Stewart Hoosan

Stewart was born in 1951 at Doomadgee Mission in the Gulf of Carpenteria. He is a Garrwa man on his mother side. He grew up on Calvert Hills Station with his grandfather Yarriyarri. At nine years of age he went to work in stock camps and spent time droving throughout Queensland and the Northern Territory. In his late teens he worked on a cattle station in Western Australia and moved back to Queensland four years later for further work on cattle stations. He settled in Borroloola in 1972 after marrying Yanyuwa/Garrwa woman Nancy McDinny.  He worked on surrounding cattle stations Mallapunyah and Green Back before starting his own cattle business at Wandangula, Police Lagoon, in 1979. He currently lives at the nearby outstation, Sandridge, with Nancy.

Stewart started painting in early the 2000s after he stopped cattle work. He started painting landscapes from the Calvert Hills and Robinson regions, later developing an interest in painting social-history stories. His paintings speak to a number of important personal experiences and influences, including cattle droving and stories of family members who were Aboriginal resistance fighters during the period of colonisation in the Gulf – ‘The Frontier Wars’.