Gail’s painting style often
reflects a fusion of the style of her birthplace in the Western desert, near
Papunya, with where she now resides in the small community of Amata in the APY
Lands. Gail paints her grandmother’s country and the Bush Onion Dreaming story
that is associated with it, detailing the journeys of older women to gather the
precious tucker. This painting shows the textures and undulating terrain of
Gail’s ancestral country, west of Warumpi (Papunya). The lines are the tracks
walked by the grandmothers to collect the bush onion, and the roundels
represent either the waterholes around which the onion grows or where the
onions have already been dugout from the land. The wild bush onion is a totemic
plant, featured in song and ceremony, often relating to ‘women’s business’ as
knowledge about the collection and preparation of the bush onion is customarily
passed down from older women to the younger generations.