Penny Tweedie

Penelope "Penny" Anne Tweedie (30 April 1940 – 14 January 2011) was an English photojournalist who is noted for her work with the Aboriginal peoples in Arnhem Land in the late 1970s. Born into a farming family she went to the Guildford School of Art in spite of her parents’ opposition. Tweedie's first job came with Queen in 1961 after it asked her college to send their best performing student to them. She left two years later to go freelance and set herself assignments in which she covered various newsworthy stories. She and others travelled to East Bengal during the 1971 East Pakistan crisis but were arrested by the Indian Army after they were mistaken for spies.

Tweedie was embroiled in controversy when she refused to photograph prisoners accused to being collaborators when she noticed they were to be bayoneted to death for the assembled foreign media. She was asked by the BBC to photograph the filming of a programme called Explorers: The Story of Burke and Wills in Alice Springs in 1975 and later became fascinated by the lives and work of the Aboriginal people. Her work was widely exhibited and she won the Walkley Award for photojournalism in 1999. Tweedie regularly returned to the United Kingdom and continued to be kept busy until she took her own life in early 2011.^[1]