Lindsay Bird was born around 1935 at Mulga Bore, near Utopia in the Northern Territory. He is a respected elder and chief of the Anmatyerre tribe and has worked as a shepherd and rancher for many years. Lindsay, like a number of women in Utopia, was introduced to painting in 1977, when Yipati, a Pitjantjatjara artist from Ernabella, and Suzie Bryce, a craft instructor, taught them to paint on silk batik. With up to 80 members at a time, the Utopia Women's Batik Group became an essential source of inspiration for artists, and its enormous success, both in Australia and abroad, led to another successful project, introduced in 1988, in which artists were required to paint on stretched, primed canvases. Lindsay and many women embraced this new medium with ease and enthusiasm, finding it more exciting to work with than the silk and batik techniques. Lindsay was the only man to take part in the important community projects of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA), which enabled the works to be exhibited at the S.H. Erwin Gallery in Sydney and in several other major Australian galleries. This was the beginning of the Utopia art movement, and it was impressive enough to attract international attention with "Utopia - A Picture Story, 88 silk batiks from the Holmes a Court Collection", which toured Australia and then New Zealand.