His mother was of the Kija clan and his father a Gooniyandi man. He spoke both languages, as well as some Walmajarri and Bunuba. Both his parents worked on the station, in and around the homestead, and he recalled being taken out bush for walkabout and at law time, when he was a young man.

With the two of them working on the station, it followed that Butcher also spent most of his working life on Fossil Downs Station, and as a stockman he worked cattle and droving from Fitzroy Crossing to Derby and Broome.

This time was hard as he stated, "real hard".

Butcher was a key elder of the Goonityandi language group and was instrumental in the retention of law ceremony at Muludja Community.

He saw Aboriginal Law and language as fundamentally important, and felt uneasy that young people did not have this tradition to refer to as they had not been educated as he was.

Thus Butcher's calling in life evolved, the need to ensure his culture remained alive and remain alive for the generations that were to follow him

Butcher's works provide glimpses of his cultural physical environment. As he stated,

“with my eyes, my heart and with my brain I am thinking. When I go to sleep nighttime, I might talk to myself 'ah, I might do (paint) that one tomorrow,' not dreaming; I think about what to do next.”

These works on paper are a selection of works from the estate held at Mangkaja Arts, which he made to preserve and transmit this significant body of cultural knowledge to the younger generation. Some of these works formed part of the Revealed show in 2019, the remainder have never been shown outside of Fitzroy Crossing before.

He was a lovely artist who had a quiet career that built very slowly as he produced very high-quality work. [These works] seldom appear for resale as they're so charming and loved by the people who own them, so this release of archived works is a very special occasion.

Butcher was recognised as one of Australia's leading contemporary artists. He was listed twice as one of the 50 most collectable artists in Australia by Australian Art Collector and was declared a 'State Living Treasure' by the Government of Western Australia in 2004.

He was one of the most important artists from that region of the Kimberley that ever painted and is represented in countless National collections and held widely around the world.

Butcher joined Mangkaja Arts in the early 1990s, worked closely with the founding art coordinator Karen Dayman and was introduced to Arches paper, a medium ideally suited to his artistic practice which serves to distinguish Mangkaja work of the 1990s from that of other Kimberley and Western Desert art centres.

Butcher's first solo exhibition at Birukmarri Gallery, Perth in 1992 revealed the artist's fluent mastery of the medium of paper and a singular preoccupation with the formal properties of colour and shape.

Also extraordinary is his abiding concern with the question of whether or not he is a good painter as revealed in his 1992 work purchased by the NGV entitled Joonany garra mi yoodila which translates as 'If I am doing it right, am I a good painter or not?"

Butcher's iconography is based on his precise observation of country and its minutiae of natural forms. Individual works render special particular things vividly observed in nature such as ripe bush plums, boob nuts, patterns in the mud after the fioodwater has receded, ripples made on water by wind and marks made in the sand by beetles.

His interest in the formal repetitiom of tiny details as if viewed under a microscope echoes the elaborate tooling of wunda shields, spear throwers and pearl shell pendants from the Kimberley region.

Each painting on a clean sheet of paper or canvas is as Butcher states 'a new story [from me] not out of a book', from mind, heart, hand and eye, a clear mental picture made actual in paint.

Butcher is an artist's artist who eschews the notion of painting to a formula or revisiting previous successes. Rather he chases after new ideas, colours and designs, ensuring that no two paintings are exactly alike.

His works are often intimate in scale and tissue from a Blakean ability to sense and see 'a World in a Grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower' and to translate these perceptions of country into sublime works of art that are a microcosm of the universe.

Judith Ryan, 2009
Former Curator of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)