Her family grew oranges and grapes on a block of land her father, a World War II veteran, received through the Soldier Settlement Scheme.
[1] Following high school in Robinvale, Ely moved to Melbourne to study painting at Caulfield Technical College, where she was taught by Pam Hallandal.
For instance in her performance Jabiluka UO2 (1979), Ely explored issues surrounding Aboriginal Land Rights and uranium mining in the Northern Territory.
As a complex exploration of women's traditional roles, the performance is both a celebration of motherhood and nurture, and a critique of woman as a consumable product of culture.
A short story explains they are the only living creatures left on a post-apocalyptic Earth and are an excellent source of food in the future's dystopian environments as they cannot escape and are delicious.
More recent work addresses the river's declining health during the Millennium Drought, when environmentally unsustainable agricultural practices exacerbated acid sulphate contamination and outbreaks of blue green algae.
Bonita Ely immersed herself in the river amongst the dead fish in the pose of Millais’s “Ophelia”, lying back, chest heaving, body sinking, her open hands raised in helpless resignation.
Her interactive work takes the form of a hollow haystack, referencing the conical stacks made of rice 'hay' in the fields around Huế that were used for cooking fires.
The sculpture's three arch-shaped entrances are approximately one metre high – children's height – and its barrel-shaped base acts like an acoustic chamber, collecting the sounds in the surrounding environment.
'[17] Ely was selected to represent Australia at documenta14 in 2017, where she exhibited the installations Interior Decoration in the Palais Bellevue in Kassel, Germany, and Plastikus Progressus in Athens, Greece.
“PTSD typically leads to emotional numbing, … recurrent nightmares, substance abuse (traditionally, alcoholism), … delusional outbursts of violence.” (Goldstein, 2001).[relevant?]
Similarly the bedroom furniture turned inside-out forms polished wooden tunnel-like trenches, hiding places, all surveyed by the ladder-less 'Watchtower', made from a marriage bed, its floor the wire springs of a child's cot mattress.
The sculptural components are contextualised by a dado around the room composed of a visual narrative addressing trauma, and the names of Kassel's Jewish people deported and killed during WW2.
A diorama features plastic eating creatures, their physiologies built on vacuum cleaners & the parts thereof the artist found discarded on Sydney's streets.
These environmental works are informed by Ely's cross-cultural research of our relationship to land, first tracing the narratives inscribed upon natural landscapes in Australia's Aboriginal mythologies, or Song Lines, that weave across tribal nations' countries, functioning as ethical, spiritual, and practical narratives used to navigate across complex terrain, embedding environmental knowledges essential for food gathering, hunting, reading the seasons, the winds.
[citation needed] Similarly in India's Hindu mythologies, Chinese and Japanese gardens, Europe's pre-Christian animistic belief systems, the landscape was/is inscribed with meaning.
The installation Juggernaut, shown in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and the Asian Biennale of Contemporary Art, Dhaka, Bangladesh (1999), evoked this inscription of terrain.
Around 1981 Ely met Sydney artist Marr Grounds in Toronto, Canada, and they had a daughter together, born in Berlin when he had a year's residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien.