Birrundudu Drawings

A breathtakingly beautiful and history-swerving body of work.

Last week, we all received a present from Kieran*: a copy of Birrundudu Drawings by John Carty, Jason M. Gibson, Alistair Paterson, Luke Scholes, Jessyca Hutchens, and Stephen Gilchrist.

The Birrundudu Drawings represent one of the most significant bodies of historical imagery ever introduced into the canons of Australian art. A collection of 810 crayon drawings were created by sixteen Aboriginal men working on a Northern Territory cattle station in 1945. That place was Birrundudu, an outpost of Gordon Downs, a large cattle station with a lease that extended across the Northern Territory and Western Australian borders. The works resulted from the men’s engagement with the anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt. Dutifully recording as much information about their meaning as he could, Ronald Berndt and the men who made these drawings captured an extraordinary record of the Country, ancestors, history and ceremonies of the region.

The drawings are not simply important because they have never been seen, nor because there are so many of them. They are important because of the convergence of these two aspects – their scale combined with their novelty has transformative potential in the narratives of Aboriginal art and Australian history. A breathtakingly beautiful and history-swerving body of work.

The delightful Terri-Ann White from Upswell Publishing personally delivered the books to our office! We recommend you order a copy here now!

*Don’t be sad, Sydney, you’ll have yours soon!