by Darren Jorgensen.

Recently the Gooniyandi artist Mervyn Street made news after succeeding in recovering unpaid wages for around eight thousand Western Australian pastoral station workers [1]. These workers were living on stations with their families, but were unpaid or underpaid because they were Aboriginal. [2] Despite the feudal structures of power under which Aboriginal people laboured, Street remembers station life fondly. ‘They liked their work,’ Street recalls, for although they ‘worked for no money... I know it was hard work, but it was good fun, it was a good life.’ [3] For three decades Street has been documenting his memories of life on cattle stations in the 1950s and 1960s, with drawings, prints and paintings of droving, mustering, branding and camping. It is remarkable that it has taken so long for him to have a solo show outside the commercial galleries, as Street’s paintings are well known among collectors and those interested in Aboriginal history. Amidst the fetish for dots and ochres, his historical scenes have been overlooked by curators. Since showing experimental paintings of cattle on shaved and etched cowhide in the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s Desert River Sea in 2019, Street has come to appear as one of the most crucial Australian artists of our time, as he brings life to an epoch of horses and cattle, saddles, and spurs. His exhibition at the Fremantle Arts Centre, Stolen Wages, offers a survey of the diversity of his practice, and includes a classic series of his prints, new paintings and an installation illustrating the beginnings of his art in illustrations on the side of a water tank.
        Born on Lousia Downs Station around 1948, Street was raised toward the end of station time. After a childhood in a bush camp, he began working after moving to the station homestead when he was 10 years old, collecting and chopping wood, and moving it around with a donkey and trailer. He went on to learn all the trades necessary to running a station, from making ropes to shoeing horses. [4] He compares what life was like then with life today:

In the 1940s and 50s people used to go mustering in the bush, these were hard days. People had to ride all day, no helicopters like today. They used to put them in the bullock paddock and count them 500-600 bullocks or more. They used to muster all these bullocks and drove them to Derby, Broome, or even Wyndham. They had no trucks in those days, long trips, droving these cattle, it would sometimes take months… No more droving now, them trucks do all the work. [5]

