This painting was given to retired Inspector Brendan Keleher while he was in charge of the Mount Isa Watchhouse from 1990 to 1993. Seven Sisters in the Sky was painted by one of the prisoners in his charge after he introduced a program to keep them occupied and engaged.
In 1990 Brendan was promoted to Sergeant of the Mount Isa Watchhouse. In those days, the watchhouse keeper’s family were required to feed prisoners for the recompense of $2.78 per meal. Mrs Keleher cooked more than 1,000 meals per month—the same meals she and her family ate—with locals sometimes seeking to be arrested for the weekend to enjoy her home cooking.
Brendan said that apart from the high standard of food, the watchhouse—which was replaced with a modern facility in 2002—was not a good place to be. “The conditions were very poor in comparison to the level of service we provide in watchhouses today thankfully. There was no air conditioning and at times we had more than 25 prisoners sleeping in exercise yards, cells and in the blanket storage area for up to six weeks with summer days over 45°C.”
As the Mount Isa Watchhouse was the main facility for the district, prisoners from outlying stations were held there until an escort could be arranged to Townsville’s Stuart Creek Prison. Due to overcrowding at Stuart Creek however, it was not unusual for short term prisoners with sentences of less than eight weeks to remain at Mount Isa Watchhouse. Retikred Inspector Keleher said he tried to find ways of making the prisoners stay more tolerable and of keeping them busy or mentally active. One day during an inspection, I noticed one of the young Aboriginal prisoners using a pencil to sketch a landscape purely from memory.
Brendan said he approached some of the senior officers attached to the station with the idea of supplying the longer-term prisoners with painting materials. “I can say I did not receive any great encouragement awards and was told it would be my responsibility. There was no budget for these types of wild ideas back in the ‘90s, so I purchased paints from our new K-Mart store at my own expense,” he said. “The only thing that we had plenty of was very stiff, white watchhouse tea towels. For some reason we had hundreds of them in a storeroom, and they were made from a cloth that after many washings still would not absorb water.”
The stiff white tea towels were perfect for use as painting canvasses, and with a steady supply of paints courtesy of then-Sergeant Kelleher, many hundreds of prisoners passing through the watchhouse had the opportunity to try their hand at painting to fill in time. Prisoners generally took their paintings with them upon release, or else discarded them. Brendan said “the man who painted Seven Sisters in the Sky was given to Brendan by a prisoner who when affected by alcohol was aggressive and violent towards police. This prisoner Mr Ned, was in my care and custody on a number of occasions and we developed a strong bond as sometimes happens with Watchhouse Keepers and prisoners. Mr Ned had not quite finished the piece when he left the watchhouse but brought it back as a gift when it was finished.
The ‘Seven Sisters’ is an Aboriginal Dreaming story common in various forms to many different language groups across Australia. The story tells of seven sisters who were foraging for food when they came across a man (or men) with amorous intentions from a different skin group. As traditional law forbade romantic relations with members of other skin groups, they fled and were eventually lifted into the sky where they assumed the form of the Pleiades star constellation. The blue in the painting represents the various waterways in the Channel Country running into the centre, while other elements represent fertility.
Seven Sisters in the Sky touches on many things: a moment in Brendan’s career, an era in the history of the Queensland police, the relationship between police and Indigenous people, and the connection of Aboriginal people to the landscape.
This story was written from the reminiscences of retired Inspector Brendan Keleher.
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“FROM the VAULT – Seven Sisters in the Sky” by the Queensland Police Service is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (BY) 2.5 Australia Licence. Permissions may be available beyond the scope of this licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/au/legalcode