Winnie Bamara

She remembered suffering from painful "sand" in her eyes (trachoma, in fact), for treatment of which Winnie spent three months in the Adelaide Children's Hospital and there also fell victim to polio, but this was not noticed until after she had returned to the mission station.

She attended the mission school, a crowded galvanised iron building, where it was noticed that her learning had been affected by her time in hospital, but her teacher Miss M. Cantle noted and encouraged her drawing ability, giving her a box of watercolours with which it was found that, without any instruction, she could paint perspectively correct specific landscape scenes around Port Augusta, completely from memory.

[2] In a 1957 newspaper interview Cantle reported; "On outings to the Flinders Range, Minnie [sic] seems able to make a mental photograph of a landscape in three-dimensional colour.

[6] Principal of the School, Mr. L. Roy Davies, said: "It is extraordinary that an untrained girl in an aborigine mission station should paint realistic pictures of her surroundings.

Influential South Australian journalist Sir Lloyd Dumas opened the show to an audience of 200[9] and, seen by 8,000 visitors, it sold out.

[14] In the 1960s Bamara married William Fredrick Smith (1942 – 2014)[15][16] and their children were Russell,[17] Robyn, Anthony, and Shona, and Eugene and Lillian, who were both deceased at the time of his death.

"Writing in The Canberra Times about the "Aboriginal Art Show" at the Academy of Science in Acton, Canberra, in which her work was shown with that of Gordon Waye and Bill Lennon, Melbourne critic John Reed called her "gifted", comparing her work with that of Belgian emigrant and Australian autodidact painter Henri Bastin.

Principal at the National Art School L. Ron Davies reported that; She has been shown examples of Namatjira’s work but has not tried to model her style on them.