Event | Perth Festival exhibitions for 2026 | Birrundudu Drawings and Gracie Greene – It’s Time

Invitation for major Perth Festival exhibitions for 2026, the monumental Birrundudu Drawings of rarely seen works from 1945 created at a remote cattle station by sixteen men, and a long overdue and first solo retrospective of paintings by Gracie Greene – It’s Time (curated by Lynley Nargoordah and Lee Kinsella ), both at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.

Please feel free to share far and wide and particularly with mob! These exhibitions have both been many years in the works, and the Berndt Museum is thrilled that many descendants, artists, and those with cultural ties to the works, will be travelling down to join what will be a massive celebration of these vast cultural inheritances from across the many desert communities these stories belong to.

There are also significant historic works on loan from the Berndt Museum in two other Perth Festival shows (ones that have some beautiful resonances with the Birrundudu drawings). Yirrkala crayon drawings from 1947 are on display at both PICA and John Curtin Gallery, the latter alongside immense pandanus ‘dhomala’ sails from Milingimbi from the 1940s.

Together these works are just a glimpse of the vast exchanges of knowledge happening through material practice in the early part of the 20^th Century – between Aboriginal people and others – amidst the rapid disruptions of colonisation – knowledges now being actively re-engaged by the communities that hold these stories today.

Birrundudu Drawings tells the story of sixteen senior Aboriginal men from different cultural and linguistic groups in the Western Desert who worked at Birrundudu Station on the border of Western Australia and the Northern Territory in 1945. Over a period of three months, the men created 810 crayon drawings on paper, commissioned by anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt.

Using this unfamiliar medium, the men documented their extensive knowledge of Country, ancestral creation, history and ceremonies of the region. These remarkable drawings demonstrate the vibrancy, depth and power of Aboriginal art, created 25 years before the emergence of the Western Desert art movement at Papunya in 1971.

Birrundudu Drawings showcases over 100 of these works on paper, none of which have been exhibited before. The re-emergence of the Birrundudu Drawings was the result of four years of collaborative research involving more than forty cultural authorities, descendants, academics, researchers, advisors, and museum workers who have helped bring the stories and cultural significance of these drawings back to life. The research team visited the communities of Balgo, Billiluna, Halls Creek, Kalkarindji (Wave Hill), Lajamanu, Yuendumu, and Mparntwe (Alice Springs) to share the collection with the descendants of the artists and others connected to its cultural significance. This project culminated in the major publication Birrundudu Drawings, released by Upswell Publishing in 2025. A large delegation of descendants and individuals with cultural ties to the drawings will travel to Perth for the exhibition, which will open with a performance in the Sunken Gardens.

Gracie Greene: It’s Time! is curated by Lynley Nargoordah, Mangkaja Arts, and Lee Kinsella, Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art at The University of Western Australia, with support from The Berndt Museum. This exhibition celebrates the prodigious lifetime of cultural and artistic contribution of Gracie Greene, a major figure in the early development of the Balgo art movement. Across a long career, Gracie remained singular, her innovative style of combining lively figuration within finely dotted topographies see stories unfold dynamically across the canvas. From early work at Balgo to a long partnership with Mangkaja Arts, her works embody a weighty legacy of sharing knowledge.