Art Ew - National Gallery of Australia

new acquisition Australian Prints and Drawings
Roy Kennedy
Wiradjuri people
I’m never alone 2005
etching, printed in black ink
from one plate
platemark 25.0 x 33.0 cm
National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra
62 national gallery of australia
Roy Kennedy I’m never alone
Wiradjuri artist Roy Kennedy was born in the early 1930s
in Griffith in central New South Wales. Kennedy spent
his childhood on a government-run mission located on
the banks of the Murrumbidgee River, downstream from
Narrandera and Hay. As a young man he worked on farms in
the district and later moved to Sydney. In 1995 he enrolled
at the Eora Centre for Aboriginal Studies at the Sydney
Institute of Technology where he pursued his interest in
printmaking. He was student and artist of the year at Eora in
1999, and won a NAIDOC Week award that same year.
Kennedy’s etchings provide a graphic documentation
of his memories of the Aboriginal mission environment.
Through his sure placement of key elements – the church,
the police station, his own mission hut and recreation
areas – a vivid and very personal picture emerges of how
people lived on the mission during the Depression. Of
I’m never alone he writes ‘all my lovely memories of my
mission are always there. Some are sad times and some are
good memories’. His family had been moved from nearby
stations to the mission many years before and the concept
of relocation is a constant theme in his art. Of Mission boy
dreams Kennedy recalls ‘from far back as I can remember
I’ve always wondered when we would have our own home
and years on I’m still wondering’.
The mission on which Kennedy spent his youth was
closed in 1941. His graphic etchings provide us with a
historically acute and sensitive picture of mission life
during this period.
Mary-Lou Nugent
Curatorial Assistant, Australia Prints and Drawings