FOREWORD
The art of Nyaparu (William) Gardiner (1943-2018) presented this year at Tarnanthi and in this catalogue shares narratives of a mighty life lived across two of the nation’s most mythic outback landscapes: the Pilbara and the Kimberley. This life, encompassing hard graft, travel, and family, took place during a time of massive change in the circumstances of the Indigenous people of mid-twentieth century north Western Australia. This art tells a story of places, people and events that are part of history. In Gardiner’s drawings and paintings are condensed the social, historical and cultural legacy of the first Aboriginal pastoral workers’ strike in Australia in the 1940s; the unique experience of stockman life and style; and the humour, directness and generosity of an artistic perspective shaped by the unflinching recollections of a man who, despite being part of momentous events, experienced and interpreted the world on his own terms. BHP is doubly proud to be supporting this presentation of work. We are a long-term partner of Western Australian cultural organisation FORM, who staff and administer the
Spinifex Hill Studio in the Pilbara’s South Hedland where Gardiner lived, and where he created these extraordinary pictures right up until the end of his life; we are also the principal partner of Tarnanthi, the annual national celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA). BHP is also a principal partner of another highly successful Pilbara-based Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art centre, Martumili Artists. That we are able to play a part in supporting, not only the production of art by important Australian artists such as Gardiner, in art centres such as Spinifex Hill Studios, but also the preservation and presentation of this art for all Australians via collecting and exhibiting institutions such as AGSA, is a source of deep pride for BHP. Gardiner’s work speaks engagingly, with charm and without affectation; much like the man himself. Though his lifework and artwork are now complete, he leaves us a great gift in these enduring and endearing chronicles of a life lived large in a vast country. Thank you, Mr Gardiner.
Edgar Basto
Asset President, Western Australia Iron Ore BHP
FORM would like to acknowledge the Kariyarra, Ngarla, and Nyamal people as the Traditional Custodians of the Port Hedland lands. We recognise their strength and resilience and pay our respects to their Elders past and present. We extend that respect to all Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people of the local community and recognise their rich cultures and their continuing connection to land and waters.
Warning: Readers should be aware that this document includes names and images of deceased people that might cause sadness or distress to Aboriginal readers.
Jack, He can do anything (detail), Nyaparu (William) Gardiner, 122 x 101.5 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2018. Image courtesy of Spinifex Hill Studio. 001
A R T I S T S TAT E M E N T
My name is William Gardiner and this is my life story that I’m telling you. It’s mostly about what I’ve done. Some of these paintings are to show how we used to live, mostly around this Pilbara area and up into the Kimberley. I’m learning my grandchildren to understand all sort of things like this, and my children, they already know.
After a while I left my uncle because all the jobs run out and you know when you’re young and you like big space out on a part of the country? I went to find a job in the Kimberley. I was experienced by then, as a stockman, and I got a job in Myroodah Station. We used to bring along horses to the yard from [the] mustering channel and put them in the yard.
I was born in the Brockman River, this side of Marble Bar, in 1943. My old man used to be a stockman. He used to work all those places around the De Grey River, in Warrawagine Station and the Oakover River, Carrawine and Running Waters. They were pretty hard days. I do these pictures now just to show how we was in the early days. The life wasn’t very good at the time. It was hard because there wasn’t any jobs. A really hard time we had, but that’s the time we face most of our life.
I started drawing when I was a young man in Port Hedland, out in Two Mile. I had seen a couple of old people do drawing. ‘I like these things’ I would say to myself. I used to come near them and I would see how they do all this, and they were very smart. I found it interesting. I learned to draw from comic books. Later I worked with the Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre mob. I wrote a few [books] and I was doing a bit of art for the Aboriginal people. I was painting what stories they was telling me. My inspiration for the book was that I seen a movie of that person, [Albert] Namatjira, but I didn’t know him terribly [well]. I seen the picture in a movie of him, what he made, and I was thinking about what I could do. I was thinking about painting, that I can do it. I had a few idea on how to mix the colours and so on and I learn more bits and pieces and put it together, you know, in my mind. Things like what colours and what kind of hills and what colours to mix. The hard part of painting is how to mix the colours to picture what kind of picture, the evening or the light in the morning, or midday or something. Some of my favourite colours are here now: red, blue, white, brown, black and green. These are the colours that I use now.
