Mervyn Bishop (born July 1945) is an Australian news and documentary photographer. Joining The Sydney Morning Herald as a cadet in 1962 he was the first Aboriginal Australian to work on a metropolitan daily newspaper and one of the first to become a professional photographer. In 1971, four years after completing his cadetship, he was named Australian Press Photographer of the Year. He has continued to work as a photographer and lecturer. Early life Mervyn Bishop, a Murri man, was born in July 1945 in Brewarrina in north-west New South Wales. His father, "Minty" Bishop, had been a soldier and shearer, and was himself born to an Aboriginal mother and a Punjabi Indian father. In 1950, "Minty" gained an "official exemption certificate which permitted 'more advanced' Aborigines to live apart from mission blackfellas in post-war Australia". This enabled the family to live among "ordinary" people in Brewarrina. The catch to this certificate was that the exempt Aboriginal people were expected to "sever their ties with their old culture". or 1963, By high school he had started "chronicling the family with a camera – first his mother's Kodak 620 and, then a 35mm Japanese camera he bought for £15". He moved to Dubbo when he was 14 to finish his high school at the Dubbo High School. Career Bishop began his career as a cadet photographer with The Sydney Morning Herald in 1962, the first Aboriginal photographer hired by the paper, becoming the first Aboriginal person to work on a metropolitan daily newspaper and one of the first to become a professional photographer. During four years of his cadetship, he completed a Photography Certificate Course at Sydney Technical College. In 2004, he remained the only indigenous photographer to have been employed by the paper. He won the Nikon-Walkley Australian Press Photographer of the Year in 1971 with Life and Death Dash (1971). From 1974 to 1980, he worked as the Department of Aboriginal Affairs staff photographer. Some of his most enduring work came from this period, as he visited Indigenous communities and documented "the first flush of an idealistic era when land rights, equal wages and government-funded aid seemed to presage a new dawn for Aboriginal Australians". It was during this time, in 1975, that he shot the iconic photograph of Gough Whitlam pouring soil into the hand of Gurindji traditional owner, Vincent Lingiari, at the handover of the deeds to