Rover Thomas was born in 1925 near Gunawaggii, at Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route, in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia.
[2] Thomas was inspired to paint by a mystical experience of being visited by his deceased kinship mother after the disaster of Cyclone Tracy, which he interpreted as a warning against the decline of Indigenous cultural practices.
[5] In the early 1980s, Rover Thomas started painting ochre on canvas and soon became a pioneer artist of what was later known as the East Kimberley School.
A National Gallery of Victoria curator noted the works dual roles as history painting and landscape painting: While these images describe actual events of cultural and social importance as remembered and passed down in oral history; they are at the same time, superb planer constructions of colour and form as in the dominant, central black shape and contrasting ‘country’ of Lake Paruku.
In 2000, Thomas's work was among that of eight individual and collaborative groups of Indigenous Australian artists shown in the prestigious Nicholas Hall at the Hermitage Museum in Russia.