Person

Bradshaw, Joseph (Joe) (1854 - 1916)

Born
1854
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Died
23 July 1916
Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
Occupation
Explorer and Pastoralist

Summary

Joseph Bradshaw was a pastoralist who, in 1891, set out to explore his lease of over one million acres along the Prince Regent River in northwest Western Australia. During this journey he discovered Aboriginal rock paintings of a distinctive style and made sketches of the paintings. The drawings, the whereabouts of which were unknown for more than 100 years, were acquired in 2013 by the Berndt Museum and the University of Western Australia. Bradshaw abandoned the lease in 1894, taking up instead leases along the Victoria River and the west side of the Gulf of Carpentaria. In 1902 and 1905 he donated to the British Museum Aboriginal artefacts from the Victoria River area.

Published resources

Books

  • Parker, A.; Bradshaw, J.; and Done, C., A Kimberley adventure: rediscovering the Bradshaw figures (Marleston, S.A.: Gecko Books, 2007), 59 pp. Details
  • Walsh, G. L., Bradshaw art of the Kimberley (Toowong, Qld: Takarakka Nowan Kas Publications, 2000), 464 pp. Details
  • Walsh, Grahame L., Bradshaws ancient paintings of north-west Australia (Carouge-Geneva, Switzerland: Edition Limitée, 1994), 285 pp. Details

Book Sections

  • Crawford, I. M., 'The relationship of Bradshaw and Wandjina art in North-West Kimberley' in Form in Indigenous art: schematisation in the art of Aboriginal Australia and prehistoric Europe, Ucko, P., ed. (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1977), pp. 357-69. Details
  • Cusack, M., 'Joseph Bradshaw - getting lost in the Kimberley and the art he found there' in Kimberley history: people, exploration and development, Clement, C., Gresham, J. and McGlasham, H., eds (Perth: Kimberley Society, 2012), pp. 127-33. Details
  • Goldhahn, Jaokim; Harper, Sam; Veth, Peter; and Ouzman, Sven, 'Histories of rock art research in Western Australia's Kimberley, 1838 - 2000' in Histories of Australian rock art research, Taçon, Paul C.; May, Sally K.; Frederick, Ursula K.; and McDonald, Jo, eds (Canberra: ANU Press, 2022), pp. 173-204. https://doi.org/10.22459/TA55.2022.10. Details
  • Welch, D. M., 'Bradshaw art of the Kimberley' in Rock art of the Kimberley, Donaldson, M. J.; and K.F. Kenneally, K. F., eds, vol. Perth (The Kimberley Society, 2007), pp. 81-100. Details

Journal Articles

  • Bradshaw, J., 'Notes on a recent trip to Prince Regent's River', Transactions of the Royal Geographical Society of Australia (Victorian Branch), 9 (2) (1892), 90-103. Details
  • Lewis, D., 'Bradshaws: the view from Arnhem Land', Australian archaeology, 44 (1) (1997), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.1997.11681585. Details
  • McNiven, I. J., 'The Bradshaw debate: lessons learned from critiquing colonialist interpretations of Gwion Gwion rock paintings of the Kimberley, Western Australia', Australian archaeology, 72 (1) (2011), 35-44, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03122417.2011.11690529. Details
  • Rainsbury, M. P., '"Mr Bradshaw's drawings": reassessing Joseph Bradsahw's sketches', Rock Art Research, 30 (2) (2013), 248-53. Details
  • Rainsbury, Michael P., 'Joseph Bradshaw's "lost" watercolours found', Rock Art Research, 31 (2) (2014), 247-8. Details

Resources

See also

  • Clement, Cathie, Gresham, Jeffrey and McGlashan, Hamish eds, Kimberley history: people, exploration and development (Perth: Kimberley Society, 2012), 227 pp. Details

Helen Cohn

EOAS ID: biogs/P005720b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 November (Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - early summer - season of butterflies)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#ballambar
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P005720b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260