Early Western Desert Paintings and Artefacts

In 1971, at the government settlement of Papunya, 240 kilometres west of Alice Springs, a group of senior Anmatyerre, Arrernte, Luritja, Warlpiri and Pintupi men began transferring designs of ancestral authority — until then confined to ceremonial ground paintings, body decoration and sacred objects — onto scraps of board using acrylic paint. Encouraged by schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon, these first painting men, among them Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Old Walter Tjampitjinpa, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula and Uta Uta Tjangala, founded what would become the most significant art movement in Australian history. Papunya Tula Artists, incorporated in 1972, remains its enduring institution. The earliest works are direct and unguarded, rendered before concerns over the disclosure of restricted imagery led artists to veil sacred elements beneath fields of dotting. It is this rawness — the visible negotiation between ceremonial knowledge and a new, permanent medium — that gives early Western Desert painting its extraordinary art-historical weight. Presented alongside the paintings are artefacts of the desert peoples: incised hardwood shields, spearthrowers, coolamons and boomerangs whose fluted and engraved surfaces carry the same ancestral iconography. These objects are not precursors to the painting movement so much as its foundation — the designs the painting men first laid down on board had been carved, ground and worn for millennia.