Barbara Backstrom
- Date of birth
- 1949
- Ethnicity
- Miangla people, Fitzroy River W.A.
- Notes
- Barbara Backstrom was born in Derby, Western Australia in 1949. Her mother was Aboriginal and Chinese while her father had an English/Jewish heritage. Her grandmother’s people were called Miangla. Backstrom is strongly influenced by her Fitzroy River or 'Channel Country' heritage. Many of her designs depict small creeks, rivers and waterways of the region and her ancestry, along with the animals and plant life reliant on these water systems for their survival. Perhaps Backstrom’s most unique work is executed on the large nuts of the boab tree, the only species of the boab found in Australia. Native to Western Australia's northern Kimberley coast and the Northern Territory, the boab nut is ideal for engraving and etching. Backstrom won the Aboriginal artefacts section in 1992 at the West Kimberley Craft Festival with a carved boab nut. Backstrom fuses abstract geometric forms and wildlife in her designs, capitalising on the sensuous form and bulbous surface of each nut. She engraves her patterns and often paints them or nibs detail with ochres.
