In 2023, Melanie Hava received a Cairns RSL Club Artist Fellowship to create new works for her first exhibition at the Gallery.

Melanie Hava: Bugan Mungan exhibition in 2023 forms part of the Cairns Art Gallery online First Nations Research Archive developed as part of the Gallery’s online Legacy Archive produced to celebrate the Gallery’s 30th anniversary.

Melanie Hava was born in Mount Isa, Queensland, in 1982 and currently lives and work in Cairns, Queensland. When she was 23 years old, Melanie travelled to Austria to live with her father's family and learn about European culture. Her exquisite landscape and seascape paintings often include an homage to her father’s cultural legacy, with the inclusion of silver and gold leaf as well as Swarovski crystal.

Hava’s earlier works were predominantly landscapes inspired by her grandmother’s stories and memories of Country. Her grandmother’s stories told of places with old caves deep in the forest, some forbidden, while others offered a refuge from the wild weather. Other stories told of scaling down perilous cliffs with her brothers and sisters and watching large corroborees through the trees at nighttime.

For this exhibition, Hava produced an ambitious nine-metre-wide painting on paper showcasing the flora and fauna that abounds on Mamu country, south of Cairns. In carrying out this work Hava introduced a new approach to her painting. In the past her paintings had always been the retelling of her grandmother’s stories based on her memories of her Country with the painting elements compressed in the frontal space of the work. In this painting, Hava began working from direct observation of her Country and inserted new elements such as waterfalls and mountain ranges into her storytelling to open up a more panoramic exploration.

This work is now in the Cairns Art Gallery Collection.