At a table among a lush tropical garden on an island off the Gove Peninsula, Dhambit Mununggurr sits painting all day on almost anything she can find - board, bark, or straight onto the base of a large tree.
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The 50-year-old laughs often and speaks slowly. She takes long pauses, as if waiting for the words to solidify in her mouth.
You can barely see the black of her wheelchair's armrests for the splatters of paint in every colour - green, blue, orange, red.
She is dressed entirely in blue.
Dhambit is a Yolngu woman from the East Arnhem Land community of Gunyangara, on the Drimmie Peninsula in North East Arnhem Land in the north east corner of the Northern Territory.
She started painting when she was 13, learning from her parents who were award winning painters. Her father, Mutitjpuy Munugurr won First Prize at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Awards (NATSIAAs) in 1990 with a bark painting called Djang'kawu. Her mother, Gulumbu Yunupingu, won the same prize in 2004 with a work called Garak, the Universe.
Dhambit won the bark painting award in the same competition this year, being recognised for the first time at the most prestigious Indigenous art awards in the country.
But Dhambit's art is different to that of her parents.
Mostly because instead of the traditional yellows, reds and blacks of ochre used in traditional Yolngu art, it's painted in striking shades of blue.
"[The blue] comes from the ocean," Dhambit explains.
"It's history."
She's only been painting in what has become her signature blue acrylic for a few years, after a car accident in 2007 left her with serious brain damage and almost took her life.
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The accident also stopped her from painting for several years, and forced her to completely reinvent her craft.
Because of her brain injuries, previously right-handed Dhambit had to teach herself to paint with her left hand.
She also had to seek special permission to paint with acrylic paint instead of the traditional Yolngu colours as her injuries make it difficult for her to crush ochre.
"In a junction at Nhulunbuy, I was fighting a car," she recalls.
"Then this fella, my husband, helped me to live forever."
"Now, he's still with me."
The husband Dhambit is referring to, Tony Gintz, has a bushy beard, piercing blue eyes and, somewhat surprisingly, a strong French accent.
He has been in Australia since the '80s and Dhambit's partner since 2004, and then since her accident, her primary carer.
It was he, with Dhambit's late mother, who helped Dhambit recover from her accident.
"She was in hospital [in Darwin] for seven months," he says.
"Her mother came and we took her to a beach because her mother was a traditional healer so we did a seminar with bush medicine.
"Before she had this, she couldn't swallow and after we did the ceremony when she came back she could swallow again."
They were also the ones who encouraged her to start painting again, an act Dhambit says saved her life.
"Painting helps me be alive," she says.
"It gives me energy."
A self-described "facilitator" of Dhambit's painting, Tony has the arduous task of preparing bark from trees to become canvases for his wife's work.
These days, he says, the bark can't come fast enough.
"At the moment it's probably too much, she's really addicted to painting," he says with a laugh.
"At the moment she goes paint at the art centre [in Yirrkala, around 25 minutes drive from Gunyangara] then she come back home and paint her own stuff.
"She paint all the time."
Although in many ways Dhambit's art has deviated from the ways of her parents, their influence on her work runs deep.
"[I paint on] bark because my parents used to show me, they used to paint on bark when I was raising up with them," she says.
"I got my parents' knowledge."
Her NATSIAA award winning work, Bees at Gangan, which is done in her signature striking shades of blue, is about her parents.
"It's about my mother and father telling me a story about that relationship to the world," she explains.
Although this is the first time Dhambit's work has won her a prize at the NATSIAAs, her work has been recognised across the country by by major art institutions for years.
Last year, the National Gallery of Victoria showed her solo exhibition Can We All Have a Happy Life as a part of their its prestigious NGV Triennial.
Her solo show at the Salon Project Space in Darwin in 2019 completely sold out before it even opened.
Despite the commercial demand for her work, Dhambit is known for giving her pieces away, meaning a Dhmabit Mununngurr painting graces the walls of many homes in North East Arnhem Land.
It's a generosity that is reflected in everything she does. Dhambit is humble but also proud. She is grateful for the people in her life, especially Tony.
"He makes me proud, " she says.
"All those years. And now I'm talking to you and I'm happy."
She stops multiple times during our interview to greet family and friends. All of them get a kiss and a joke. Dhambit has time for everyone.
"I'm 50 now and I'm very happy, I could fly."
Bark Ladies: Eleven Artists from Yirrkala celebrating the National Gallery of Victoria's collection of work by Yolngu women artists from the Buku Larrngay Mulka Centre (Buku), in Northeast Arnhem Land opens on December 22, 2021.
