Born at Pikilyi (Vaughan Springs), west of Yuendumu, c 1949, Michael grew up in the bush, living a traditional life, ‘without clothes’, seeing his first white man at Mt Doreen Station.
He remembers hiding in the bush in fear. Michael lived at Haasts Bluff for a time with the same family group as Long Jack Phillipus. Later his parents took him to Yuendumu for a European education at the mission school. He left at thirteen, after his initiation, and worked buffalo shooting in 1962 on the East and South Alligator Rivers, driving trucks, droving cattle and in the army, before coming back to Yuendumu and then to Papunya to settle and marry his current wife, Marjorie.
He came to Papunya in 1976, working for a time in the government store and for the Council, observing the work of the older artists for years before beginning to paint regularly for himself in 1983. His parents were both Warlpiri and his father was an important ‘Medicine Man’ in the Yuendumu community.
Michael paints Possum, Snake, Two Kangaroos, Flying Ant and Yam Dreamings for the area around Pikilyi.
In 1984 he won the National Aboriginal Art Award; in 1986 he exhibited in the Biennale of Sydney and was included in ‘The State of the Art’, a British art documentary. In 1987, a painting by Michael (8.2 m) was installed in the foyer of the Sydney Opera House. In 1988 he was introduced to the Queen of England at the opening of the new National Parliament as the designer of the 196 sq m mosaic in the forecourt of the building. His 1985 painting ‘Five Stories’ was one of the most reproduced works of Australian art of the 1980s. It appears on the cover of the catalogue of the Asia Society’s ‘Dreamings’ exhibition, which toured the USA in 1988-89. Michael travelled to New York with Aboriginal Artist Billy Stockman for the opening of the show. In 1989 he had his first solo exhibition in Melbourne at the Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi and participated in the BMW Art Car Project by hand-painting an M3 racing car. In 1993 he received the Australia Medal for services to Aboriginal Art and an Artist’s Fellowship, Visual Art Board, Australia Council. Australian Embassy, Washington DC, 1999.