Biography

Vincent Forrester is a Luritja/Aranda man, a traditional elder of Mutitjulu who was born in Alice Springs in 1952. He grew up both in Alice Springs and Angus Downs (400km southwest of Alice Springs on the Luritja Highway). Vincent’s grandmother was born at Katajuta and his Scottish grandfather Bill Liddle was the first cattle station owner in South West Central Australia. His station became the refuge for many Indigenous people during two decades of the ‘rifle times’ (a period of 50 years where Indigenous people were routinely massacred in the area).

 

Vincent was politically active in the Land Rights and Indigenous Rights movement for many years, helping set up a number of Aboriginal organizations in Alice Springs such as the Land Council, Central Australian Aboriginal Congress (an Alice Springs Indigenous Health Service and first Indigenous health service in Australia), CAAMA and Imparja Television. As a member of the National Aboriginal Conference in the 1970s and 1980s, Vincent was an Indigenous advisor to Australian Prime Ministers Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke.

 

Today, Vincent is a highly regarded Indigenous guide and story teller and known as the ‘bush medicine’ man. He has worked in the tourism industry since its infancy (from the 1960s) and more recently at Uluru-Kata Juta National Park and the Alice Springs Desert Park. Vincent has the right to tell landscape Tjulkulpa stories orally and in his paintings and depict landscape in his paintings from Alice Springs to Kings Canyon and Uluru.