I first went to school in Port Hedland, way back in the 1950s. One of these ministers used to come and teach us at Two Mile. We used to live there at Two Mile and we’d walk round to that old train shed, learning English and all kinds of things. After a while my father took me out [of school] to go stay with them mob in Moolyella. That place is east of Marble Bar, about twelve miles away, and this is where they used to mine for tin and gold and whatever precious minerals they can find. They used a pick and shovel too, picking out the best part of the minerals. I was only a boy at the time, but my father and mother they used to do these kind of things because they had a strike from the [pastoral] stations. It was a hard time after the 1946 strike, with the Aboriginals and Don McLeod. They made it hard for us too, we mainly was little kids you know? I was just running around. I couldn’t go back to school after that so that’s how I used to work. I still had in my head a vision to work as a station hand too. When I grew up I decided I didn’t want to stay with this mob, so I left my old people and went to Warrawagine Station to work with my uncle. We used to train all the horses, build windmills and fences or some things like that. I been working with a couple of mates but they are all gone now. 002
I got my own style now, you could say that. It’s all from my memory, these old people and the Country. This thing here inside your head is where you work things out. You see that thing and you do that thing! Nyaparu (William) Gardiner
July 2017
“William Gardiner’s painting is a conscious act of remembering these old people and their experiences, their struggles to assert their independence and survive the consequences. They were people who took part in some of the most momentous events of post-war Aboriginal history, key precursors to the struggle for Aboriginal self-determination, land rights and native title. We should be thankful for the priceless legacy he is leaving his people and all Australians. We had no right to expect he would do so with such tact and dignity, truth and restraint.” - John Cruthers, 2017.
Nyaparu (William) Gardiner at the 35th NATSIA Awards at the Museum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory, 2018. Photograph by Greg Taylor. 003
THE BALLADEER
Ballads are often overlooked because of their sentimentality. The best of them, however, are tales of resistance that honour oral traditions and connect us with our past through poetry and story. The same can be said for the paintings of Mr Nyaparu (William) Gardiner. He is a chronicler of hardship with his depictions of the Pilbara pastoral strikers and rugged miners from the middle of last century, among them the ‘Strelley mob’ who motivated hundreds of unpaid Aboriginal workers to demand a weekly wage. Mr Gardiner’s paintings stage a conscious and radical act of remembering. Along with difficulty and tragedy, he also depicts heroism – his flash cowboys know Country and kin and more than a thing or two about horses. A balladeer of both song and paint, Mr Gardiner also loved music and was known to play his guitar regularly in the Spinifex Hill Studio. In his hands the tradition of the bush ballad is reclaimed, not as the triumph of the wild colonial boys but of the man who refused to be colonised. Nici Cumpston
Artistic Director, Tarnanthi and Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Art Gallery of South Australia
Lisa Slade
Assistant Director, Artistic Programs, Art Gallery of South Australia
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Nyaparu (William) Gardiner drawing at Tarnanthi Art Fair, 2017. Photograph by Nat Rogers. Courtesy of Tarnanthi.
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T H E B A L L A D O F B I L LY G A R D I N E R 006
Nyaparu (William) Gardiner at the National Gallery of Victoria, May 2017. Photograph by Greg Taylor.
