What was the name of the person that had grandmother's from the rainforest country around Cairns?
Mellor was born in Mackay, Queensland, in 1971. His father was of American and Australian descent; his mother had Irish, Mamu, Ngagen, and Ngajan heritage. Mellor's maternal great-great-grandmother, Eleanor Kelly, and great-grandmother, May Kelly, were Indigenous Australian people from the rainforest country around Cairns. The family was peripatetic: in his first twenty years, Mellor lived in Mackay, Queensland; Scotland; Brisbane, Queensland; Sutton Grange, Victoria; Adelaide, South Australia; and Cape Town, South Africa, as well as in the Northern Territory. Mellor went to school at Steiner Schools in South Australia and South Africa; in high school he was taught art by his mother. Looking back at the influence of his schooling upon his art, he remarked how, despite the Eurocentric origins of Rudolf Steiner's approach to education, "there are comparable elements and themes inherent in [Steiner's] philosophical narrative that parallel an Indigenous outlook, which is holistic in the way it approaches deeper and more intuitive readings of the environment and landscape."
After completing a Certificate in Art at the North Adelaide School of Art in 1991, Mellor undertook a Bachelor of Arts with Honours at the ANU in 1992–1994, and a Masters in Fine Art at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, part of the Birmingham City University, in 1995–1996. In the early 2000s, he entered a doctorate at the ANU, where he also taught print-media and drawing. He completed his PhD in 2004. As of 2013, Mellor is a lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, within the University of Sydney. Mellor is married to artist Joanne Kennedy.
Mellor