Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art

Pintupi people from the Western Desert

Pintupi is the name of a Western Desert language spoken by Aboriginal people who belong to a large stretch of country in the Gibson Desert of Western Australia and the western edge of the Northern Territory. When the Pintupi arrived in the government settlements east of their traditional lands between the 1930s and the 1950s, they adopted the term 'Pintupi' to distinguish themselves from the surrounding Aboriginal inhabitants as the 'people from the west'. They were among the last Aboriginal people in Australia to abandon their nomadic lifestyle, the last family arriving into the newly established community of Kiwirrkura in 1984. In Papunya, the Pintupi, bound to each other by their dominant loyalties of relatedness and kinship, were ostracised due to their lack of conversance with kartiya (non-Aboriginal) customs and their perceived lack of sophistication.

It is useful to separate the initiatives of Kaapa Tjampitjinpa and his Anmatyerr countrymen – workers on cattle stations who were influenced by the example of the Namatjira School – from another group of founding artists, the Pintupi. These 'people from the west' were different from the Anmatyerr and Warlpiri artists linguistically, geographically and in terms of their limited experience in dealing with Europeans. They were also unacquainted with watercolour painting or figurative carving. In April 1971, the Pintupi began to congregate on Bardon's verandah where they made pencil or watercolour drawings on paper. Their drawings of archetypal and raw simplicity recall Tjapanangka's cartographic incisions on the spear-thrower collected by Donald Thomson in 1957. This rendering of their primal vocabulary in pencil – linear and cerebral, rather than painterly or pictorial – is in contrast to the virtuoso image-making, bilateral symmetry and subsidiary elaboration of Kaapa, Clifford Possum and Tim Leura. Yet the rhythmical linearity and sobriety of their elemental drawings and of their earliest works on board produced in the Men's Painting Room can in retrospect be seen as critical to the development of an enduring Papunya Tula art form. Their artistic vocabulary has been in the ascendant from the mid 1980s until now, and is largely produced in the Pintupi homeland centres of Walungurru and Kiwirrkura.