Mervyn Bishop (b. 1945), a Murri photographer, began a cadetship with the Sydney Morning Herald in 1963. In 1971 he was voted News Photographer of the Year, but three years later he began work at the new Department of Aboriginal Affairs, travelling the country to document Aboriginal social history. It was in this role that he took his iconic 1975 photograph of then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pouring a handful of earth into the hand of Gurindji Elder and traditional land owner, Vincent Lingiari. In 1979 he returned to work at the Herald. From 1986 he has worked as a freelance photographer and lecturer. His retrospective exhibition, In Dreams: Mervyn Bishop, Thirty Years of Photography 1960–1990, initially curated by Tracy Moffatt, toured for a decade. He worked as a stills photographer on Phil Noyce’s film Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), and was awarded the Australia Council’s Red Ochre Award in December 2000. A major retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2017, Mervyn Bishop, combined his photojournalism and art works with the family photographs he took around Brewarrina in north-west New South Wales as a young man and on return visits. The exhibition later toured around Australia.
