323-25 – Bush Delicacies – HELEN NAGOMARA

Artist : HELEN NAGOMARA
Title : Bush Delicacies
Size/Medium : 813 x 305mm: acrylic on canvas Painting

Biography:

Helen Nagomara was born in 1953 at Old Balgo Mission, a place where the earth and stories quietly intertwine. The third child and second daughter of artist Milliga Napaltjarri and Albert Nagomara Senior, she belongs to a lineage shaped by art and deep-rooted connection to the Australian land.

Milliga, her mother, hailed from Kulkurta, in the west of Australia, near Tjukurla, while her father, Albert, was from the lands of Yagga Yagga. It was in the south that he met Milliga, and together they moved to the Balgo mission, where they began to build a new life and future.

Helen spent her childhood at the mission school, attending alongside her sisters Imelda, Gracie, Tossie, Jane, and Joan. Life at the mission was governed by strict rules, with the young girls needing to seek permission from Father John McGuire to visit their parents, before returning to the dormitory each evening.

The nuns taught them, while summers were spent camping at Paraku (Lake Gregory) and the rockholes near Kunuwarra, places imbued with memory and tradition.

Today, Helen is one of the primary translators at Balgo, a living bridge between generations and languages. She works with Warlayirti Artists and the Wakala Language Centre to preserve the Kukatja language, a precious heritage she carries within.

Since 2000, she has been painting with Warlayirti Artists, using her canvas to pay tribute to bush foods — the wild harvests that grow around her mother’s country. She sees these foods on ICTV but has never set foot on those distant lands, beyond the communities of Kintore and Kiwirrkurra. It remains a dream of return, a dream to one day walk upon those ancestral soils.

Story : 

This painting depicts a part of Helen’s mother’s country — the late Milliga’s ancestral land. Located in the far south of Balgo, near Tjukurrla and Warakurna, this sacred place is known as Gaugo. It is a deeply revered landscape, rich in cultural significance and memory.

Helen’s painting focuses on the mungarri — the bush foods that grow in abundance across this land. She paints kumpupatja (bush tomato), Witjirrki (wild fig), bush onion, Pamilyi (bush passionfruit), and Tjurnta (bush seeds), each one a vital source of nourishment and a marker of season and place.

In the desert, the land offers its gifts in rhythm with the changing seasons. Through her careful dot work and layered symbolism, Helen tells the story of this sacred country — of how it feeds, sustains, and connects those who belong to it. Her painting is both a tribute to her mother’s memory and a celebration of Gaugo’s enduring abundance.