Wandjina - Charlie Numbulmoore

Charlie Numbulmoore lived for many years on Gibb River Station in the Central Kimberley where anthropologist Ian Crawford first recorded him repainting Wandjina figures in a Mamadai cave during the 1960s. The few biographical details of Numbulmoore’s life that exist are traced solely through his encounters with those anthropologists who collected his work. Following Crawford’s initial encounter, Helen Groger-Wurm collected the artist’s work on behalf of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in 1970, the same year that collector and grazier Tom McCourt purchased a number of paintings on bark, plywood, and cardboard. In his journal, McCourt recalled Numbulmoore as 'the last of the old people here… who has that certain something that impresses you… when I was in Charlie's camp, I bought several paintings he had in his hut from him… although his work is childlike, it has the primitive look of paintings seen under the rock hangings out in the bush' (cited in Sotheby’s 2003: 10).