BOOK LAUNCH | All my Country: The Batchelor Institute Art Collection

Join the editors Dr Ngatkali Wendy Ludwig and Maurice O'Riordan to celebrate the release of All My Country: The Batchelor Institute Art Collection.

All my Country is the first substantive book on the little-known Batchelor Institute (BIITE) Art Collection, a unique cultural and artistic resource which has developed over the decades-long life of the Institute.

The BIITE Art Collection comprises around 1000 artworks primarily by Indigenous artists from the Top End but also including the work of Indigenous Australian artists more broadly, some non-Indigenous artists with BIITE affiliations and from Papua New Guinea. The Collection began as a place- making initiative to make the campus more familiar to BIITE students, eventually becoming a more formalised entity with an advisory committee and curatorial roles, and supported by an artist-residency program.

The title All my Country comes from the book’s editor-in-chief Dr Ngatkali Wendy Ludwig, a Kungarakan and Gurindji woman from Darwin and committed lifelong advocate for First Nations Education and Training and First Nations Arts. “The BIITE Art Collection, in all its wonderful diversity”, says Ludwig, “essentially celebrates and affirms the artists’ connections to and longing for Country.”

All my Country aims to bring the Collection to a wider audience and scholarly appreciation through the commissioning of essays by Gary Lee, Chips Mackinolty, Pat Torres, Joanna Barrkman and Maurice O’Riordan, with O’Riordan also supporting Ngatkali as the book’s editor. Significantly, the book includes a catalogue of the entire Collection to date along with a Collection Highlights section on a range of themes including: ‘More than mermaids’, ‘Bush Toys’ and ‘Celebrating Art, Language and Medicine at Utopia’.

All my Country is published to commemorate BIITE’s 50th anniversary in 2024. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.