A Gunnai Elder – Mum Alice won Ray Thomas the $30,000 Deadly Art Award, the top prize in Victoria's Indigenous Art Awards in 2013. The painting is a tribute and a glimpse into the life the artist's mother, Alice, then 94, one of the oldest among Victoria's Gunnai people.

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''Older people need to be recognised. I've thought about doing mum's portrait for years but never been able to fit it in,'' said Thomas, who generally has favoured landscape painting.

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Through images scattered in the portrait, Thomas captures a story spanning almost a century - Alice's life, from her childhood in Gippsland to her adult years in Fitzroy.

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''There's the traditional woven grass basket with fruit and vegies. Mum spent her early days on a farm in Lakes Entrance. They were self-sufficient. Mum's mother was apparently good with a rifle, she'd shoot rabbits for meat, then they'd just grab a few groceries from town.

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''I wanted to incorporate that as it's going back 90 years. There's also a small black-and-white photo of her sitting on her mum's knee. If that's not at Lake Tyers mission it's probably at the farm. The half-caste policy of the day impacted on our family, so her parents were forced off the mission.''

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The older people of the area would visit her grandparents' farm and have a corroboree, but already it was a world slipping away from Alice's grasp. ''The old people didn't teach mum and her cousins, which is sad because we're only talking the 1920s.''

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The background of the painting recalls a Gippsland landscape; ''the mists in the forest and the scarred tree. The canoe was cut from the tree. On the lake there's an old Gunnai man standing in the canoe - it's how the old people traversed the lakes.''

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'When Alice moved to Melbourne during the war years her family was one of the first in Gertrude Street in Fitzroy. A self-taught pianist, she played at community events and funerals, so keyboards have found their way into Thomas' painting.