Footnotes

• PROVENANCE:
  Painted in 2000
  Jirrawun Aboriginal Arts, Western Australia
  Chapman Gallery, Canberra
  Private collection
  
  LITERATURE:
  Linda Michael (ed.), Paddy Bedford, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, p.147 (illus.).
  
  Paddy Bedford, or Nyunkuny, was a senior Gija law man and painter in the eastern Kimberley. He was born and raised on Bedford Station where he worked for rations as a stockman. He also spent time on Greenvale and Bow River Stations before returning to Bedford Downs. As with most Aboriginal people in the eastern Kimberley, Bedford continued traditional practices and ceremony which provided the opportunities for him to paint. His first paintings in the public domain, however, were made when he joined the Jirrawun Art group established by Freddie Timms at Rugun (Crocodile Hole) in 1997. Bedford went on to become one of the senior artists of the group, having been accorded a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in 2006, a version of which was shown at the AAMU Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art in Utrecht in 2010 (see Georges Petitjean et. al., Paddy Bedford: Crossing Frontiers, Utrecht: Aboriginal Art Museum Utrecht and Snoeck Editions, the Netherlands, 2010).
  
  Gernawarliyan is a site in the artist's mother's traditional lands where the ancestral goanna, Garndoowoolany camped in the Dreaming. The place is indicated by the central circle. Garndoowoolany called out to the dingo Marranyji who was transformed into a rock. The modern name of the site dates back to the time when Afghani traders took their camels through the eastern Kimberley to the port of Wyndham. The rock itself, situated in the red ochre corner in the painting, is said to be in the shape of a camel.
  
  Wally Caruana
  
  This painting is sold with accompanying Jirrawun Aboriginal Arts documentation.

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Category: Fine Art / Aboriginal Art

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