Rosemary Sorensen from The Australian interviews Margo Neale, curator of the retrospective of Kngwarreye’s work in Canberra and Japan:
A COUPLE of years before the death of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Margo Neale decided someone had to act. “Every Tom, Dick and Harry, it seemed, was having retrospectives by the time they were 36 years old,” Neale says. “It seemed negligent of Australia to have such an extraordinary talent, nationally acclaimed, and no one was going to do a retrospective.” Kngwarreye, who died in 1996, had been awarded the Australian Artists Creative Fellowship by then prime minister Paul Keating in 1992, but there was still no move to honour her achievements with a big show.
