days of guns, hobble chains and whips – the days of frontier justice – were finally over.” (T. Roberts, 'Frontier Justice, A History of the Gulf Country to 1990', University of Queensland Press, 2005, 227-229).