Donald Butcher is both a Kija and Jaru man. Growing up in Halls Creek in the 1960s, he recalls: ‘it was pretty scrubby… we had plenty of people from different tribes and we got on well when I was young’.

Like many others of his generation, Donald finished school and worked in a stockyard and as a station hand. ‘I grew up mostly doing work on the stock yard… on the station… In this town, most of the old people, it was the only life we knew when we left school,’

Donald likes to paint the country that has always been his life - sometimes the way it was back in the old days and sometimes as it has been during his life.