Kerrie Lester Burnum Burnum

Born at Wallaga Lake in southern New South Wales, Woiworrung and Yorta Yorta activist, storyteller and author Burnum Burnum (1936-1997) spent his childhood in mission homes as one of Australia’s Stolen Generation. He became a celebrated athlete, later studying law at the University of Tasmania, and joined the Bahá’í faith. In 1976 he changed his name from Harry Penrith to Burnum Burnum (great warrior), in honour of his great-grandfather, artist Tommy McRae, who created detailed pen and ink drawings of his life experiences in the late 1800s.

On 26 January 1988, in an act of defiance, Burnum Burnum planted the Aboriginal flag on the White Cliffs of Dover in England, symbolically invading Great Britain and declaring in irony, ‘We wish no harm to [England’s] natives’. He further pledged not to poison British waterholes, ‘pickle and preserve the heads […] of your people […] sterilise your women, nor to separate your children from their families’. At the time this portrait was painted, Burnum Burnum was advocating for changes to the Australian Constitution, to allow for seven additional Senate seats to represent Aboriginal people from each state and territory.

This portrait of Burnum Burnum by Kerrie Lester – one of her distinctive stitched canvases – is now in the Macquarie University Art Collection, Sydney.