“Paddy Bedford was born at a cattle station southeast of Warmun in the East Kimberly region of Western Australia. In the late nineteenth century, the colonising pastoralists who came to this area named it Bedford Downs, which became central in the violent world into which the artist was born. Two years before his birth, a massacre occurred here that shadowed the ancestral spirit of these traditional lands. A group of Gija people – family members of the yet to be born Paddy Bedford – had killed a bullock, and the blood that was subsequently shed stained the land and memory of the survivors. This dark past was kept alive through the artist’s name, given to him by the brutal station manager who had ordered the mass killing of his relations, and through the subject of his art. Bedford’s work hangs in the balance of two worlds. He paints places of great significance in Gija Dreaming narratives that address and transcend the brutalities of colonial history.” (Vanessa Merlino and Luke Scholes, 60 over 50: 60 Paintings from 50 Years of Australian First Nations Art, 2023, p. 16)

“Bemberrawoonany, or Brumby Spring, is near old Greenvale Station, now part of Bow River Station near the northern part of Bedford Downs. It is a place where marranyji the dingo travelled when he was a man in dreamtime. As he travelled he urinated, leaving water places that are now spiritually dangerous. After the arrival of Europeans it was for some time the gathering place for many brumies.” (Linda Michael, Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 132)