William Mora Galleries: Paddy Bedford

Paddy Bedford (Nyunkuny) is a senior Gija law man, born around 1922 at Bedford Downs Station in the East Kimberley where his family lived and worked. While young, he worked as a stockman for the usual tea, flour and tobacco rations on old Greenvale and Bow River Stations, returned to Bedford Downs Station and eventually settled with his family in Turkey Creek. Paddy has painted ceremonially all his life, but began painting on canvas for the art market after the establishment of the Jirrawun Aboriginal Art cooperative by Freddie Timms in 1997. Paddy was one of the original members of the cooperative, set up to sell members' artworks through commercial galleries to the public on the same terms as white artists. Unlike several other indigenous arts cooperatives around Australia, the members of the Jirrawun cooperative continue to paint with ground natural pigments rather than acrylic paint.

Paddy's work is sparse in composition and bold in form and colour, depicting traditional dreaming stories as well as stories from the artist's own lifetime. His canvases may show abstracted roads, rivers, property boundaries, stock yards and camp life, or emu, turkey and cockatoo dreamings. His paintings have related stories of the poisoning of a group of his relatives by the then manager of the Bedford Downs Station, Paddy Quilty, as punishment for killing a milking cow near an emu dreaming place west of the homestead. It was Quilty who gave Paddy his "gardiya" name.

Hailed by some as the "new" Rover Thomas, even though he was born a few years before Rover, Paddy's work has been acquired by several major Australian collections, including Parliament House in Canberra.

Paddy Bedford Selection

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