In 2018 the Gallery staged an important exhibition of new works by Danie Mellor, titled Proximity and Perception that focussed on the artist’s connections to his matrilineal Country of the North Queensland rainforest region, south of Cairns. With funds from the Gallery Foundation, Cairns Art Gallery commissioned Mellor to produce a new work for the exhibition and the Collection, Dulgu-burra (a procession of history.)

This exhibition 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.

Mellor was born in Mackay, Queensland, in 1971, and currently lives in Bowral, NSW. For more than twenty years Mellor’s artworks have circled back to the culture and landscape of his matrilineal Country of the lower Atherton rainforest region near Tully, Far North Queensland, and homelands of his ancestors, the Mamu, Ngagen and Jirrbal peoples. Mellor’s father is of Scottish descent, and his work is anchored by the intersections of Indigenous and Western philosophies and his connections to ancestorial rainforests.

Mellor is an established artist who uses European aesthetics and pictorial devices from the colonial period to reimagine the collision between Australia’s pre- and post-settlement history. He explores spiritual and metaphysical understandings of being present in an ancient Australian rainforest and examines micro and macro views of worlds and environments through his camera lens.

Mellor regularly returns to the Atherton Tablelands region. On field trips he continues to receive and absorb knowledge about his Aboriginality and his Country, particularly through a strong relationship with Jirrbal Elder and educator, Ernie Grant. Spending time on Country with Ernie Grant and his family has become an annual personal ritual and pilgrimage for Mellor.

As though peering into another time and place, Dulgu-burra (a procession of history) pictures daily life in an idyllic scene of Bama (rainforest people) beside a river. Two men in conversation hold spears and Balan Balan (rainforest shields cut from the buttress of fig trees). Other men wear Jawun (unique biconical-shaped woven baskets) around their foreheads and walk with young ones held aloft. Two women sit in front of a low thatched shelter, looking up from their weaving. The scene under a white river gum canopy is also occupied by colourful kingfishers, king parrots and satin black birds. It is Utopian in one sense; however, the landscape also conveys what Mellor refers to as ‘Arcadian melancholy’, stating, ‘This landscape speaks ... of colonialism, and an age of expansion that irrevocably transformed the lives of people and complex ecology not just of Northern Queensland, but Australia and also the globe’.

Danie Mellor is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists. His works are represented in major Australian and international gallery and museum collections.

The Gallery’s commissioning of Dulgu-burra (a procession of history) led the artist to donate a triptych and four other works to the Collection, and a major collector to donate a further significant work by the artist, bringing the total number of Mellor works in the Collection to eight.