We wasn’t allowed to go to school, we wasn’t allowed to get paid money. We worked for flour, sugar, tea. Rations! We went on strike and we become equal. We become recognised as human beings. – Nyaparu (William) Gardiner1
The 1946 Pilbara strike, one the earliest unionised fights for Aboriginal self-determination, is a significant yet thinly recorded period in Australian history. The paintings of the late Nyaparu (William) Gardiner (1943–2018) offer an incredible insight into the experience of those times. Born in the Brockman River in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, Gardiner came of age in the aftermath of the Second World War and the strike. In 1946 his parents walked away from their work at Yarrie Station to help form the union that protested against the injustices of the State Government’s Aborigines Act (1905) and the Native Administration Act (1936). From being a striker child and using a ‘little yandy’ to sort tin alongside his families at Moolyella, Gardiner was one of the first to benefit from the fledgling equalities earned by the actions of the strike. In the 1950s he went to school in Port Hedland, where he attained a high level of literacy that would later serve him in his work as an author and translator. Books, however, could not ultimately compete with horses. ‘I wanted to be a cowboy and I dressed like a cowboy,’ Gardiner said in 2015. ‘[It] used to be boots and hat, a cigarette lighter in the belt, and a pocketknife in case of any trouble.’ Gardiner had a distinct dislike of what the strikers, in their poverty and
hard work, were often reduced to wearing. It was ‘all worn out, secondhand clothes, like […] in the army’. Whereas flash clothes were a luxury the strikers generally forwent, the subjects of Gardiner’s artworks are usually afforded the best. They are dressed smartly in the fashion of country singers like Roy Rogers, Hank Williams and Buck Owens, their clothes giving them status and prestige. This magnetism towards the cowboy life clearly remained strong for many men and women in the years following the strike. Even on the stations with the poorest conditions, hard tasks such as breaking horses, mustering cattle, fence work, cooking and cleaning were deeply satisfying and gave many men and women a purpose, a place and a sense of pride. Apart from all this social and historical context, it is clear from this exhibition of Gardiner’s work that his aesthetic is a triumph. His skew-whiff landscapes – detailed here, gestural there – are dreamily conceived and executed, and his figures of odd anatomic proportions often blend into or become the landscape. For Gardiner, who created almost all of his life’s work at Spinifex Hill Studios between 2014 and 2018, this aesthetic was developed, refined and eventually flourished as appreciation and recognition for his art grew. These years were a time when his body, eyesight and memory were not serving him as faithfully as they had, but from his mind and brush he teased out a powerful, original vision that captured the phenomenal changes he experienced and witnessed in his lifetime. His contributions to Tarnanthi 2019 are a showcase from these remarkable years and a legacy that will hopefully inspire his deserved acclaim. Greg Taylor
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All quotes courtesy of Spinifex Hill Studio.
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ARTWORK COLLECTION
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Old People (detail), Nyaparu (William) Gardiner, 122 x 101.5 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2018. Image courtesy of Spinifex Hill Studio.
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Kalyeeda Station 40.5 x 51 cm Acrylic on Arches paper 2015
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This is up at Kalyeeda Station in the Kimberley. There’s a rockhole here. When it rains it fills up but you can go there all year round for a drink. When I was a young man we would be mustering the horses and fill up our cups here. For the horses we’d fill up our hats with water and the horses would have a drink. And the mules too, they were crying for water. At the station the mules would hang around the kitchen, always hungry!
Stockyard 34.5 x 50 cm Acrylic on Arches paper 2015
That’s a nice stockyard, like we used to build. He got his horses all ready and they waiting for other people to come. They could be going out to get the cattle, going out in the morning to get whatever bullocks, going out mustering. We used to do that, get up in the morning. We used to wait for our boss to tell us which area we do our mustering.
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Mineral Country 40.5 x 50.5 cm Pencil, acrylic paint and ink on paper 2015
We used to go looking for minerals, well not me, my father. My father was doing that after the 1946 strike, trying to get fair wages. We used to use a yandy - it’s made out of tin, and its round. All the bad stuff goes this way [motions left], and all the tin goes this way [motions right]. Whatever minerals we’d find in the bush area like this, like this river bed. We used to yandy with those people who we were living with in the Pilbara district. We lived all together, as one group, one people. We’d go as a group to go prospecting. Yandying, no machine no! That life was very hard. We only had one old truck to take the minerals that was clean to Port Hedland, and they’d send that to Perth. Then we’d have to wait maybe a couple of weeks before we got some food sent back to us. During those days we had maybe a big bag of flour we’d share together. We used to go hunting for meat, go fishing and eat bush tucker too. My old man was a bushman. He could go hunting for goanna. He wasn’t a fisherman - he didn’t go hunting in the water! We used to eat bush tomatoes and bush onions. We knew what kinds of food there was. We were living on that too. Our mothers used to get all the seed from the bush, put it in the yandy, and separate the good seed from the bad seed. Then they used to grind it with one big rock, and they used to have another stone and a bit of water. They’d rub it like that, make it smooth, then make a flour for damper. I was born in the bush out of Moolyella, east of Marble Bar. He wasn’t a station, just a tin field. It was mineral Country.
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My Old Man, Jimmy Gardiner 101.5 x 71 cm Acrylic on linen 2018
Jimmy Gardiner 101.5 x 71 cm Acrylic on linen 2018
My old man, Jimmy Gardiner, with his dog. He passed away now.
He is holding some rugs. He is going to the shop or something. He getting away from the mob.
