Helen Read Director

A Profile by Donald Williams Global Art Projects Melbourne

ART

Helen Read enjoys a sincere and genuine interest in spreading knowledge and understanding of Australia’s Indigenous peoples; cultures and life through the preservation, promotion and dissemination of their art.

So how did a passionate artist and registered nurse from the United Kingdom become one of several important people to promote the art and culture of the Indigenous artist of northern and central Australia to the rest of the world?

Helen trained as a painter at the Royal West of England Academy in the early 1970‘s where her love of art history, painting, colour and form became an important foundation for her later ventures decades later in Australia. The subsequent qualifications gave Helen the academic requirements necessary to study nursing, another of her passions which again was critical in the direction of her impending career.

NURSING

Helen studied nursing at the Frenchay District School of Nursing in Bristol, England, becoming a State Registered Nurse in 1976. AFter graduation, she travelled to join her cousin, a Doctor of tropical medicine in West African Nigeria - near the border of secessionist Biafra. War had torn the country apart creating increased significant social dislocation where adults and children were dying of malnutrition and other diseases.

Helen migrated to her Mother’s country Australia in 1978 to gain her midwifery certificate. With her earlier registration and new qualifications, she took off to work in north eastern Victoria. Traveling between various bush hospitals Helen worked in emergency, midwifery, theater and general nursing departments. But this was only part time work, the remainder of her week was spent flying.

FLYING

Flying has been just as important in Helen’s life as her love of art, people and nursing. Bush pilot since 1984 she gained her solo pilot’s license in the UK before arriving in Australia, and whilst working as a bush nurse studied the course of required subjects for her commercial and airline pilot’s license. Simultaneously, she was getting her hours up by taking parachutists up in the air, offering joy flights for tourists and flying camera crews on aerial surveys.

After traveling to Perth in 1983 Helen became the first recipient of the Robin Miller Dicks Memorial Foundation Scholarship - part of the Royal Flying Doctor Service. The funds from this supported and enabled Helen to complete her commercial certificate. The daughter of Mary Durack, Robin Miller Dicks (1940-1975) too was a pioneering flying nurse who flew across Kimberly giving Aboriginal children the Sabin (polio) vaccine in sugar lumps. She became affectionately known as the ‘Sugarbird Lady’.

WALUNGURRU (KINTORE)

In 1985 Helen arrived at Walungurru to work as a nursing sister and pilot for the newly established Pintupi Homelands Health Service. She had heard about a remote area employment opportunity there through a series of chance meeting and circumstances.

I was being steered and pulled toward central Australia by Pintupi people and other friends who were establishing the fledgling communities of Walungurru and Kiiwrrkurra.

The air born element of Helen’s work has enabled her to observe with amazement vast areas of the Australian desert and appreciate the depth and breadth of the country. Flying from clinic to clinic she was able to survey the fleeting colours, diversity and changing geography of the landscape below en route, as she explains:

Cheerful, sometime sombre, local flight companions would point out physical and non-physical landscapes, so inseparable to existence, as we flew between clinics - sometimes detouring over country soul wrenchingly unseen in years. I was oriented flying low over vast tracts of rhythmic country by looking, looking, being taught to see. This was before GPS, before the World Aeronautical Charts became accurate.

The world of Indigenous health with it’s complex political and social issues were not new to Helen, but she was horrified at what she saw. In this remote community 600 kilometers west of Alice Springs, well after the MacDonnell Ranges peter out, children were dying of malnutrition and sickness. Vaccination programs were way behind the rest of the country, or missed entirely. Trauma and disease were rampant. The conditions in this part of Australia were much worse than she had experienced in Nigeria, and what was equally alarming to Helen was that most Australians had no idea!

Helen’s training and knowledge of art was to be a great foundation for the artwork she was going to encounter when confronted with the diversity and complex nature of Pintupi paintings. It was also going to be a good starting point to educate people with means and influence to help improve conditions. Not just about the stories in these dynamic works of art but also, by flying people out, the cultural and social issues encountered by Indigenous Australians where the artists live and work.

Helen’s encyclopedic understanding of art history and art practice in many ways underpins the professional manner in which she works with the Indigenous artists and clients alike, and further more goes a long way in explaining her ‘good eye’ and sound judgement.

Helen formalised her interest in the promotion of Aboriginal art and culture with the establishment of two companies; Didgeri Air Art Tours (DAAT) and Palya Art.

HELEN READ COLLECTION

Over more than two and a half decades Helen has brought together three significant touring exhibitions of art, two of which have at different stages traveled to NSW, Victorian and South Australian Regional Galleries and Universities. The exhibition A Thousand Journeys toured from 1997 - 2000 and is now housed at the Flinders University Art Museum where it remains as an important resource for Students. More recently Luminous: Contemporary Art from the Australian Desert’, traveled from 2005 to 2008. Milikapiti - artworks from Melville Island - is the next exhibition currently under development.

Artworks in the Collection are used by relevant Institutions for research and education. Most of the artworks are held at Flinders University Art Museum and can be seen by request if not currently on exhibit.