The discarded outback road signs that became a prize-winning artwork
By Helen Pitt
Back in 2020, when Melbourne was beginning one of the world’s most onerous COVID lockdowns, Indigenous artist Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis planned to go to Pitta Pitta Country in central west Queensland to photograph her great-grandmother’s country.
“Not being able to travel to Country because of the pandemic – I was forced to find alternative ways to connect to Country, so I went there via Google Earth,” said the Northcott-based photographer, whose efforts were rewarded yesterday at the nation’s most prestigious Indigenous art competition.
Romanis, now a Monash University lecturer, was presented with the $15,000 multimedia award at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA), announced at a ceremony in Darwin on Friday.
Gaypalani Wanambi, the 2025 Telstra NATSIAA winner, at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. Credit: Charlie Bliss
Her work, part of her (Dis)connected to Country series, uses freeze frames that show the transition between street and satellite views on Google Earth. It was part of her honours-year thesis, which grew into a PhD but began as a way to explore her great-grandmother’s homeland near Boulia.
“I’m interested in how photography and cartography come together,” she said. “I think I’d probably define my practice more as ‘indigenising’, rather than ‘decolonising’, and reconnecting with Country.”
The winner of the 2025 $100,000 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, the richest in the Aboriginal art world, is North-East Arnhem Land artist Gaypalani Wanambi for her work Burwu (blossom in Yolngu language).
The winning work showing the etching on the rear.Credit:
It is a giant, three-square-metre glittering metal work, etched onto 15 discarded road signs, depicting Wuyal, the ancestral honey hunter of her Marrakulu clan. It features honeybees that gather nectar from their local stringybark trees.
“When the stringybark trees blossom, it tells us the Wuyal honey is ready,” said Wanambi, whose surname in Yolngu means “sacred stringybark”.
The 39-year-old artist and mother of four, based in Yirrkala, about 700 kilometres east of Darwin, learnt her art from her late father, acclaimed artist Mr W. Wanambi, a three-time winner of various NATSIAA awards who died in 2022.
As the eldest daughter of one of the instigators of the “Found” movement in North-East Arnhem Land, where artists make artworks from discarded industrial materials they find on the roadside, she’s been making art since she was 17, in 2003. This includes searching for discarded road signs, and she intends to use some of her prize money to buy a new vehicle to collect them in.
Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis was presented with the multimedia award at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.Credit: Penny Stephens
“Picking up these signboards is not easy – you have to go out bush to look for them on the road,” she said through her sister, fellow artist Dhukumul Wanambi.
She started helping her dad paint his signature mullet fish onto burial poles, then bark paintings, then learnt to etch them onto old road signs they found off the Arnhem Highway. After that, she graduated to creating her own honeybees.
“He would have been really proud,” Wanambi said. “He taught us from a young age to learn how to do our artwork.”
Taungurung artist Kate ten Buuren, the award’s first guest curator and former First Nations curator at the Melbourne Arts Precinct, said she hung the winning work so both sides – the delicately engraved silvery surface on the front, and the road signs on the back – could be seen.
Credit: Matt Golding
“It’s like two ways of seeing Country: one way of being told how to behave on Country; and another, a deep way, of knowing who you are and where you come from,” ten Buuren said.
“A great element of this year’s works was the younger and emerging artists who are using new technologies to tell stories in new ways or crafting old technologies and practices that have been handed down but bringing their own personal technique to it.”
Other category winners included Amata artist Iluwanti Ken, who won the $15,000 general painting award with her work Walawuru Tjukurpa (Eagle Story), and Maningrida artist Lucy Yarawanga, who won the $15,000 bark painting award with Bawaliba & Ngalyod, painted on stringybark.
The judges, Indigenous artists Gail Mabo, Brian Martin and academic Stephen Gilchrist, said they had a difficult time choosing 71 finalists from the 216 entries.
The NATSIAA 2025 show is at Darwin’s Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) until January 26, 2026.
Helen Pitt travelled to Darwin courtesy of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.