Hugh Sawrey

In 2009 a documentary was made about Sawrey, titled Banjo Paterson with a Paintbrush. On 3 October 2009, the documentary premiered at the Art at Kogan festival in the presence of the Governor of Queensland, Penelope Wensley.

In his long career Sawrey was awarded several art prizes including the Queensland Industries Fair Gold Medal and in 1989 he was appointed a CBE for services to the arts.

Sawrey exhibited widely throughout Australia and in 1979 was selected as one of two Australian artists to represent Australia in "The Horses of the World" exhibition at the Tryon gallery, London, the world's foremost sporting gallery. Sawrey was also the founder and a former chairman of the Australian Stockman's Hall of Fame at Longreach. During the mid 1970s many hall of fame conceptual meetings between Sawrey and RM Williams were held at Jack Murphy's Grand Central Gallery in Brisbane. Sawrey with the assistance of Jack Murphy and Lester Padman of Boolarong press in Brisbane donated several print runs of some of his famous paintings for sale to assist in the building of the hall of fame

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.

In 1964 Sawrey moved to Brisbane to become an artist full-time and he set up his first studio in the Royal Hotel in Queen Street, Brisbane. He studied under Brisbane artist Caroline Barker. His first dealers were Keith Moore, and later Jack Murphy of The Grand Central Gallery Brisbane, Julian Stirling, Southern Cross Gallery Melbourne and John Cooper, Eight Bells Gallery, Surfers Paradise. Later he was represented by Jim Elder Fine Art in Adelaide.

In 1964 Sawrey met and married his wife Gill on the Gold Coast.

In August 1950 Sawrey married Betty. However, they argued over her dog and Betty left Sawrey in November 1950. They were divorced in November 1954.

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 1930s. 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, travelling extensively throughout the interior of Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

Hugh David Sawrey, CBE (born in Forest Glen, Queensland 1919, died Benalla Victoria, 1999) was an Australian artist and the founder of the Australian Stockman's Hall of Fame, 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.