AustLit

Sandra Le Brun Holmes was born on Boolcoomatta station in Northern New South Wales, near the border of South Australia. As a young child her playmates included Aboriginal children, and with her mother she accompanied Aboriginal women on bush tucker and medicine excursions.

As a Darwin resident Sandra helped Aborigines to preserve their religion and culture. Sandra was an author, film maker, archivist, art collection, adventurer, and a controversial woman of her time. She began her life on a sheep station in the far north west New South Wales. It was there in the Australian outback that she developed a relationship with Aboriginal people and their culture. In the 1950s she travelled alone into the desert to record Aboriginal songs, stories and messages, and some of this documentation and recordings combined with dance to highlight the plight of Aboriginal people.

She studied anthropology in Sydney, where she met and married writer and film maker Cecil Holmes and together they made a number of films on Aboriginal life and culture, as well as in isolated parts of Papua New Guinea. After, settling in Darwin Sandra became a field worker and collector for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. She established a teaching museum and became a classified relative of some Aboriginal familes and clans.