The Stranger Artist

Desert Water Dreaming

Buried under the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter issue that has garnered global media attention was the launch of a new book “The Stranger Artist – Life at the edge of Kimberley painting” by Quentin Sprague.

The book focuses on Tony Oliver, the son of a Gippsland dairy farmer and a wonderful old mate of mine, and his decade long immersion in the East Kimberley art movement establishing Jirrawun Arts, one of the most successful and yet controversial centre’s of the Australian Aboriginal art movement.  The telling of Oliver’s collaboration with the Gija people and his extraordinary creative relationship working with Aboriginal painters such as Paddy Bedford, Freddie Timms, Rusty Peters and their emergence into the main stream of the global art world is compelling, brutal and often tragic.

The book offers insight into the tensions between the white government bureaucrats' attempts to continue the colonization of Australia Aboriginal culture to shore up their own careers and the art entrepreneurs in their rush to curry favour in order to capitalize on the underlying greed of the art world. Both sides saw Tony Oliver as an enemy thwarting their goals and visions.

The reality in my view is that Tony Oliver was seeking to work with the original inhabitants in a search to surface a post colonial Australian cultural identity.

This is a must read for those interested in contemporary Australian culture.

In my new work Desert Water Dreaming I am paying homage to the first nations people of Australia and the wonderment their culture offers in my search for my own Australian identity