Birrundudu Drawings

Birrundudu Drawings is a revelatory body of imagery that recasts the conversation around desert art in Australia, offering a chance to look anew at a phenomenon at risk of drifting, through the fog of familiarity, from our understanding.

Birrundudu Drawings brings to the world for the first time artworks from a series of 810 drawings produced in 1945 by Aboriginal men in the Northern Territory, a collection today cared for by the Berndt Museum at the University of Western Australia.

The Birrundudu Drawings represent one of the most significant bodies of historical imagery ever introduced into the canons of Australian art. The 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. Apart from a handful of drawings, most of the collection has never been seen.

These drawings sat in silence for eighty years- first in the Berndts' home and then at the museum. Some of these silences are interrogated in this book, while others will take longer to resolve. What is beyond doubt is the fact that the Birrundudu Drawings represent a monumental body of Aboriginal knowledge and creativity. 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.