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painter, was born at Middleton Ponds station, near Tempe Downs at the southern border of Hermannsburg, about 160 miles south west of Alice Springs (NT). Her father was a Pertame man and her mother a Luritja woman. Her early life was spent on Renners Rock station where her father worked as a stockman. Here Bessie learned traditional bush hunting and gathering. For ten years, on and off, the family camped near Hermannsburg (Ntaria) Lutheran Mission, either during drought times when work and bush tucker were scarce, as in 1937, or else to purchase supplies from the mission store. Bessie then attended the mission school, where she studied in the Aranda (Arrernte) and English languages. Mission classes also included drawing and singing (the Hermannsburg choir became as famous locally as its watercolour school). As early as 1913 the mission’s struggling economy had included the women’s thriving mail-order fancywork and tourist artefact industries and the men’s skin and tanning and mulga artefact businesses.

After the railway was extended to Alice Springs in 1929, the mission was visited regularly by artists seeking locations to sketch en plein-air , including the well-known visits by Rex Battarbee (1932-34), who settled in Alice Springs in 1940, and less well-documented visits by Jessie Traill (q.v., 1928, 1932) and Violet Teague (q.v., 1933). In 1938 the educationalist and artist Frances Derham took groups of some eighty children, including Bessie, to Palm Valley specifically to execute commissioned sketches. It could be said that the mission’s rather pragmatic art programme benefited by these early 'artist residencies’.

After Bessie married, she moved to her husband’s station and continued to work stock and be camp cook. Her three children were reared in the saddle. The family still holds coolamons she made in the 1950s. During the 1960s the station was used as a tourist lunch stop so, in addition to cooking, she again took up artefact production. With her husband (who died in October 1997), Bessie long taught culture and hunting to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children and adults as a member of the teaching group Kami arangka , beginning with tourists to Uluru (Ayers Rock) in the 1950s and ’60s. In 1981, after moving to Alice Springs, she took a course in literacy at the Institute for Aboriginal Development. In 1986 she and four other women established Jukurrpa Artists Inc., a cooperative workshop, gallery and sales outlet at Alice Springs which now represents some 250 Warlpiri, Pitjantjatjara, Luritja, Anmatyerre, Arrernte and Pintupi women artists. It is the only gallery of its kind in Australia.

Liddle has been exhibiting regularly since 1988. Her paintings, which concentrate on transferring ceremonial body designs to canvas – many depicting the Seven Sisters Dreaming cycle from Pitjantjatjara lands—are represented in the Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs and the United Nations building in Geneva. In 1994 she was a delegate to the ASEAN Women Leaders Forum in Singapore. On 13 November 1997 athlete Cathy Freeman launched Australia’s first locomotive painted with an Aboriginal Dreaming story, Warmi NR30 , a 132-tonne loco for the Indian Pacific route from Sydney to Perth and the Ghan from Adelaide to Alice Springs decorated by Bessie after a Warmi (snake) dot painting showing a snake, bush tucker and women’s footprints. Another loco showing the Seven Sisters Dreaming is being completed, and Liddle’s friend Clive Scollay is making a feature film about the Seven Sisters Dreaming.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FROM JOAN KERR’S FILES:

painter and decorative artist, was born at Middleton Ponds station near Tempe Downs at the southern border of Hermannsburg, about 160 miles southwest of Alice Springs (NT). Her father was a Pertame man and her mother a Luritja woman. Her early life was spent on Renners Rock station, where her father worked as a stockman and where Bessie learned traditional bush hunting and gathering. For ten years, on and off, the family camped near Hermannsburg (Ntaria) Lutheran Mission, either during drought times when work and bush tucker were scarce, as in 1937, or else to purchase supplies from the mission store. Bessie then attended the mission school, where she studied in the Aranda (Arrernte) and English languages. Mission classes also included drawing and singing (the Hermannsburg choir became as famous locally as its watercolour school).

