Jeremy Eccles

A migrant from Margaret Thatcher's Britain, Jeremy first encountered Australia's Aborigines at the Woolworths in Brookvale, where he helped an Arnhemland group buy winter clothes before dancing at the Paris Autumn Festival in 1984. This lead to an invitation to attend one of the great Groote Eylandt dance festivals organised by the Aboriginal Cultural Foundation where he discovered the variety and complexity of Aboriginal cultures from right across the North. Later that decade he discovered the art when working with Rodney Gooch at CAAMA in Alice Springs, just before Gooch delivered the first canvases to Utopia.

Jeremy has written about Indigenous art, theatre, dance, film and literature since in most Australian newspapers, the Sydney Review and local art magazines - particularly the Art Market Report, Eyeline and Art Monthly - and overseas in Asiaweek, The Financial Times and on The Arts Desk website. The 1998 documentary film 'Art from the Heart?' was shown three times on ABC TV and at international film festivals. Another film is in the offing.

Jeremy has also been a political correspondent for the BBC, Head of Current Affairs for Radio Hong Kong, editor of two theatre magazines, and a theatre, dance and opera critic.