20/09/2026
Introducing Kudditji
Kudditji Kngwarreye, pronounced goo-beh-chee and known as Goob. Emily’s skin brother, family through Anmatyerre kinship and every bit as close. Custodian of the Emu Dreaming and the Men’s Business sites tied to his Country at Boundary Bore, Utopia Station, around 230km northeast of Alice Springs. A senior law man, a ceremonial leader and a master artist in his own right, someone whose story has too often been told only in relation to hers.
Before he was known as an artist, Goob lived a traditional bush upbringing, then spent years working as a stockman and a mine worker across Central Australia. As a younger man, he’d take the boys out hunting emu on his Country, teaching that knowledge as part of their initiation into men’s business.
He started painting around 1986 and for years painted the way galleries expected: fine, detailed dot infill in the fashionable style of the time. It wasn’t until 2003 that Goob let that go entirely, picking up a heavily loaded brush and sweeping it broadly across the canvas instead, chasing the actual feeling of his Country rather than a technique built to sell. What came out of that shift became his celebrated My Country series: bold, juxtaposed fields of colour, sometimes harsh, sometimes soft, always instinctive, often compared to Rothko, but unmistakably his own. Family remember him singing while he worked, the same as Emily did, putting the stories of the land, the ancestors and Country straight into the paint as he moved across it.
By 2006 he was named one of Australia’s top 50 most collectible artists and his work now sits in major collections around the world. He kept painting until 2015 and passed in January 2017, but what he left behind hasn’t stopped speaking.
This is exactly why OUR COUNTRY exists: to put brother and sister side by side, two of the strongest voices Utopia ever produced, telling the same Country from two completely different hands.
📸 Image provided by DACOU Gallery.
View the full OUR COUNTRY collection online now, link in bio.