As early as 1913 the mission’s struggling economy had included the women’s thriving mail-order fancywork and tourist artefact industries and the men’s skin and tanning and mulga artefact businesses. After the railway was extended to Alice Springs in 1929, artists regularly visited the mission seeking locations to sketch en plein air , along with state notables, funding representatives, Commissioners of Enquiries, ethnographers, museum personnel and tourists. They were sold 'curios’ and lobbied on the crucial issue of extending and protecting Aboriginal land reserves from the pressure of pastoralists. The adventurous Jessie Traill preceded the train in 1928 then returned in 1932. Una Teague, impressed by the landscape on her 1931 visit, returned with her sixty-year-old stepsister, the artist Violet Teague , on a sketching trip in 1932 {or 1933 CHECK BOOK}. Rex Battarbee stayed in 1932 (with John Gardner), 1934 and 1936, taking the skilled mulga-wood artefact maker and, after 1934, enthusiastic watercolourist Albert Namatjira as his thirty-four year old 'camel boy’ in 1934. Arthur Murch visited in 1933 and 1934. The mission’s rather pragmatic art program clearly benefited by these early 'artist residencies’.

In 1938 the educationalist and artist Frances Derham took groups of some eighty children to Palm Valley specifically to execute commissioned sketches. Waterhole and Trees , a crayon and pencil drawing inscribed 'Bessie, 13’ made on the trip (NGA, donated 1976), was first exhibited in Drawings and Paintings by Children from Hermannsburg, Aurukun and Malabunga , a 1984 NGA Education Department selection of works from the collection of several thousand children’s drawings and paintings donated by Frances Derham – also the first time the collection had been seen. Following the convention categorising art from reservations or missions as being 'made from the mismatching of two cultures’ or 'an art of transition’, the selection promised to show 'the work of indigenous children whose lives had been affected by elements of Western culture’.

Childhood’s special and protected status in Western culture is in play in this 'innocent reading for origin’ of a child’s drawing (the artist was eleven at the time – the '13’ floating after the copperplate signature is her laundry number), where the child is represented as an index of social history. This notion of witness is deeply culturally specific. Bessie’s drawing, like most children’s gifts, may serve many ends, a fact that possibly made the angelic National Gallery so cautious in dealing with this archive. In 1984 it was a superb illustration of Derham’s 'transitional’ thesis and the gallery’s representational methods of analysis, perfectly evoking a Biblical Jordan, that scene of joyous baptism, while the cycads recalled a pre-historical Eden, an ancestral 'palm valley’ site of idealised Aboriginality.

In 1938 Derham was pioneering ideas and practices that were to prove enduring in Australian educational methods. During her two-week visit she encouraged the children at Hermannsburg to make sketches with pastels made to her own specifications. The rich pigments were a spectacular change from the impoverished Mission’s standard materials; Ruth Pech, the Aranda-speaking teacher at the Mission in 1935-40 (who remembers Bessie as 'excelling at drawing, songs – and games!’), recalls that drawing was normally done on the child’s classroom slate. In order to teach fifty-six pupils Pech and her assistant, Abel, ran split morning and afternoon shifts, the small schoolroom’s only decoration a colour chart of biblical scenes. Pech was away when Derham took the group fifteen miles to the Valley of Palms. Derham’s private photograph album documents the excursion, her photographs accompanied by breezy captions such as 'the girls like communal art, their dinner is in the kerosene tin’.

Pech and Derham both noted that the children preferred to draw their immediate surrounds, the boys choosing cattle and hunting scenes after their fathers’ activities while the girls preferred the Semco flower patterns their mothers used in the flourishing fancywork and rug-making industries. Pastor Friedrich W. Albrecht, who joined the mission in 1926 with his wife, Minna (Geevers), noted that 'even before we had arrived, the women had been doing some fancy needlework, some of which was artistically conceived and executed’.

Hermannsburg (Ntarea) Lutheran Mission is a cross-cultural caseworker’s Garden of Eden. Established on 8 June 1877, this small land grant of 900 square miles (extended in 1941 to 8,000 as a permanent Aboriginal reserve) on mostly Aranda (Arrente) lands was an 'oasis’ for Aboriginal people, like Bessie Liddle’s family, fleeing from land-grabs and ensuing famine, from genocide (as late as 1928 an estimated 100 men, women and children were massacred in 'reprisal’ on nearby Pitjantjatjara lands), drought and inevitable social upheaval. In 1973 the Finke River Mission began discussion with the Aranda to hand over the land and buildings. On 2 June 1982, the Hermannsburg lease was surrendered to five Aboriginal land trusts. Shortly afterwards, the out-station movement began.

