Billy Benn: Before I Go Home

“I go back with my spirit and see the land before man”

Billy Benn (1943-2012), was an Alyawarr man born in Harts Range, around 200km northeast of Mparntwe (Alice Springs). His art is steeped in deep personal, cultural, and geological histories sharing landscapes that defy simple categorisation, a textured resistance to the boxes into which contemporary Indigenous art is so often placed. For a long time, Benn’s works existed in obscurity, on the walls of the Bindi where he worked as a gardener, metalworker and woodworker. However, when people started to take notice of these charming landscapes there was an attempt to categorise the works as ‘Outsider’ or ‘Naïve’ art. However, his unique style—at once expressive and restrained—bears traces of an early encounter with Chinese calligraphy, taught to him by the Chinese wife of a mica miner, who he met when working on the mines before the close of industry in the 60s. The influence emerges in the elegant, slanted brushstrokes that gesture toward the folds and peaks of escarpments. These gestures carry more than formal beauty: they inscribe the fraught histories embedded in Country.

Harts Range, once the centre of Australia’s mica mining industry, is a place marked by the extractive violence of settler capitalism and ongoing colonial intrusion. In Benn’s hands, even the softest mark carries the weight of resistance. The mining industry—a threat to his homelands—both imperils and catalyses his work. There is grief in Benn’s palette—muddied ochres and dusky greens that seem to summon what teeters on the edge of loss. And yet, with each rasping stroke, something is brought back into being.

Harts Range is also a place fraught with painful personal memories for Benn, it was here that during his first mental health episode he shot his uncle, followed by his escape into the wilds of Mt. Brady and dramatic final surrender. He was jailed and then eventually committed to the Hillcrest institution in Adelaide. His brush moves through these tensions, mapping a vexed yet vital relationship between art, Country, and survival.

In Benn’s paintings, the landscape breathes. The wind’s passage traces the ridgelines and stirs the gum leaves. Its presence is geological and ancient—felt before we arrive, and long after we leave. Benn’s strokes move with this rhythm, marking time that cannot be contained. In this way, even in the smallest of canvases, we are immediately placed into the insurmountable feeling of being within this Central Australian landscape, reminded of our smallness in the world and surrendering to the all-encompassing beauty that envelopes us.

Benn’s time as a stockman on cattle stations that blanket his country has created a key layer in his visual knowledge of landscape. “Work on cattle stations meant that local people experienced a slower, more drawn-out integration into the settler world than was the case for many groups in this region”. “Aboriginal men earned status and respect in both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal worlds.” Benn’s love for Country also recalls a fleeting childhood encounter with Albert Namatjira. In both artists’ work, landscape is not merely observed—it is felt, known, embodied. Each painting carries a persistence, a spirit that exceeds any fixed notion of land or style. “He seized upon Namatjira’s example to make paintings his personal redemption as an Aboriginal man.”

It is important to note that Benn’s creative journey was shaped in part through Bindi Enterprises, where he began painting on off-cuts of timber and metal in the 1990s, following his diagnosis of schizophrenia. Benn’s tenacity inspired the establishment of the Bindi Mwerre Anthurre Artists studio, a cooperative of artists working with a disability, and the fostering of the talents of his colleagues, including Adrian Robertson, Aileen Oliver, Seth Namatjira and many more. “Although it was not the cultural norm for an Arrernte man and a Warlpiri man to co-habit, Billy enthusiastically took up the opportunity to share his house with Adrian Robertson” when offered the opportunity at the Hetti Perkins Nursing Home. “Painting at Bindi, the two men continued to inspire each other in their work for years to come.” As Sandra Brown, former arts support worker for Billy Benn notes “He would often enter the studio in the morning, with wired eyes and a mischievous chuckle, clapping his hands and bursting with energy and excitement, and a myriad of jumbled thoughts that played over and over in his mind and could not wait to be aired… thoughts of God, who might stand in judgement of him, of the cowboy John Wayne, who symbolised family and freedom on the land, and of his intense distrust of police, who, decades earlier, had taken these very things from him…Typically, at the time that I worked with Billy, he used a limited colour palette of cadmium red, yellow, and orange… ultramarine, and cerulean blue… and magenta, and white. Rather than mixing colours on a palette, he would scoop paint from the pots with his brush and skilfully mix it on his canvas.”

In the first show of works since his passing Before I go home speaks to Benn’s lifelong pull towards the Country from which he was separated. His paintings trace the journey back, transforming memory, grief, and survival into landscapes where he could stand, once more, on the ground that made him. “It had been Billy’s intention and desire to paint all of his country, including every one of the hills and valleys and waterholes… before he could stop painting… before he could rest… and before he could return home to his country. I believe that this also meant before he could pass from this life to the next. I don’t know if Billy Benn achieved his goal, but I know that he left behind a vast catalogue of work and an incredible legacy… for his family… for the Harts Range Community… and for lovers of art, whether aboriginal or non-aboriginal… and that this legacy will hold its own in any gallery for years to come.”

Text taken from the Catalogue Essay & speech by Sandra Brown.

Exhibition Catalogue (PDF)