Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (born July 1945) is an Australian news and documentary photographer. Joining "The Sydney Morning Herald" as a cadet in 1962 or 1963, he was the first Aboriginal Australian to work on a metropolitan daily newspaper and one of the first to become a professional photographer. In 1971, four years after completing his cadetship, he was named Australian Press Photographer of the Year. He has continued to work as a photographer and lecturer.
Early life.
Bishop, a Murri man, was born in Brewarrina in north-west New South Wales. His father, "Minty" Bishop, had been a soldier and shearer, and was himself born to an Aboriginal mother and a Punjabi Indian father. In 1950, "Minty" gained an "official exemption certificate which permitted 'more advanced' Aborigines to live apart from mission blackfellas in post-war Australia". This enabled the family to live among "ordinary" people in Brewarrina. The catch to this certificate was that the exempt Aborigines were expected to "sever their ties with their old culture".
By high school he had started "chronicling the family with a camera – first his mother's Kodak and, then a 35mm Japanese camera he bought for £15". He moved to Dubbo when he was 14 to finish his high school at the Dubbo High School.
His wife, Elizabeth, died of cancer in 1991, and he was left to care for their teenage son, Tim, and six-year-old daughter, Rosemary.
Career.
He began his career as a cadet photographer with "The Sydney Morning Herald" in 1962, the first Aboriginal photographer hired by the paper. During four years of his cadetship, he completed a Photography Certificate Course at Sydney Technical College. In 2004, he remained the only indigenous photographer to have been employed by the paper.
He won the Nikon-Walkley Australian Press Photographer of the Year in 1971 with "Life and Death Dash" (1971).
From 1974 to 1980, he worked as the Department of Aboriginal Affairs staff photographer. Some of his most enduring work came from this period, as he visited indigenous communities and documented "the first flush of an idealistic era when land rights, equal wages and government-funded aid seemed to presage a new dawn for Aboriginal Australians".
It was during this time, in 1975, that he shot the iconic photograph of Gough Whitlam pouring soil into the hand of Gurindji traditional owner, Vincent Lingiari, at the handover of the deeds to Gurindji country at Wattie Creek. This photograph has been seen as capturing "the symbolic birth of landrights".
He returned to the "Herald" in 1979, before becoming a freelance photographer in 1986, working for such agencies as the National Geographic Society.
Bishop completed further studies and lectured in photography at Tranby Aboriginal College, the Eora College and at the Tin Sheds Gallery at the University of Sydney.
In 1991 he had his first solo exhibition, "In Dreams: Mervyn, Thirty Years of Photography 1960 to 1990", at the Australian Centre for Photography. Originally curated by Tracey Moffatt, it went on to tour for over 10 years. A book titled "In Dreams" was published to accompany the exhibition.
He produced a one-man performance piece, "Flash Blak", in the vein of a William Yang slide show to music and written and directed by Yang, for the 2004 Message Sticks Festival at the Sydney Opera House. His aim in the show was to delve "into his family's history to illuminate a wider story about Aboriginal life in the latter half of the 20th century". He also worked as a stills photographer on Phillip Noyce's "Rabbit-Proof Fence".
Bishop's work was included in Candid Camera: Australian Photography 1950s–1970s at the Art Gallery of South Australia (May to August 2010), a group retrospective of social documentary photography which also featured the work of key Australian photographers Max Dupain, David Moore, Jeff Carter, Robert McFarlane, Rennie Ellis, Carol Jerrems and Roger Scott. A number of Bishop's photographs are held in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Australia.
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