Q&A with Chelinay Gates

Dr Chelinay Gates aka Malardy Mulardy is an Indigenous (Karajarri/Kurdish) artist, author, poet, playwright, director, and Dr of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Intrigued by the journey of the soul, her work explores the interface between physicality, spirituality, and our birth place.

Hi Cheli, it’s a pleasure to have your story in Issue #38 of TSR, along with your beautiful illustrations to accompany it. Your art practice is at once varied in style and distinct in expression. Who taught you to paint and how do you transform images from your mind to your vision on the canvas?

Thank you, it is an honour to be included in TSR. When my husband and I married we wanted to share our interest in painting. Self-taught, we explored many mediums and after two years we became professional artists. When our four children were little I only had time to do small works in gouache (a type of watercolour). This was actually great training for quickly capturing the essence of what you are trying to communicate. Many of the illustrations are on-location sketches, oils on tin, pieces of wood and gouache, pencil and charcoal in my trusty sketch book. When painting people I try to capture emotion, not just a physical likeness.

Central to the story told in your first novel, Lucky-Child: The Secret (2019), is a network of strong women. What role have women played in your life and creative practice?

I have emerged from a line of powerful women and my daughter follows the tradition. Lucky-Child: The Secret is dear to me because it gave me the opportunity to paint in words the many types of women who have influenced my life. It also gave me the opportunity to speak to my twin sister who I’ve never met because we were separated at birth. I jokingly remind my children that she is the evil twin. Dialogues emerged between her and I and my mothers that I could not have imagined. I love being an old woman. I’ve left behind me the ‘conditioned times’ that society demands of women and am now free to be me. I have been to hell and back—I am grateful for the journey and know I have acquired powerful tools that feed my soul and have brought me to a place of joy.

You do a masterful job of blending culture and tradition into stories of the everyday lives of Aboriginal people. What impact do you hope this has on the reader?

Bless you for saying that. I want the stories I tell to be real, painful, unpleasant, even horrific. But under, over and through it all, I want to reveal our joint humanity, because that is deeper than skin colour, gender, race, religion or class. I hope that the reader forgets that they are reading about Aboriginal people; I want to let them into the story so that they become family. So that they can cry with us, laugh with us and fall in love with us. Love in all its forms, including the heart-wrenching love that screams when a child is taken and stands up against injustice and feels safe on Country.

Alison J Barton

Alison J Barton’s poetry is widely published in Australian and international literary journals. Her work has been recognised in numerous prizes and Best of Australian Poems over several years. She was the inaugural winner of the 2023 University of Cambridge First Nations Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, and was granted places in several other residencies around the world. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Not Telling, was published by Puncher & Wattmann. She is Editor-in-Chief of The Suburban Review.