Hugh Sawrey

Hugh David Sawrey CBE (born in Forest Glen, Queensland 1919, died Benalla Victoria, 1999) was an Australian artist and co-founder of the , Longreach. Sawrey was an artist whose prolific output of paintings, and drawings of the Australian landscape and its people contributed in a profound way to the preserving of the memory of times and places in Australian history that were in danger of being overlooked and lost to posterity. Throughout his long career, he experienced firsthand events that shaped Australian identity in the 20th century and documented through his work many of the characters that lived in this period.

His father, a teamster died when Hugh was only three years old. Together with his mother and older brother Alan, Hugh moved to Brisbane in the early 30's. However he left school when he was 15 and began working in outback Queensland to assist his family during the Great Depression. He worked a multitude of jobs from droving to shearing, traveling extensively throughout the interior of Queensland, the Northern Territory, and Western Australia.

He enlisted in the Army during World War II and served in the Aust Tank Attack Regiment (AIF) and later transferred to the Royal Australian Air Force 20th Squadron Catalinas in New Guinea. After his discharge at the end of the war Sawrey used his service pay to buy a mob of cattle which he ran on a small property on the Darling Downs with his mother.

In the following twenty years Sawrey went droving in Queensland to augment the tough years on the farm. It was in this period that he began to paint, not only small works around the campfire at night, but murals on the walls of several southwest Queensland pubs. Sawrey excelled in his murals and larger works commissioned for public spaces, with possibly the finest being "Quilty's mob", a very large framed work first commissioned to hang in the Red Bull Steakhouse in Noosa Heads in 1972.

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