The importance to artists in the Storylines sample of their Indigenous ancestry and their family history was demonstrated by their often detailed knowledge of relatives going back three or four generations to great great grandparents, great aunts or uncles and so on, far more than the average non-Indigenous Australians’ knowledge or recall of their family history.

Family is a subject for many Storylines artists, in works underpinned by both celebration and mourning. Take for example Michael Riley’s series A common place: portraits of Moree Murries (1991) and Yarns from Talbragar Reserve (1998) and Ricky Maynard’s series Moonbird People (1985-1988) and Portraits of a Distant Land (2005-2007). An important family figure represented in bush sculptor Janine McAullay Bott’s work is ‘Oldie’, a nickname shared by her grandfather and a big kangaroo on her grandparents’ property in Katanning WA. Laurel Nannup’s ‘The Lolly Tree’ illustrates a moment from her childhood when her uncle drove her in a horse and cart past a tree he had filled with colourfully wrapped lollies. Vic Chapman’s Baagi Vase depicts his grandmother “setting off to her favoured fishing hole with her bait, sugar bag and handmade fishing lines smoking a bent stem pipe”. Brenton McKenna’s illustrations for his graphic novel Ubby’s Underdogs and the Legend of the Phoenix Dragon are inspired by his grandmother’s youth in post-war Broome, and family members are mobilised as subjects to give extra punch to a confronting political message in the work of photographer Bindi Cole.

Baagi Vase, circa 2003. Image courtesy Tess Allas, 2010

Most who cited family (or ‘elders’) as the source of their artistic training were among the older half of the sample. Lucy Williams Connolly learnt the technique of pyrography (wood burning) from watching her father, whose cousin also taught her the slow and difficult task of emu egg carving. Sue Charles’ basket weaving “was inspired by Aunty Dot Peters, a renowned elder and weaver, who used to take me to collect flax and grasses for weaving eel traps”. Aunty Zelda Couzens learnt to weave baskets from her great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and father, and passed on these weaving techniques to her daughter, artist Bronwyn Razem. Corrie Fullard grew up watching her mother, father and grandparents gather, dry and clean shells before stringing them into necklaces and at the age of 16 she decided to dedicate her life to continuing this tradition. Esme Timbery learnt about shells from her mother, grandmother and aunts and from the age of seven began creating shellworked brooches under their guidance. The passing on of skills was not necessarily deliberate – as in the case of Connie Hart, who began basket weaving at the age of 65 after returning to Little Dunmore to care for her elderly mother and remembering the baskets that her mother had made from Puung’ort grasses. Family remains an important source of inspiration to some of the younger artists in the sample, like Joel Birnie, who builds his identity as an Indigenous artist on the foundation of his famous ancestor Fanny Cochrane Smith.