Bett-Bett's wonderful lonely palace ... is a large sequence of out of sight works that was produced over a period of some 20 years.
The title Bett-Bett's wonderful lonely palace ... is from the caption of a photograph in Mrs Aeneas Gunn's Little Black Princess of the Never-Never (1905) a story with which 7 year old Betty Durack had identified when it was read aloud by Loreto nuns during sewing classes in 1922. Some fifty years later when travelling through East Kimberley near the Northern Territory border the artist recaptured the mood of earlier times.
Contemporaneously with the gentle and frankly nostalgic Bett-Bett's ... the artist was producing disturbing out of mind paintings to which she gave the general title: The Rim, the rim of our brittle and disintegrating world ...