Palms along the Finke River grew to some seventy feet. Transplanted palms at the mission often provided the backdrop for school and formal photography. Bessie’s palms are a reminder of this time when Aboriginal people, in collaboration with missionaries, began the long process of repatriating Aboriginal land and preserving their culture.

Bessie Breaden married Arthur Liddle (1917-97) of Angus Downs, son of William Hurle (Bill) Liddle, a Scottish contractor who helped Gerhardt Johannsen construct the stone building at Arltunga Police Station, and Mary Earwacker, a part-Aboriginal woman. {Arthur Liddle and his sister Emily had been removed to the Bungalow Half-caste Home in Alice Springs in the 1920s; his letter seeking release from the NT Aboriginal Ordinance is in the National Archives, Canberra, A1, 1938/8191.) Bessie moved to her husband’s station, where she continued to work stock and be the camp cook. Their three children, Lawrence, Lorraine (to become the first Aboriginal woman lawyer to practice in the Northern Territory, being admitted to the Bar in 1986 and appointed barrister to the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service) and (?) [not mentioned in Petrick], were reared in the saddle.

The family still owns coolamons Bessie made in the 1950s. In the 1960s Arthur built a homestead with a dining room for tourists en route to Ayers Rock. Bessie did the cooking and took up artefact production again. Bessie and her husband (who died in October 1997) taught culture and hunting to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children and adults. Bessie was a member of the teaching group Kami arangka ('following in the grandmother’s footsteps’), who began teaching tourists to Uluru (Ayers Rock) in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1981, after moving to Alice Springs, she took a course in literacy at the Institute for Aboriginal Development. In 1986 she and four other women established Jukurrpa Artists Inc., a cooperative workshop, gallery and sales outlet at Alice Springs that now represents some 250 Warlpiri, Pitjantjatjara, Luritja, Anmatyerre, Arrernte and Pintupi women artists. It is the only gallery of its kind in Australia.

Liddle has been exhibiting regularly since 1988. Her paintings, which concentrate on transferring ceremonial body designs to canvas – many depicting the Seven Sisters Dreaming cycle from Pitjantjatjara lands – are held in the Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, and in the United Nations building, Geneva. In 1994 she was a delegate to the ASEAN Women Leaders Forum in Singapore. On 13 November 1997, athlete Cathy Freeman launched Australia’s first locomotive painted with an Aboriginal Dreaming story, Warmi NR30 , a 132-tonne train for the Indian Pacific route from Sydney to Perth and the Ghan from Adelaide to Alice Springs decorated by Bessie after a Warmi (snake) dot painting of a snake, bush tucker and women’s footprints. Another train featuring Bessie’s Seven Sisters Dreaming was completed in 1997-98 and complemented by a feature film about the Seven Sisters Dreaming made by Liddle’s friend Clive Scollay (report on 2nd train, Land Rights News February 1998, 19).

Writer: Holder, Jo
Date written: 1995

Born at Middleton Ponds, south-west of Alice Springs. Her mother was a Luritja woman from Tempe Downs. Her father was a Pertame man whose country was around Henbury Station: Watarka, Lilla, Wanmara. Bessie Liddle gives her tribal affiliation as Luritja/Pertame and her country as Angus Downs station: Kings Creek. She has family at Angus Downs, and connections with the communities at Enbery Station and Hermannsburg, also Wallace Rockhole, Maryvale, Uluru/Ayers Rock. She paints the Gecko Dreaming from Middleton Ponds, Seven Sisters Dreaming, and Kungka Kutjara (Two Sisters) Dreaming that passes through Kings Canyon. She remembers as a child her grandmothers and grandfathers telling stories and drawing them in the sand. They all passed away before 'dot painting’ started, but this is how she learnt the stories she paints. She began painting in early 1987, after looking at the paintings in galleries in Alice Springs and deciding to try it herself. She began on art boards and experimented with colour and style, but always staying true to the Dreaming story and designs. Initially she sold through the CAAMA shop, but after eighteen months came to join the group at Jukurrpa, of which she is now the President. She has had work in exhibitions in Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide, Darwin, and WA (through CAAMA), London, New York and Geneva (where a postcard was made of one of her paintings).

Writer: Johnson, Vivien
Date written: 1994

Writers:

Holder, Jo
Johnson, Vivien
nmian

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2012