DOB: 1948-2024. Woola Downs, Northern Territory
Known as: Margaret Scobie
Language: Anmatyerre
Country: Mulga Bore, Utopia region
Dreaming's: Awelye (women's ceremony and body paint designs), Bush Medicine Leaves, Spinifex Grass, Mountain Devil
Margaret Scobie was born in 1948 at Woola Downs, north of Alice Springs, and her family's Country is Adelaide Bore in the Utopia region. She spoke Anmatyerre. Like many Aboriginal people born in that period her exact birth date was never recorded, so it is often written as 1 January 1948.
She belonged to one of the most celebrated painting families in Central Australia. Emily Kame Kngwarreye was her aunt, and she was first cousin to the Petyarre sisters, among them Gloria, Kathleen, Anna and Ada Bird. She spent time on her homelands as a child, went to school at Ross Park Primary in Alice Springs, and lived most of her life in town while returning to Utopia throughout the years.
Painting came to her long before canvas did. As a young woman she took part in Awelye, the women's ceremonies, where ochre is worked onto the chest, breasts and shoulders of the women taking part. Those designs are learned by hand, on skin, and they sit underneath everything she later put onto canvas. She stayed close to her cousin Gloria over the years, and Gloria's influence can be seen where body paint designs found their way into her work.
What Margaret became known for is movement. Her leaves and grasses are not laid down in neat rows. They lift and turn and lean, as though a hot wind has just crossed the canvas, and she carried them in colour combinations few other painters would attempt. It is a style that was entirely her own, and instantly recognisable once you have seen a few of her paintings. She passed away in 2024.
Her Dreamings
· Awelye (women's ceremony and body paint) - The ceremonies belonging to Anmatyerre women, where ochre designs are painted across the chest, breasts and shoulders before singing and dancing. The designs honour the ancestors, the Country and the women's responsibility to both. This was Margaret's first way into painting, learned by hand on skin, and it stayed underneath her work for the rest of her life.
· Bush Medicine Leaves - The leaves of a number of different native plants gathered by the women across Utopia. Depending on the plant and what is needed, the leaves are boiled and the liquid drunk for coughs and colds, crushed into a poultice for wounds and sores, worked with kangaroo fat or resin into a balm, or burned so the smoke can be used. The knowledge of which plant does what is passed between the women. Margaret painted them mid-drift, flowing lines carrying the leaves across the canvas.
· Spinifex Grass - The tough hummock grass that covers so much of the desert country. It holds the sandhills together, gives shelter to small animals, and its resin has long been used as a glue for making tools. Margaret painted whole plains of it bending together under the wind.
· Mountain Devil - The small spiked desert lizard, also called the thorny devil. It travels slowly across the sand and leaves a distinctive wandering track, and its journey belongs to the ancestral stories of this Country. Across the wider Utopia family this Dreaming is known as Arnkerrthe.
Purchased directly from Margaret and signed by the artist. Supplied with a gallery Certificate of Authenticity.
