Robert Campbell Jr (1944-93), Ngaku painter and printmaker was born at Kempsey on the mid north coast of New South Wales and grew up in close contact with the bush and coastline. He first learnt to draw while still at primary school on Burnt Bridge Mission by producing images of birds and animals in pencil on his father’s carved boomerangs. His father would then trace over the young Robert’s design with a red-hot wire, to burn it into the local wood (local wattle and mangrove). As an adult, while toiling at various labouring jobs in Sydney and in seasonal work around Kempsey, Campbell continued to paint for tourists and local art shows, using whatever discarded materials he could lay his hands on.
Despite having neither traditional Aboriginal tutoring nor Western art-school training, he worked confidently to invent his own idiosyncratic visual devices and painting style, such as the 'x-ray’ view of the esophagus of his figures. In this respect he differed from the artists of the more urbanised Aboriginal art movements of the late 1970s, which were centred around a population of young Indigenous art students in Sydney. Rather, his patternings resemble designs on the insides of the traditional possum-skin cloaks of south-eastern Australia.
Campbell’s subject matter ranged from the brutal history of racism and colonialism in Australia to the mundane existence that constituted life in post-war rural New South Wales. Bright and cartoon-like, his episodic snapshots of contemporary events merge his Aboriginal world view with that of the wider Australian society (from which he was mostly excluded) in an often humorous but always insightful way. He is remembered for his wit and for his celebration of Aboriginal political events, which he saw as points of historical convergence with the outside 'white’ Australian world.
In 1987 Campbell and fellow local artists Milton Budge , David Fernando, Mary Duroux, Raymond Paul Button and Sharon Elaine Smith formed the 'Kempsey Koori Artists’ and began working together as an artists’ collective.
Campbell had a number of solo exhibitions in private galleries, and his work was included in numerous group exhibitions, significant among them being 'Aboriginal/Australian Views in Print and Poster’, Print Council Gallery, Melbourne, 1987; 'A Koori Perspective’, Artspace, 1989; 'The Continuing Tradition’, National Gallery of Australia, 1989; 'L’ete Australien’, Montpellier, 1990; 'Tagari Lia: My Family’, Glasgow, Swansea and Manchester, UK, 1990; and 'Tyerabarrbowaryaou: I Shall Never Become a White Man’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1992. He had numerous solo exhibitions from 1987 – 1997 at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. He has exhibited internationally at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London and Harvard University, USA.
He has a following in his community: in 1995 the local Kempsey school held a pageant titled 'Living the Dreaming’ that featured large Robert Campbell Jr puppets in celebration of his work.
Examples of his work are held in the National Gallery of Australia (ACT) and Museum of Contemporary Art (NSW), Artbank Collection (NSW), Campbelltown Arts Centre (NSW), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery.
