Lin Onus

William McLintock Onus was born at St. George's Hospital, Kew, Melbourne on 4 December 1948[1] to William Townsend Onus Jr (Bill), a Yorta Yorta man, and Mary Kelly, of Scottish parentage. His father became the founder of the Aboriginal Advancement League and was the first Aboriginal JP, dying in 1968, a year after a long campaign bore fruit – the success of the referendum giving the national government responsibility for Aboriginal affairs and including Aborigines in the determination of the country's population.[2]

Onus was educated in the 1950s and 1960s at Deepdene Primary School and Balwyn High School in Melbourne, Victoria. He was largely a self-taught urban artist who, after being expelled from Balwyn High School for fighting,[3] became a mechanic and spray painter,[4] before making artefacts for the tourist market with his father's business, Aboriginal Enterprise Novelties.[5]

Onus became a successful painter, sculptor and printmaker. His painting Barmah Forest won Canberra's national Aboriginal Heritage Award in 1994.[6]

The works of Onus often involve symbolism from Aboriginal styles of painting, along with recontextualisation of contemporary artistic elements. The images in his works include haunting portrayals of the Barmah red gum forests of his father's ancestral country, and the use of rarrk cross-hatching-based painting style that he learned (and was given permission to use)[7] when visiting the Indigenous communities of Maningrida in 1986.

His most famous work, Michael and I are just slipping down to the pub for a minute, has been featured on a postcard, and is a reference to his colleague, artist Michael Eather. The painting is of a dingo riding on the back of a stingray which is meant to symbolise his mother's and father's cultures combining in reconciliation. The image of the wave is borrowed from The Great Wave of Kanagawa (1832), by Japanese printmaker, Katsushika Hokusai.

In 1993 Lin Onus received the award Member of the Order of Australia "for service to the arts as a painter and sculptor and to the promotion of aboriginal artists and their work."[8] Onus was inducted to the Victorian Aboriginal Honour Roll in 2012.[9]

Lin Onus died on 24 October 1996 at the age of 47 in Melbourne.[1] He was cremated and his ashes scattered at the Cummeragunja cemetery on the NSW-Victorian border.[2]

On 8 December 2000, as part of Aboriginal Reconciliation, Peter Bond, Principal of Balwyn High School, at the school presentation night at Dallas Brooks Hall, issued a posthumous apology to Lin Onus for being expelled from Balwyn High School in the early 1960s.[10]

• Holmes à Court Collection[11]

• Amanda Ladds, 'The Reconciler', The Blurb, Issue 27
• Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, Onus, L., Aboriginal Studies Press for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra, 2001
• Alan McCulloch, Susan McCulloch and Emily McCulloch Childs, 'Onus, Lin', in McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Australian Art (4th edition), Aus Art Editions and The Miegunyah Press, MUP, 2009
• Mary Travers, 'Death of Lin Onus', Art Monthly Australia, no. 96, 1996, p. 43
• Humphrey McQueen, 'Art Indigenous - Onus', retrieved July 2007
• Louise Bellamy, 'Onus goes on show', The Age (newspaper), 23 February 2005.
• Neale, Margo, 2000, 'Urban Dingo',The Art and Life of Lin Onus, Queensland Art Gallery and fine Arts Press, Sydney, NSW, Australia

• Lin Onus at the Art Gallery of New South Wales