Biddee Baadjo Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1938 -

Biddee Baadjo, a senior Wangkatjungka woman, was born around 1938, near Purrpurn waterhole, located in her ancestral country in the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia. When she was still a baby, she was snatched by an eagle from a coolamon, where she had been left sleeping by her mother when the family was out hunting. Her mother saw the eagle swoop away with the child, and chased after it. The eagle dropped Biddee into the spinifex grass, and her mother found her there crying.

During the 1940s Biddee Baadjo’s family joined the exodus of Wangkatjungka people who left the desert and travelled north towards the cattle station country of the Fitzroy Valley region. Aboriginal people followed the Canning Stock Route towards Bililuna, or travelled north west following a trail of creek beds and waterholes, that headed towards Fitzroy Crossing.

Biddee Baadjo has lived and worked at Wangkatjungka Community, located adjacent to Christmas Creek station, between Halls Creek and Fitzroy Crossing. Aboriginal artists began painting in the community in 1994. Biddee lived there with her husband, fellow painter Luurn Willie Kew. Biddee Baadjo’s paintings relocate the significant waterholes and hunting areas that have been the province of her family for countless generations.