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Jack, He Can Do Anything 122 x 101.5 cm Acrylic on canvas 2018
Eric Tinker 61 x 35.5 cm Acrylic on canvas 2017 My Martu Brother.
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Drover 40.5 x 50.5 cm Acrylic paint on paper 2015
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This old man is a drover. He’s a black man and a horse breaker. We used to have a respect for those people because they showed us a lot of things in our life, working in the stations. It was like a religion to us. He was a drover, he was a rider. I was a boy. I worked on the stations from this Country. My father was a drover too. We used to brand all those cattle, put them into a truck and truck them up to the meatworks. We’d do all other things; fencing, build a yard, check the windmills, cleaning the trough. That’s right.
Yandying Family 40.5 x 50.5 cm Acrylic paint on paper 2015
Before the flour and sugar and tea, the old people used to grind seeds with a grindstone. They would be singing when they make a damper. When they make a damper they had to collect all the seeds in the yandy. I will show you, when I yandy, all the bad things go this way [down] and the good things stay in the top. I learned from my mother and my father. This woman is making a damper, mixing the ground seeds and a little bit of water, it becomes nice. The heat of the river sand, good clean sand, with hot coals to cook the damper. Sometimes we use bark but it burns. We use the dry clean river sand, not the dusty sand, then the damper comes out clean.
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ABOUT SPINIFEX HILL STUDIOS 018
Nyaparu (William) Gardiner at The West End Markets, Port Hedland, 2018. Photography by Bewley Shaylor, courtesy of FORM.
Spinifex Hill Studio, one of Australia’s youngest Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art centres, opened in 2014 as a partnership venture by BHP and Western Australian cultural organisation FORM. Situated in South Hedland, Port Hedland’s more culturally and economically diverse neighbour, the Studio offers a nexus of calm and creativity for a network of more than a hundred Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, spanning eight different language groups. Of these, a core group works at the centre every day. Thanks to a partnering of the artists’ trust and commitment, corporate generosity, and not-for-profit expertise in artist development and management, these people have a stable, safe environment in which to practise and refine their art. The artists are as diverse in artistic style and tempo as they are in life experience and cultural background, and this individuality of approach is one of the reasons that the Spinifex Hill Studio’s output is so fresh and dynamic, and is becoming increasingly sought after by public and private collectors. Despite its status as a relative newcomer, the reputation of the Studio and its key artists (such as the late Nyaparu Gardiner) is growing, both in Australia and overseas. In the last two years alone the Studio’s resident artist group (Spinifex Hill Artists) has been consistently represented at Revealed, Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair, Desert Mob in Alice Springs and Tarnanthi, alongside exhibitions in Perth, Darwin, Adelaide, Hobart and the Mornington Peninsula; Singapore, Italy, Luxembourg and the United States. In 2019 Gardiner himself posthumously won a major prize at the 36th NATSIA Awards at the Museum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory.
For ‘old man’, as Nyaparu (or Billy) Gardiner was affectionately known, the Studio became a haven, ‘a still point of the turning world’ to quote T.S. Eliot, where this instinctively talented artist could not only craft his memories into his extraordinary portraits of people and landscape, but also make the present resound with the past by sharing other renditions of his particular take on the world. The Studio was also a place where Billy would often take up his guitar, and perform his unique love-songs to his youth as a stockman, to comrades of yesteryear, and to his beloved Country. While he loved people to listen, one sensed that for Billy an audience was not essential, that this music came from and carried him to a place that offered two sides of the same coin: reinvigoration and respite. As did his art. Perhaps that is also what the Studio offered Billy: reinvigoration and respite, evidenced in the late flowering of an artistic, documentary impulse that was determined to record in an inimitable style the trials and triumphs of a long life. Whether remote or urban, art centres like Spinifex Hill Studio are so important in being able to provide a space where stories may be told, in canvas or objects, before they are lost forever. Many important Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists come into their own, artistically, late in life. Many do so while also coping with the fragility and ailments that seniority can bring; yet, as we can see from Billy’s work, there is nothing of this fragility in their art. For the people who supported Billy at the Studio, and beyond the Studio in FORM and BHP, the critical success of his artistic output, though wonderful and richly deserved, may not ultimately be as meaningful as the knowledge that this space was where this extraordinary man was joyously himself: painting, drawing, and playing his guitar. Mags Webster FORM Writer
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He’s Myself 37.5 x 55 cm Acrylic on Arches paper 2015 He’s myself. That’s how I used to dress up for when I was getting ready for working you know, early in the morning when I was young? I was working like a stockman, I was dressing like a cowboy. Used to be a boots and hat, and a few other things. We used to wear cigarette lighter in here [indicates belt], in the belt, and a pocket knife in case of any trouble. For anything good, for cutting up a piece of meat or something like that. [As] long as you got a pocket knife, and a stone to sharpen your knife, you’re right then. We used to wear not this sort of clothes [indicates clothing worn at present], but you know, like what they wore in the army or something like that? All worn out, second hand clothes. We used to get jeans. That wasn’t in in this area, in Myroodah. I went there because my mother was there in Myroodah Station, and she wanted me there. She was missing me. The first job I got was with a contractor, Jack Tsaklos. We were carting up fuel in a fuel truck. The truck would come pick me up. We the boys from here, Port Hedland. We were the experienced workers. We knew how to use all kinds of machinery and that. Some other people didn’t know how to do too much. We were looking for work.
