Untitled | SP-1133

DOB: c. 1933 – 2013

Language: Mara

Region: Ngukurr Roper River N.T.




Gertie Huddleston was born in the Roper River area in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Territory. As a young girl she and her sisters grew up in the Mission community and attended the mission school. Gertie’s childhood was heavily influenced by the local missionaries, the girls learned embroidery and sewing and were taught to grow vegetables and flowers.

Gertie Huddleston’s landscapes developed out of the Ngukurr art movement that was founded in the 1980’s. She soon developed her own distinctive way of painting the land; crowded with plant and animal life and executed with exquisite embroidery-like detail.

“I always loved to paint. When I was small in school, I used to sit down draw with crayon or chalk might be even with pencil, black pencil. About three or four, might be three, (years ago) I started painting at Ngukurr. I went and bought myself a canvas, paint and brush and started. I love painting. I’m trying to encourage my grandkids too to paint you know. When I was here at Roper, I get little pieces of paper or something for them.”

Her paintings resemble the gardens that Gertie and the girls tended in the mission with a blend of traditional stories of landscape, fauna and flora. Gerti’s paintings express her extensive knowledge of the environment and love of her ancestral country between the Limmin and Rose Rivers.

“I think in my mind mostly and sometime I’ve seen those birds and tree somewhere so I put them in the picture, painting. Like sometime I travel by air, by airplane, looking always, watching down and you see those kinds of things. I’ve seen a lot, everywhere I went. It is good to put something that you saw eh, in your painting.” (Gertie Huddleston, 1998)

Gerties work is sought after and has been collected and exhibited worldwide.