Year Of Birth

c.1912

Year Of Death

1996

Biography

Paddy Jaminji was a pioneer of the East Kimberley style of painting, developed in the nascent community of Warmun (Turkey Creek), Western Australia, throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. Jaminji’s Gija people had established the Warmun Aboriginal community, south of Kununurra, after government changes to pastoral wages (intended to instigate equal pay) forced stock workers, including Jaminji who was employed as a stockman on Bedford Downs Stations, off stations and reserves.1 Around this time, the destructive impact of Cyclone Tracy in the Northern Territory in 1974, was interpreted as a spiritual warning – instructions from the Rainbow Serpent to the Gija people to adhere to and strengthen their cultural practices.2 Paddy Jaminji’s nephew, Rover Thomas, experienced this warning as a series of dream visitations following the sudden death of elderly female relative (a classificatory mother, a Gija Wula speaker) in a car accident near Warmun on a road flooded following the cyclone. The episodes of Thomas’ dreaming acted as the catalyst for the efflorescence of the school of painting in the East Kimberly, codified by Thomas, Paddy Jaminji and George Mung Mung into an extraordinary contemporary corroboree song cycle accompanied by painted boards, known as the Goorirr Goorirr (Kurrirr-Kurrirr/Gurrir Gurrir/Krill Krill/Kuril Kuril) Ceremony.3 This new dreaming spoke of the old woman’s spirit taking an epic journey through the lands of East and Central Kimberley, linking sites of sacred and historical importance to several different language groups of the area.