Born around 1932, on the Napperby cattle station to the north of
Alice Springs, Clifford Possum grew up there and also at the aboriginal
settlement at Jay Creek. He began wood-carving and was stimulated
by meeting the members of the Hermansburg watercolour painting group,
including Albert Namatjira, the founder. This gave him the freedom
to paint realistic scenes on his carved works. But by the l970s,
when living at Papunya where he met Geoffrey Bardon, the art teacher
who worked there he was encouraged to take up painting on canvas.
His work carefully blended the traditional imagery of aboriginal
culture with those traces of European culture, which he had encountered.
Together with his ‘brother’, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri (who
predeceased him in 1984) he embarked on a superb series of major
scale paintings which ‘mapped’ his country’s sacred
sites for posterity. Indeed these works have become the masterpieces
of the Aboriginal culture. Apart from an increasingly important
series of exhibitions in his native land, Clifford Possum was given
a retrospective exhibition in 1988 at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
He may not have been completely respectful of the use of a Clifford
Possum painting for one of the 747 tail fins decorated during British
Airways’ ‘ethnic’ period. In l997, but took it in
good heart. He knew before his death in June this year that he had
been appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia, but had sadly
died before its investiture by the Administrator of the Northern
Territory, passing quietly into a coma at Alice Springs.