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My Jamu (Grandfather) Mine 101.5 x 61 cm Acrylic on linen 2018
That old man standing there is my grandfather. He’s in Looma. My grandfather's name is Ulay. That’s his blackfella name because he didn’t have no whitefella name. Ulay is my grandmother’s side, my mother’s father. He’s a Mangala, his language is Mangala people. He’s in Looma there. In the Kimberley they talk that language, I speak that language with them too. My mother been passed away in Looma now. They might be stopping in the shade or something like that. This hill is Looma hill, and this is a billabong. They used to sit around in that area because they belong to Country. He died out there in the desert. They didn’t have a funeral.
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New Count 146 x 114 cm Mixed media 2018
I was working at Warrawagine Station out near Marble Bar. New Count was a racehorse we helped train. Old man whatsaname...Sandy Coppin was the trainer for New Count and he won the Marble Bar Cup sometime in the [19]60s. Sometimes a horse is special and sometimes he is lucky. I remember New Count, tall one. Beauty was another [horse]. Johnson Taylor... he was a c**t [laughs] and Peter Monaghan were trainers too. Bill Marshall was another. I worked for them all.
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Strelley Mob 56.5 x 76.5 cm Pen/pencil drawing 2017
After the [1946 Pilbara] strike we was working there in Strelley. We was camping in the creek and we was trying to get a mineral out of the hills. We were getting tantalite and beryl, those kinds of minerals. By that time we was getting some money and we started building houses with tools we bought. In the early days we were staying in tents to shelter from the rains. We made them with sticks and white sheets that [Don] McLeod got for us. We were a hard people out there. We got made hard by our lives. We didn’t have a white colour body and we couldn’t go everywhere we wanted. We got chained up, around the neck sometimes. We didn’t get a money for work. These are the sorts of things [reasons] why we started the business of the strike. At this time [in Strelley] the only problem that we had was the bosses said there’s going to be a committee who says who’s going to do what sort of things, what sorts of jobs. Not all the people liked that. Some people went one way and some stayed in McLeod’s crew. I was only a young man then in Strelley. All these people are passed away now.
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Strelley Fellas 61 x 35.5 cm Acrylic on linen 2017
I started working in Strelley with Peter Miller. It was a sheep station. We would talk about a bit of business together like this, saying "we're going to help you" or "we're coming too" that sort of thing. When the business of the strike was finishing, when our people started getting a money for work [not only rations], we were changing between mineral work and station work.
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I Can’t Call His Name 101.5 x 71 cm Acrylic on linen 2018
Doing these paintings is how I remember our old people. These pictures I’m showing you are from my memories. It’s a hard life in those days and we had to change a lot in this life. A lot of the time we didn’t get to decide where we went and why we had to leave our families. We would have to walk some other places, do another thing. When someone is dead and gone, you can’t always tell the story or call his name. I got all these old people up there in my mind. Our culture and language is strong up there too. Yeah, I have some worries. I think of some of my old people. We can’t forget them. The old people, the law and culture they put us through, my paintings are about remembering them now they passed away.
