Shirley Macnamara - the life behind the art

The origins of and influences on Shirley Macnamara’s art are inextricably interwoven with her bush upbringing and extended Aboriginal family life on Western Queensland pastoral stations. This biographical essay touches on her salient life experiences including her grandmother’s bush tutorage on a remote cattle outstation which shaped her customary Indjalandji beliefs as a child, as a teenager droving mobs across the vast Barkly Tableland grasslands with her future husband, co-managing a family cattle station and becoming a grandmother and artist on Mount Guide Station in later years.