PATRICK OLOODOODI TJUNGURRAYI

Patrick Tjungurrayi was born in Yalangerri near Jupiter Well c.1935. A Pintupi and Kukatja speaker, he walked in from the desert while on the Canning Stock Route, and moved in to the Old Balgo Mission which had been established in 1943. Here he worked building the stone houses and, after the community moved in 1962, constructing the church at the new Balgo site. He met and married Mirriam Olodoodi, Lucy Yukenbari's sister, at the church in Balgo but returned to Kintore shortly after while she remained in Balgo. Through the early 1980’s Patrick travelled to Christmas Creek, Docker River and a number of other Western Desert and coastal Kimberley communities doing a variety of jobs ranging from construction, labouring and working on boats until he rejoined his wife once more in Balgo Hills.

Initiated by Freddy Timms with help from artist Tony Oliver, the group which includes Timms, Peggy Patrick, Rammy Ramsay and others, has gained exponential notoriety and they have been ‘mythologised, almost like rock stars, by some of the country’s best writers’ (Bowdler 2005: 45). In tangible terms Jirrawun Arts has been able to provide the kind of individual support and promotion of its artists that art centers have difficulty emulating. Numerous shows were organised through the group, in which Bedford starred during his lifetime, including Blood on the Spinifex at the National Gallery of Victoria and True Stories at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. 'I’m a millionaire' Bedford shouted when he received his first cheque as an artist. Over the following decade his painting style developed from simple expanses of flat ochre to masterful luminous textured surfaces. Painting in a recognizable east Kimberley style in which plains of ochre are disrupted only by sparsely planted shapes, Bedford masterfully combined important ancestral Dreamings with depictions of his environment and contemporary historical events.

His health and dexterity at various times dictated the medium in which he worked. Introduced to gouache and paper after 2000, he created intimate works that were equally successful as those depicted in ochres. In both mediums, his paintings are imbued with authority and an absolutely distinctive individual language within the east Kimberley conventions. Characteristic of Paddy’s style are richly ochred surfaces with minimal arrangements of circular shapes, often centered upon a band, and delineated by white dots. Though important Dreamings such as the Emu, Turkey, and Cockatoo are present in many of his works, like the narratives of his family history they are not depicted in any figurative form. This is evidenced in the self-published book, Walk the Line, produced during 2004, in which Bedford depicted important sites and explored the culture of his people.

Paddy Bedford, an enigmatic octogenarian, stood out as a uniquely talented artist. He was amongst the few selected to contribute to the permanent installation at the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris and was honoured, during his lifetime, with the unprecedented recognition of a retrospective exhibition and a major catalogue by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney during 2007, which toured nationally.

His work, most probably without intention, became embroiled in the ‘history wars’ between various social commentators and journalists after Keith Windschuttle, in his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History 2002, questioned the veracity of Aboriginal oral accounts of such tragedies as the Bedford Downs massacre. Three years later Paddy Bedford exhibited a series of paintings based on the Bedford Downs massacre at the National Gallery of Victoria. The Blood on the Spinifex exhibition revealed a surprising attitude to the killings. Its power lay in the 'modesty of the voice, the quiet economy of the storyline, the sober lack of sentimental or rhetorical elaboration' (Nelson cited in Bowdler 2005: 46). It is testament to this wonderful old stockman and artist, one of the great Kimberley characters, that the truth distilled within his canvasses has brought broad acceptance amongst a majority of Australians as to the credibility of Gidja oral accounts of their traumatic encounters with white settlers.