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Old People 122 x 101.5 cm Acrylic on canvas 2018
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Old Fella 91.5 x 91.5 cm Acrylic on canvas 2018
Young Fella 122 x 101.5 cm Acrylic on canvas 2017
Old Man 122 x 61 cm Acrylic on canvas 2016
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Our Old People 122 x 122 cm Acrylic on canvas 2018
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EXHIBITION HISTORY
Solo Exhibitions
Awards
2017
Outside Men, Vivien Anderson Gallery, VIC
2017
Old People, Suzanne O’Connell Gallery, QLD
2019
Work on Paper Award, 36th Telstra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, Museum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory, NT
2018
Best Portrait Award, Cossack Art Award, WA
2017
Best Work in a Medium Other than Painting, 2017 Hedland Art Awards, Port Hedland Courthouse Gallery, WA
36th Telstra NATSIA Awards, Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory, NT
Best Painting by a Pilbara Indigenous Artist, Cossack Art Award, WA
2018
Hedland Art Awards, Port Hedland Courthouse Gallery, WA
Paddington Art Prize finalist, Sydney NSW
Highly Commended, Hadley Art Prize, Hobart, TAS
Black Swan Prize for Portraiture, finalist, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth WA
2016 Most Outstanding Work, 2016 Hedland Art Awards, Port Hedland Courthouse Gallery, WA
35th Telstra NATSIA Awards, Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory, NT
2015 Best Indigenous Artwork, 2015 Hedland Art Awards, Courthouse Gallery, Port Hedland, WA
Cossack Art Award, Cossack WA
VIC
Stockman, Strikers and Sundown, Vivien Anderson Gallery,
Collections
Dream Mine Time, FORM Gallery, Perth
Art Gallery of Western Australia, WA
Good Enough! The Art of Spinifex Hill Artists, Paul Johnstone Gallery, Darwin NT
Curtin University Collection, WA
Pujiman, Spinifex Hill Artists and Martumili Artists (touring exhibition), WA
Museum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory, NT
2017
Tarnanthi, Art Gallery of South Australia
Hedland Art Awards, Port Hedland Courthouse Gallery
Cossack Art Award, Cossack WA
Hadley Art Prize, Hobart TAS
44th Muswellbrook Art Prize, NSW
2016
Biggest Mob - the Spinifex Hill Artists, Port Hedland Courthouse Gallery, WA
Hedland Art Awards, Port Hedland Courthouse Gallery
33rd Telstra NATSIA Awards, Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory, NT
Anything Colours, Paul Johnstone Gallery, NT
2015
We Call It Home - The Spinifex Hill Artists, FORM Gallery, WA
Hedland Art Awards, Port Hedland Courthouse Gallery, WA
Group Exhibitions 2019
Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Art Gallery of South Australia
Western Australian Museum, WA
Flinders University Collection, SA Art Gallery of South Australia
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FORM is a Perth-based non-profit organisation. We work with all sectors of the community to explore how creativity sparks art and culture, inspires learning and social connection, and generates opportunity. Since 2008 we have run programs in South Hedland for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, consolidating this support in 2014 with the establishment of the Spinifex Hill Studios. For a decade and a half, FORM’s programming supporting the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists of Western Australia has continued to explore the deep connection between place and culture, Country and community, and promote connections between urban and remote environments through collaborative partnership with regional and desert communities. Perhaps the best-known outcome has been Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route Project (2012), an extraordinary multi-year collaboration with ten art centres and remote communities, spanning four regions from the Goldfields to the Kimberley. The project compiled oral histories, films, multi-media material, original art and objects in an expansive documentation of the social and cultural impact of the Canning Stock Route on the Indigenous peoples whose Country it crossed. This was the stock route story told for the first time with Aboriginal voices. The artwork collection was subsequently acquired by the National Museum of Australia, while all of the documentation was returned to each community. Two major publications, a catalogue and a compilation of academic essays were published about the project.
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A more recent example of FORM’s innovative Indigenous programming is Pujiman (2018), which united artists from Spinifex Hill Studio and Martumili Artists, sharing knowledge between senior pujiman or ‘bush dwelling’ artists and younger practitioners. The collaboration showcased powerful, distinctive culture through the mediums of animation, filmmaking, photography, drawing and acrylic painting. Pujiman showed the extraordinary energy and variety of contemporary Indigenous arts practice as it is today: the work of emerging artists responding to and informed by the knowledge and example of their seniors. Works from these shows have been collected by The Stokes Collection and Wesfarmers Arts. FORM’s role in projects such as these is not restricted to curatorship, but expands into the development of programs and pathways for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and designers to access economic and professional opportunities, and national and international exposure to audiences and collectors.
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