Biddee Baadjo - Piyurr

Paintings of Great Sandy Desert homelands painted by Biddee Baadjo at her Kimberley community at Wangkatjungka between 2002 and 2010.

Biddee Baadjo was born around 1938 near Purrpurn, in the Great Sandy Desert near Purntujarpa or Jupiter Well. Baadjo recounts that when she was still a baby she was snatched by an eagle. All the women used to carry their babies in coolamons. Baadjo had been left with others in the spinifex, while her parents were hunting. Her mother saw the eagle take Biddee and ran after it.  Her grandfather took a stone and hit the eagle. He was a great witch doctor/medicine man. He had the use of only one hand, but his aim was true. The eagle dropped the baby down in the spinifex country, where her mother found her crying, and Baadjo still bears the scars on her body from the eagle’s claws.

When the Canning Stock Route was being established, Baadjo and other Kukaja, Wangkatjungka and Walmajarri people moved from their country in the desert to the Fitzroy Valley area, where most found work on cattle stations. Baadjo first lived at the Old Mission at Balgo. Then Baadjo and her second husband Luurn Willie Kew moved from Gogo Station to the Wangkatjungka Community where they lived for several decades. Both became established artists whose work is in major national collections.