Don Binney

A DigitalNZ Story by Courtney Johnston

The last of the Three Dons (Binney, Driver and Peebles) died in Auckland on Friday 15 September 2012, aged 72. Binney's bird paintings of the 1960s and 1970s became beloved symbols of New Zealandness, and - as Jim Barr and Mary Barr observed after his death - 'rightly made him famous', even if the attention paid to the work from this part of his career prevented audiences and critics from engaging with his later work. A passionate care for the environment and his early and continuous interest in ornithology fuelled Binney's work. In a piece contributed to an Art New Zealand issue on 'Art and the Environment', he wrote: "My own feeling of the sense of tapu, and for that matter involvement with the environment, began long before I started painting - with bird watching. You can't go deeply into ornithology without becoming exposed to the mystique of the environment. The very first trip I took to Miranda on the firth of Thames, in 1950 was for me not just an excursion into the realm of the rye-bill plover and the South Island pied oyster-catcher and the godwit and the turnstone and the knott and the stilt: it was also an excursion into the salt marsh, the salicornia, feeling the sometimes painful crunch of oyster shells under your instep, the smell of the mud and the sound of tiny crabs bubbling in their holes in tide pools."