Goodman (Worrorra people) Working 1954

Crayon on recycled cardboard 

Collected by Dr Joseph Birdsell, UCLA Physical Anthropologist, in the Kimberley Region in 1954
Thence by descent
The Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands

Joseph Birdsell was a physical anthropologist who produced a number of seminal works on the origins and ancestry of the Australian Aborigines. He worked closely with Norman Tindale of the South Australian Museum, having in excess of a 50 year long association, including field trips to the northwest and Kimberley regions of Western Australia in 1953-54.

It is understood that Birdsell worked with north Kimberley people, who would have produced these pictures, at both Derby and at the mission centre known as Wotjalum on the coast, opposite Cockatoo and Koolan Islands.

One of the methods used by the researchers to record traditional concepts and art, was to give their informants lengths of paper and crayons. In this way the iconography of the traditional art styles was recorded along with other such data as the location and structure of sites and myth lines (or Dreaming Tracks or Songlines) and other geographical information. Such maps were also used to record the country of their various informants, data that has proved to be of great benefit in these times of recognition of Native Title.

Traditionally, when producing artwork of this nature, painting rather than drawing was the manner in which art was created. Consequently, these images reflect the lack of skill at drawing per se, exhibited by older artists, when compared with younger artists of the period who were being taught to use pen and pencil within the mission school system. Features such as nipples or breasts, rarely depicted in rock art, have been added and the headdresses show varying degrees of complexity. This and the following two drawings are a very important part of our understanding of the changes in the art history of the region, and they do have an aesthetic appeal that is quite their own.

This work is virtually identical to one held in the South Australian Museum collections and attributed to an artist from the Worora (Worrorra) tribe. The fact that, apart from other similar elements, the unusual construction of the asymmetrical feature (similar to a shoulder holster) occurs in both images reinforces the belief that not only were both drawings done by the same artist but that they represent a specific individual – for which the shoulder feature may be a defining element.

A wider, but similar, suite of artwork from the region is held at the South Australian Museum, and other museums around Australia have similar types of work from other areas of the continent.