What inspired Bronwyn? The need to stop racism ‘in its dirty little tracks’

When Dr Bronwyn Bancroft sat the Higher School Certificate, she created a major work for the HSC art subject depicting a sunrise and a sunset with two women joined in the pubic area.

Exam markers said it was about lesbianism and struck it from public show. “It wasn’t about that at all,” Bancroft says. “It was just an artwork about the sunrise and sunset.”

It was a formative first lesson in who controlled the narrative in the art world and, Bancroft says, increasingly it’s not the artist.

Bancroft wears a hat and long Heidi-style pigtails draped over her shoulders as she assists with the installation of the 100 or so artworks that form part of her major retrospective, stretching back five decades. The exhibition covers expansive ground from early art school projects rephotographing her grandfather’s box brownie pictures, through to public installations as well as book illustrations, 50 or so in 33 years.

“I’m the last of seven kids, I’ve never wanted to be boxed in,” Bancroft says. “For me the journey in art is about freedom and the right to be able to explore everything, most particularly family and Country; they are the most important things to me. I don’t have a particular style, I don’t want to do the same thing over and over and over again because people like it.”

The Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative she helped found alongside Tracey Moffatt and Fiona Foley in 1987 is opening Bancroft’s I am Gurgun on Friday at its Leichhardt base.

The curator, Kyra Kum-Sing, describes Bancroft as one of the hardest working female artists she knows, a prolific groundbreaking artist and indefatigable Indigenous activist who helped drag the co-op out of its financial crisis in 2009 and has since guided it to stability, all the while mentoring young Indigenous artists. Gurgun in Bundjalung language means kookaburra, Bancroft’s totem.

Bancroft was born in Tenterfield in NSW, her father Bill, a Bundjalung man, her mother Dorothy of Scottish and Polish background. From an early age, she was never without a pencil, and studied high school art by correspondence. Seeing her father marginalised as a black man inspired her to challenge inequality and “halt racism in its dirty little tracks”.

“Racism is just about someone thinking they are better than someone else and as part of humanity we are not better than anyone else, and we should always remember that,” Bancroft says.

Her father told her she would need to work three times harder to succeed in a white man’s world. Once questioned about her Aboriginality at a public lecture at the University of NSW, she turned it into a 1991 work, You Don’t Even Look Aboriginal, acquired by the Art Gallery of NSW.

“Aboriginal art is that done by an Aboriginal person, and it can be anything we want it to be,” she says.

Among Bancroft’s earliest artistic heroes were Wassily Kandinsky, Georgia O’Keeffe and a former director of the Art Gallery of NSW, painter and photographer, Hal Missingham.

Her son Jack Manning Bancroft likens his mother to Australia’s Wassily Kandinsky, the pioneering Russian abstractionist who experimented with form and colour.

“She hasn’t played political and media games,” he says in a loving testimonial to his mother, written for the show’s catalogue. “She’s given her time to Boomalli again and again because she got a chance that my grandfather Bill and our ancestors didn’t – a fragile chance that she fought tooth and nail for, and opened a tiny little crack and kicked the door open.”

Daughter Ella similarly describes her mother as a wild woman at heart, wearing a “velvet cloak of charisma”, while holding aloft her paintbrush as a “protesting picket”. A former board member for the National Gallery of Australia, Bancroft sits on Create NSW’s First Nations advisory board as well as acting as Boomalli’s chief strategist.

But, out of art school, Bancroft struggled to get her work, full of vibrant colour and motifs, noticed by the mainstream art world, which considered tribal art and dot painting to be the defining style of Indigenous art.

In the 1980s, she began dabbling in fashion design, upcycling opportunity shop purchases. Her son was barely six weeks old when she opened a shop in Rozelle called Designer Aboriginals, creating hand-painted items including T-shirts and earrings for sale. She estimates she produced 10,000 miniature works in the six years the shop operated, as well as silk screen printed fabrics for shop clothing.

It led to a fashion parade of Aboriginal designers at the Printemps luxury department store in Paris in which she was one of three designers, among the first Aboriginal Australians, to exhibit their collections in the French capital.

A hand-painted opera cape, titled Cycle of Life, from that runway show was acquired by the Powerhouse Museum in 1994, and it’s on show with five garments from that collection, the artist’s favourite being a land rights bubble skirt in which she appropriated English paisley.

Bancroft lent her vibrant style with its bold slashes of colour to public art installations and public information campaigns (everything from AIDS to tobacco smoking). From Central Station to local council pools, chances are you’ve bumped into one of her murals.

She now lives on seven hectares of rainforest on Bundjalung country in northern NSW and is working towards two regional art shows in 2026 and 2028.

It’s a surprise, even to Bancroft, that the Art Gallery of NSW appears to be leaving it to regional art galleries to mount major shows of established NSW artists and to acquire their work.

Aboriginal art has a growing international reputation. “Some artists want to run towards that. I want to run away from that, but I do believe the international focus is good for us back here. Richard Bell is a great signpost for everybody else,” Bancroft said.

I am Gurgun runs until January 31, 2026.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.