Street’s earliest surviving drawings were on a water tank on Louisa Downs, where he etched pictures of someone riding a bucking horse, a truck and an aeroplane. This tank is recreated in the gallery as a floating installation, coloured with the images of vegetation in the shadows of the evening. Street insisted upon its significance of the tank to the show’s curator Emilia Galatis, who brought photographs of it out from the Mangkaja Arts archive. The tank was recently destroyed, making these photographs and this installation a unique key to unlocking Street’s work, which has its origins in station time itself. In the droving days, drawings and writing etched into the black bitumen of water tanks, as well as onto rock, were known as the ‘bagman’s gazette.’ [6] The gazette included the names the men who worked on stations, naked sketches of women, portraits of drovers, and as on Street’s tank, men riding bucking horses as they broke them in from being wild and untamed. [7]
        The painting Out in the Stockcamp (2024) is one of several long tableaux produced for this exhibition. Each painting offers a glimpse of station life as it was, drawn either from his memories, from his father’s stories, or from other stories of station time. His paintings draw the eye with their incredible historical detail, Out in the Stockcamp featuring saddles and spurs hanging from branches, horseshoes and tools laid out on a blanket, and a fire being stoked for cooking the evening meal. As Galatis points out, each animal and stockman have their own personality, in the expression on their faces or their standing gait. There are other paintings in the show with the same level of detail, too, featuring rain falling onto a camp in a wide valley, a horse drawn wagon meeting a group of people still living in the bush, mustering, and branding yards.
        Many of the paintings combine two vignettes, of camps, people and horses; and of landscapes and cattle moving in parallel to the gentle horizon. Trees and cattle yards tend to unify the duplicity of Street’s compositions, and sometimes draw the gaze into dusty and rainy skies. Some of his paintings are less detailed because the dust from thousands of hooves is obscuring the stockmen traversing a bleak, orange and red emptiness. There is always a cinematic quality to Street's pictures, in which the figures of animals and working people strike singular figures in the vastness, creating a pastoral sublime.
        Horses are as much the heroes in Street’s compositions as stockmen. They stand tall amidst the trees and shrubs, a symbol of power across cultures, whether in racing horse paintings from eighteenth century England or in the ledger drawings of American Indian warrior bands of the late nineteenth century. In these Australian paintings the horse stands for something else—against the trauma of colonial dispossession and exploitation, Street's work articulates a narrative of Aboriginal empowerment through droving, mustering, yarding, and breaking in. There are two kinds of horses in Street’s compositions. One stands and faces the viewer, while another is in movement and shown from the side. In both cases they make strong figures in the landscape, often engaged in spectacular action as they loom over the cattle that they are steering through the dust. In some paintings there is no vegetation or other distraction but billowing red clouds that rise into the air. Amidst this sublime spectacle, the horses and their riders resemble thin Giacometti sculptures as they shape the void around them, dividing the composition with a mob of cattle belting through the dust. The riders are masters of these empty scenes, their horses empowering them with creation and movement.
        Street’s dynamic compositions are very different to the pacific landscapes of colonial and settler Australian artists. From the first paintings of the settlement at Sydney, artists chose the picturesque as their preferred genre, sending home images of sparsely vegetated, rolling hills. They were landscapes ideal for the grazing of sheep and cattle, and largely painted by artists who had little experience working as shepherds or stockmen.
        In addition to these paintings, and to the installation mapping out Street’s earliest drawings on a water tank, the exhibition includes paintings on cow hide and bull skull. It also includes some of the most original and beautiful images made in the history of Australian printmaking, Ward’Birra Gamba Warag-goo, They Got Water for Work was a series made for an exhibition in 1995, and documents the building of a well and drawing water to drink, with women and men carrying, digging and pouring. The simplicity of the figures, leaning toward and away from poles, tanks and wells, belies the grandeur of creating a source of water for cattle and people in the creation of station infrastructure. Street’s attention to detail here collides with a sense of essentiality, of depicting only that relationship of labourer to labour, of hand to image, in a way not possible in the all-over medium of painting.
        It has been something of a common argument, and one that Street himself has made, that his paintings of station time are inseparable from the Gooniyandi wages case. The title of the Fremantle Arts Centre show, Stolen Wages, attests to this conjuncture of art and politics, image making and activism. It is, however, also possible to argue that Street’s paintings are also deeply conservative. Their compositions, interest in details, and the pastiche method by which he constructs his mise en scenes are more like the history paintings of Tom Roberts than the pop activism of Richard Bell, for example. Amidst the high colour expressionism that typically comes from Mangkaja’s studio, Street taught himself to paint naturalistically, delineating the materiality of station life with sweeping north-west landscapes. Through Street’s work we find ourselves deep within Australian history—amidst long labouring days, and fireside in the starry dark of night, listening to stockmen singing the cattle while wrapped in a swag and waking into a dawn still sore from the previous day’s ride. This is history painting at its best, of an era that was eclipsed by the arrival of trucks, helicopters and motorbikes, and by the mass exodus of Aboriginal people from station time to community time, where Street has spent most of his life, thinking about the stockman days he left behind.

Mervyn Street: Stolen Wages is at The Fremantle Arts Centre, 8 February – 20 April, 2025.

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Footnotes:

1. Alys Marshall, “Stockman Mervyn Street and the History that Prompted a $180m Indigenous Stolen Wages Settlement,” ABC News, 11 November 2023, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-11/stockman-mervyn-street-indigenous-stolen-wages-settlement/103075386

2. Ibid.

3. Mervyn Street, June Davis and Alex Smee. The Old Stockman Days. Video. 28 October, 2013. ABC Open.https://www.abc.net.au/local/videos/2011/04/06/3184025.htm

4. Philippa Jahn and Mervyn Street, “Jawardji Mervyn Street: Writing it Down in Paint,” unpublished essay.

5. Jahn and Street.

6. W.E. Harney, Life Among the Aborigines, Robert Hale, London, 1957, p. 183.

7. See R.G. Kimber, “‘Play About’: Aboriginal Graffiti in Central Australia,” in Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000, pp. 124-125; and Darrell Lewis, 'The Bush has friends to meet him' in Alan Mayne, ed., Beyond the Black Stump: Histories of Outback Australia, Adelaide, Wakefield, 2008, pp. 291-292.

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Image credits: 
Installation photograph of 'Mervyn Street: Stolen Wages', Fremantle Arts Centre, 2025; Etching on water tank, rendered in installation (detail), Fremantle Arts Centre, 2025; Water tank on Louisa Downs, 2016. Photo Wes Hill.