“The presence of ankerr (emus) is overtly apparent in the first few years of Kngwarray’s painting works. In Anmatyerr culture the respect accorded to emus is reflected in the rich and extensive lexicon of terms that are exclusively applied to them. In Old Man Emu with Babies (1989) the footprints of emus are depicted.“ (Kelli Cole and Hetti Perkins, Emily Kam Kngwarray, National Gallery of Australia, 2023, p. 184)

“The technical roots of Emily Kngwarray’s painting practice are founded in the batik medium that was introduced to the women of the Central Australian region of Utopia in 1977. With no local batik tradition in Australia, the artists were free to improvise on this new technique adapting the practice to suit camp life’s sociable, transient and informal domesticity. For Emily, an eighty-eight year-old senior Anmatyerr woman, the process of the batik craft, building up layers of hot wax and boiling silks in drums, was both time-consuming and laborious work. Both the physical strain and the lack of spontaneity was the catalyst for her move to canvas over the summer of 1988-1989. Her early paintings hold the lightness and layered processes of her batik designs as she maintains the same hastened pace in the trailing lines and fields of dots that represent the above-ground and below-ground life of her totem – the pencil yam.”(Vanessa Merlino and Luke Scholes, 60 over 50: 60 Paintings from 50 Years of Australian First Nations Art, 2023, p. 10)