Patrick Dodson

Patrick Dodson (b. 1948), senator for Western Australia, is a Yawuru man who was born in Broome but spent most of his childhood in the Northern Territory. Orphaned in 1960, in 1961 he was sent (with his brother, Mick) to Monivae College in Victoria. In 1975 he became Australia’s first Aboriginal Catholic priest, but left the priesthood in the early 1980s. As director of the Central Land Council, he was integral to negotiations for the return of the Uluru Kata-Tjuta National Park to traditional owners in 1985. In 1989, he was a commissioner of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, and in 1991 he became the first chairperson of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. From 2010 to 2012, Dodson co-chaired the expert panel on the constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. He was the inaugural director of the Indigenous Policy, Dialogue and Research Unit at the University of New South Wales and is the first Indigenous Australian to be appointed to the council of the Australian National University.

Zhou Xiaoping met Dodson in 2002 at the funeral for artist Jimmy Pike, whose widow helped arrange a portrait sitting. 'We spent half the day together and I did a number of sketches of him, painting with Chinese ink and brushes on large rice paper,' Zhou says. Back in Melbourne, he mounted the painting on canvas and later added a layer of acrylic and oil paint.

Gift of the Lingiari Foundation 2015
© Zhou Xiaoping/Copyright Agency, 2024