The last time Keith Adams saw Nyarrapyi Giles, she was an emaciated teenage mother trying desperately to keep her two small sons alive in the Gibson Desert while teetering on the brink of death herself.

After arranging for the dehydrated, starving family to be airlifted to Alice Springs, the Perth-based adventurer and filmmaker heard later that they had died in hospital. That was 54 years ago.

Yesterday, Giles appeared to come back from the dead for Adams.

Sprightly and bright-eyed, the now 70-something senior Aboriginal artist was reunited with Adams in a flurry of laughter and hugs at the Mt Lawley art gallery that is hosting her second major exhibition in Perth.

Despite not speaking a word of each other's language, the pair clowned around like old buddies as The West Australian's photographer tried to settle them down for a picture.

Adams, 83, made an international name for himself as a Crocodile Dundee-style adventurer and crocodile hunter many decades before Paul Hogan and Steve Irwin came along.

In 1955, he packed in his crane business and left Perth in a heavily modified 1948 Buick with his wife and sister-in-law to go on a year-long safari through the interior and into the Gulf country of Queensland.

He recorded their exploits in the film Northern Safari and the book Crocodile Safari Man.

"I think it is absolutely bloody magic," Adams said of Giles' late-life success as an artist. "I feel a bit of pleasure in possibly contributing to saving her life. I am surprised she recognised me. She was too bloomin' sick back then."

Said to be born in 1938, Giles would have been about 17 when Adams found her waving frantically for help with an empty billy can on a rocky, rust-red track near the Rawlinson Range along the Northern Territory border. Her face was disfigured by a suppurating, ulcerous growth and her boys were starving, Adams said.

"She was a mess. She was incapable of going any further. The poor kid could hardly stand up. Her kids' bellies were sticking out like nothing else and she had this wound which had thick white pus running down. Where she had lain down in the dirt it had run down her neck and over her shoulder to form a channel in the dust."

He left her food and water and called into an outpost 200km away to fetch help for her.

"I didn't have room to take them in my car," he said.

"There were three of us and a friggin' dog."

Adams had been told by a government official that Giles and her children had died in hospital.

Still bearing the scar of her injury under her chin, Giles' eyes lit up and she threw her arms in the air as Adams walked through the door at Randell Lane Fine Art Gallery.

"Her image was vividly in my mind from times past and I knew instantly it was her," Adams said. "She has got the same smile."

Giles was accompanied by her niece and translator Nerida Giles and Vicki Bosisto, the manager of the Tjarlirli Arts centre where she paints at Tjurkula, about 350km north-east of Warburton.

"I am very excited," she said through Nerida between peals of delighted laughter.

"I am happy to see him. I remember what a kind thing he did. I saw him as a young fella and now I am seeing him as an old fella." After leaving hospital at Alice Springs, Giles and her boys were reunited with her husband, who had been away hunting, and later settled at Tjurkula in the 1980s.

She still enjoys hunting in the bush and had never seen the ocean before her first visit to Perth last year.

She started painting several years ago and her paintings of the Warmarunggu waterhole at her birthplace in the bush at Karku are now highly sought-after.

She also works with wood carvings and makes spinifex baskets.

A big basket is on permanent exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery.

Ms Bosisto said Giles was Tjurkula's most significant artist among about 30 painters, about half the community's population.

Her success through the art centre had helped lift the living standards and social health of the entire community, though there was still a long way to go.

A finalist in the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award last year, Giles' exhibition Warmurunngu is at Randell Lane Fine Art Gallery for the next three weeks.

Stephen Bevis