Desert Icons, The Peter Speed Collection

7 August - 21 August 2025

Peter Speed quietly assembled a private collection featuring some of the most important practitioners of Art in Australian history. His passion was driven by deep respect, cultural insight, and personal devotion. Formed between the 1990s and early 2000s, his collection honours legends like Kngwarreye, Thomas, and McKenzie. This exhibition reveals his extraordinary legacy—a tribute to story, spirit, and steadfast belief in Aboriginal voices.
 

About The Peter Speed Collection Peter Speed’s passion for Australian Indigenous art burned steadily, resulting in a private collection of over 120 works, carefully assembled between the late 1990s and early 2000s. With a discerning eye and a deep respect for culture, Peter sought out some of the most important voices in Australian art history - artists whose reputations have only grown in stature since the time he first acquired their work. These are the works we present in this collection. Though unassuming in manner, Peter possessed a fierce dedication to the artists and stories of the Central and Western Desert regions. His collection, now being revealed in full for the first time, offers a rare and insightful window into the evolution of contemporary Aboriginal art during a period of remarkable artistic expression. Peter’s collecting journey was shaped not only by passion but also by personal loss. His beloved mother tragically perished in the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires at Mount Macedon. It was from her estate that Peter bolstered the means to pursue his interest in art collecting - an act that, in retrospect, became both a tribute and a lifelong pursuit of meaning through beauty, culture, and connection. Central to Peter’s collection are works by the great luminaries of Indigenous Australian art: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, widely regarded as one of Australia's most important artists of the 20th century, whose deeply expressive and abstracted visions of her country, Alhalkere, broke new ground in contemporary art. Her energetic brushwork and spiritual depth captivated Peter early on. Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, a founding member of the Papunya Tula Artists cooperative and one of the key figures in the Western Desert art movement. His bold, geometric depictions of Tjukurrpa (Dreaming) stories reflect a sacred connection to land and Law. Queenie McKenzie, the first Gija woman permitted to paint her traditional stories, whose works blend powerful narrative content with painterly grace. A cultural matriarch, Queenie’s paintings preserve Gija history, massacres, women’s stories, and language working primarily in natural ochres found in the East Kimberley region. Rover Thomas, the driving force behind the East Kimberley painting movement, known for his ochre-toned maps of country layered with cultural, political and spiritual meaning. His work gained national and international recognition, including a landmark exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1990. Minnie Pwerle, whose gestural, spontaneous paintings burst with colour and life, capturing the traditions of Awelye (women’s ceremony) and the sacred stories of her ancestral lands. Peter was drawn to her raw energy and unapologetic individuality. Peter was not a passive collector. He immersed himself in the lives and stories behind the art. His library of Indigenous art books, auction catalogues, and gallery brochures is dense with handwritten annotations—notes on exhibitions, artists' birthplaces, recurring motifs, and, most tellingly, the Dreamings behind each canvas.  For Peter, the story was everything. In the margin of one book, he wrote:
“The paintings must have a story in it, to be a good painting. All early boards (1971, 1972) all had a story in the paintings. Then it all stopped. Not to reveal their culture.” His annotated copy of Aboriginal Artists of the Western Desert: A Biographical Dictionary by Vivien Johnson (1974) remains a precious artifact in itself—a collector’s diary of reverence and research. Though Peter lived a quiet life in his Caulfield South home, often in the company of his beloved cats - he stayed intellectually active, attending adult education courses well into his later years. He earned a Diploma in Applied Science (Horticulture) from the University of Melbourne in 2001 and maintained a lifelong love of gardening, autobiographical literature, and painting. In the 1970s, he dabbled in his own abstract landscapes and briefly ran a gallery in Williamstown during the 1980s. Peter Speed passed away in 2023 at the age of 70. With his passing came a deeper appreciation for the extraordinary legacy he left behind. The full extent of his contribution, to the preservation and celebration of Indigenous culture, to the quiet championing of its artists, and to the future custodianship of these works - is only now being recognised. This exhibition is a tribute not only to the artists but also to the man who saw their genius early, who believed in their stories, and who gave his life over to honouring them.