Review: Janet Koongotema

In Cape York’s Aurukun, ceremony is a precious living tradition. Art embodies those traditions and beliefs, holding tight tendrils of connection to the past, present, and future. The art that emerges from this northern place divides along gender and stylistic lines but is united by tradition and deep, uninterrupted connections to Country.

Portrait (detail) of Janet Koongotema, photographed by Gus Davidson. D Lan Galleries.

Carvings have been made for all time by Aurukun men. However, the more recent innovation to emerge from Aurukun are paintings. Vested in Country and experience of place, created by Aurukun women since 2008, they have drawn attention all over the world. Mavis Ngallametta (1944–2019) was exhibited from 2008, culminating in the Queensland Art Gallery retrospective in 2020–2021. Most recently, it is Janet Koongotema (born 1939), who danced in the Um Tochs (Dry Swamps) ceremony (filmed in 1962), whose colourfully layered paintings have drawn attention and acclaim.

In 2026 Koongotema will have her first solo exhibition outside Queensland—debuting at Melbourne Art Fair, the presentation will extend into a larger exhibition at D Lan Galleries. The deep cultural knowledge Koongotema carries is vital to her artistic practice. Both exhibitions are titled Archer River Country, her tribute to the wide and gently snaking body of water that opens Aurukun to the sea. In her work, expressed with joy and vibrancy, love for Country, her place and people is striking.

Koongotema was an accomplished weaver before developing her unique painting style, in which vibrantly coloured compositions layer often horizontal patterns up the canvas, depicting ancestral homelands in a way that reflects her understanding of Country as “a very colourful place.” The extraordinary depths of her experience are detailed, as is her seniority as a Wik-Mungkan elder of the Winchanam Ceremonial Clan. Creation sites of totemic significance of which she is custodian, include the dilly bag, fishing net, Burdekin duck, and white-bellied sea eagle, with these narratives and motifs expressed with compelling detail.

Janet Koongotema, Aak Chaim | Archer River Country, 2023, synthetic polymer paint, linen, 137.5 x 137.5 cm.

Koongotema’s interest in painting emerged after a workshop, held by Gina Allain in 2008 for the Wik & Kugu Art Centre, assisted many of the Aurukun women (including Ngallametta), to adapt their weaving skills into painting. Most had learnt as children to weave pandanus plants into mats, baskets, and dilly bags, with canvases from Akay Koo’oila, Ngallametta, and Koongotema emerging from this group.

Amongst Koongotema’s successes to date are being a two time finalist in the Wynne Prize with Mo’iam – Archer River, 2023, and Moun.aw – Archer River story place, 2024. She was also a finalist in the 2023 and 2024 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA), with her most significant accolade the Premier’s Award at Cairns Indigenous Art Fair in 2023. On receipt of the award, she described the winning work as a place accessed “a long way up the main Archer River and off a long narrow creek . . . when we arrived, we could see many different colours in the Land, even the colour of gold.”

Janet Koongotema has immense personal warmth. In a film, recorded for D Lan Galleries last year, she shares her memories and connections to Country on and around the river, and is open with her knowledge and long experience, beginning with her childhood in the Presbyterian mission.

In 2021 Koongotema told me: “I was in the school in the [mission] dormitory. My mum passed away when I was an infant; I didn’t see her face. So Topsy Warmane grew me up. When I went out after I finished my school, she was always waiting for me. Then I was looking at the best work she’d done. She was working [weaving] mats, the round ones. And she made a fruit bowl. I was looking at her hands. And I asked her, my aunty, what that string was. She told me, ‘This not string, this pandanus.’ And she talked to me in Language. We call it Kunchen (pandanus). She said, ‘You sit down and look, watch my hand.’ I obeyed her. After the work she always do those things. Making baskets, another one is from hand-made string. She told me, ‘You can do anything my dear.’ And I said to her, to my aunty, ‘It’s lots of work.’ And she said, ‘Yes. You must do it, do your own when you grow up, to be a woman just like me.’”

Paintings for the two Melbourne exhibitions have been complete since 2022, and amongst twenty-seven works are Aak Chaim | Archer River Country, 2023 (the 2024 Telstra finalist). Within its square format and vibrant pink background are vignettes that describe the Burdekin ducks gathered around a pond, sections of trees and strongly patterned areas that express the busyness of this place. They compel the eye to follow a linear border that contains a maelstrom of straited colour.

Janet Koongotema, Moun.aw – Archer River Story Place, 2024, synthetic polymer paint, linen, 150.5 x 151.5 cm. Photographed by Leslie Haworth.

Also included is her 2024 Wynne Prize finalist, Moun.aw – Archer River story place, which defines a narrative shaped around community use of the river. More abstract is Antbed Storyplace, 2025, a strongly patterned canvas with vertical bands. Four sets of antbeds range along the top and bottom of the canvas, leaning into the centre. Details of tiny shapes of tree canopy and dots hold tension across the picture plane, with a sense that what Koongotema sees and understands ranges rampant under the surface.

A recurring theme in her paintings is the dilly bag story (Waangk) and she relates, “There are five dilly bag stories from my Country. They all have their own Awa. I’ve seen them all.”

Now eighty-nine, Janet walks to the Wik & Kugu Arts Centre most days. D Lan Galleries curator Vanessa Merlino believes that presenting Koongotema at Melbourne Art Fair offers an opportunity to profile an accomplished artist who “paints so beautifully. Her weaving practice is visible with a real sense of that three-dimensional logic in her paintings.”

In Koongotema’s lifetime, so much has changed. Yet her paintings convey the strongest sense that Country, its vibrancy and cyclical patterns, continue to unfold and endure, alongside an impetus to share. For her, “This is sacred Country. The river goes all the way up. My paintings are about my Country. That’s why I’m painting these stories. We send these paintings away so people can see my Country.”

Exhibitions
Archer River Country: Janet Koongotema
28 February – 2 April 2026
D Lan Contemporary, Melbourne, in collaboration with Wik & Kugu Art Centre, Aurukun, Queensland.

Images courtesy of the artist, D Lan Contemporary, Melbourne and Wik & Kugu Art Centre, Aurukun, Queensland.

Dr. Louise Martin-Chew is a freelance art writer who contributes regularly to national magazines and books based in Brisbane.

This article was first published in Artist Profile Issue 74.