Lin Onus

Lin Onus (AM), born William McLintock Onus the 4 December 1948 in Melbourne and died 24 October 1996 in the same city, was an Australian artist of Scottish-Aboriginal origins.

William McLintock Onus was born at St. George's Hospital, Kew, Melbourne, Victoria to William Townsend Onus Sr, Yorta Yorta, and Mary Kelly, of Scottish parentage. His father became the founder of the Aboriginal Advancement League and the first Aboriginal JP, dying in 1968, a year after a long campaign bore fruit – the success of the referendum giving the national government responsibility for Aboriginal affairs and including Aborigines in the determination of the country's population.

Lin Onus was educated in the 1950s and 1960s at Deepdene Primary School and Balwyn High School in Melbourne, Victoria. He was largely a self-taught urban artist who, after being expelled from Balwyn High School for fighting, became a mechanic and spray painter, before making artefacts for the tourist market with his father's business, Aboriginal Enterprise Novelties.

Onus became a successful painter, sculptor and printmaker. His painting Barmah Forest won Canberra's national Aboriginal Heritage Award in 1994.

The works of Onus often involve symbolism from Aboriginal styles of painting, along with recontextualisation of modern artistic elements. The images in his works include haunting portrayals of the Barmah red gum forests of his father's ancestral country, and the use of rarrk cross-hatching-based painting style that he learned (and was given permission to use) when visiting the Indigenous communities of Maningrida in 1986.

His most famous work, Michael and I are just slipping down to the pub for a minute, has been featured on a postcard, and is a reference to his colleague, artist Michael Eather. The painting is of a dingo riding on the back of a stingray which is meant to symbolise his mother's and father's cultures combining in reconciliation. The image of the wave is borrowed from The Great Wave of Kanagawa (1832), by Japanese printmaker, Katsushika Hokusai.

In 1993 Lin Onus received the award Member of the Order of Australia "for service to the arts as a painter and sculptor and to the promotion of aboriginal artists and their work." Onus was inducted to the Victorian Aboriginal Honour Roll in 2012.

Lin Onus died at the age of 47 in Melbourne. He was buried at the settlement of Cummeragunja on the NSW-Victorian border.

On 8 December 2000, as part of Aboriginal Reconciliation, Peter Bond, Principal of Balwyn High School, at the school presentation night at Dallas Brooks Hall, issued a posthumous apology to Lin Onus for being expelled from Balwyn High School in the early 1960s.

• Holmes à Court Collection