The year was 1977, and Anatjari was at the height of his success as an artist. He was a serious, observant man of friendly silences, and on the rare occasions that he spoke it was with a gentle, quiet voice. (R. G. (Dick) Kimber, 2011)

Anatjari Tjakamarra was born in southern Pintupi country near the rockhole site of Kurlkurta in Western Australia, where he lived with his family until they started to walk towards settlements in the east in 1966. On their journey, they encountered a Weapons Research Establishment patrol that transported them to Papunya where they were re-united with other members of their extended family.

One of the later arrivals at Papunya from country to the west, Anatjari had just come into the full powers of ritual maturity. He began painting in 1971 and immediately distinguished himself among the other artists as a highly skilled painter who produced elaborate and carefully planned depictions of ceremonial objects and designs. During the 1970s he made a successful transition to large canvas and painted particularly strongly in the late 1980s, when moving between homeland centres of Kiwirrkura and Tjukurla that were closer to his birthplace, Kurlkurta.

In 1988 one of Anatjari’s paintings was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art from a group exhibition at John Weber Gallery in New York, where his first solo exhibition was held the following year.

Freddy West Tjakamarra was a tall, powerful, imposing figure – more than 6 feet tall… He was a ‘do-er,’ always making implements – spears, boomerangs, shields, mirru (spear throwers) – never at rest. He was fearless, and he emanated this power. Novelty, of a sort, access to new relationships and knowledge motivated him more than the intimate performances of ritual and dance. (Fred Myers, 2011)

Freddy West was born in the Pollock Hills north of present day Kiwirrkura, and acknowledged Wala Wala rockhole as the major site in his country. In 1962, Government Welfare Branch patrol officer, Jeremy Long first made contact with Freddy West and his family in the area of Dovers Hills. The following year, he began to walk with his family to Papunya and encountered Long at Wili rockhole on the way. At Papunya, Freddy West developed a reputation as a brilliant tracker of assistance to the police and became one of the founding artists in 1971.

An occasional painter, Freddy West created a number of precise and highly decorated depictions of men’s ceremonies with related objects, which often refer to places in his country. Later Freddy produced optical Tingarri compositions of multiple concentric circles and travelling paths.

During the 1970s Freddy West was instrumental in instigating the Pintupi’s move to establish outstations deep in country near his birthplace. In 1983 he played a vital role in shaping the newly founded Kiwirrkura community as a distinctive Pintupi base from which he and his countrymen and women could again travel to important sites in their homelands.

John was one of the three most silent of all of the Pintupi men I have ever known. Most of his talking was by hand-signs or a pointing of the chin, the latter a conventional way of indicating direction shared by all older generations of Aboriginal peoples of the Western Desert. He spoke but a few words for the entire day [on our journey to his country], yet he was vitally interested and animated the whole time. (Dick Kimber, 2011)

John Tjakamarra was born in country west of Tjukurla and travelled widely across the region southwest of Kaakurutintjinya (Lake Macdonald) until his early manhood, when he first encountered Europeans. In 1963 he travelled to Papunya by means of a Weapons Research Establishment patrol, which assisted a number of Pintupi people as they attempted the long walk from Dovers Hills in Western Australia.

At Papunya, John Tjakamarra worked as a farmhand and made a number of pencil drawings on Geoffrey Bardon’s verandah in 1971, before joining others in the Men’s Painting Room. His early paintings are of finely delineated Tingarri compositions finished in a filigree of fine dotting.

In 1981, together with 300 fellow Pintupi, John Tjakamarra moved back to Walungurru where he continued to paint for another decade.

During the early 1990s, he settled in Tjukurla, closer to his birthplace, which curtailed his painting.

We started it, like a bushfire, this painting business, and it went every way: north, east, south, west, Papunya in the middle. (Long Jack Phillipus to Luke Scholes, 2010)

Long Jack Phillipus was born at Kalipinypa, a major Water Dreaming place, north-east of Walungurru, in his mother’s country. When Long Jack was a teenager, he and his family came in to Haasts Bluff, where he worked as a timber cutter and stockman and was married.

In 1962 Long Jack moved to Papunya where he still lives, initially working as a gardener and groundsman. A councillor, working in the vicinity of the school, he was one of the founding members of the painting group in 1971 and quickly developed a relationship with the recently arrived school teacher Geoffrey Bardon. Along with Billy Stockman who was also a school yardman, he painted two smaller murals on the school walls, a Widows’ Dreaming and a Wallaby Dreaming, before collaborating with Kaapa Tjampitjinpa and Billy Stockman and others on the painting of the large Honey Ant Mural.

Long Jack’s work encompasses the Spinifex Wallaby, Kingfisher, Dingo, Possum and Emu Dreamings. A number of his early works on board depict decorated ceremonial participants and ritual objects perhaps occasioned by the heightened environment in the Men’s Painting Room, which prompted the artists to demonstrate visually the strength of their culture and law.

In 1983 Long Jack won the Northern Territory Golden Jubilee Art Award. The following year, he won first prize in the Alice Springs Caltex Art Award and was ordained as a Lutheran pastor. He was chairman of Papunya Tula Artists in the early 1990s.

It wasn’t until March 1972 that Bardon became aware of Ronnie’s presence amongst the artists who were working in the Great Painting room. Under the tutelage of Uta Uta, his father’s younger brother, Ronnie tentatively began experimenting with a raft of new materials. Driven by a desire to express his knowledge and experience of ritual amongst his cultural peers, Ronnie’s first paintings are replete with overt depictions of finely decorated ceremonial objects. (Luke Scholes, 2011)

Ronnie was born near the site of Muyinnga and was initiated at Yumari, near his birthplace. Ronnie and his younger brother Smithy Zimran came in from the bush at Yuendumu and later joined their relatives in Papunya, where he worked for a while as a labourer. He was one of the Pintupi men who gathered on the verandah of Geoffrey Bardon’s flat before joining others in the Men’s Painting Room and producing works that sometimes disclose aspects of men’s ritual.

In 1983, following the establishment of Walungurru in 1981, Ronnie returned to his ancestral lands. Over the next decade he emerged as one of Papunya Tula’s major artists, pioneering the scaled-up, bold linear style characteristic of Pintupi work of the 1990s. In 1988 he won the Alice Prize and the following year his first solo exhibition was held at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne. In 1993 the artist made a significant contribution to Perspecta at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

I was much taken with Walter’s paintings of Kalipinypa, a Rain Dreaming site, each representing the camp of the boss of water and lightning, the sense of running water and the native well … He sometimes painted other places, including a nearby Possum Men Dreaming rockhole and … the Two Women Dreaming soakage site of Kampurarrnga (Mount Russell). Walter had lived at these sites and far more widely in his youth, throughout country east, west and south of Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay), north as far as the Highland Rocks and the Alec Ross Range, and as far south-west as the great sacred men’s site, Yawulyurrunya. (R. G. (Dick) Kimber, 2011)

Walter Tjampitjinpa was born at Dovers Hills, Western Australia, and first encountered Europeans in 1923 when he joined a group of around thirty men who were visiting Hermannsburg. He was recorded as living at Mt Liebig in 1932, having come in from the bush in 1929–30 with the first mission trip beyond the Kintore Ranges. From the 1940s he lived with his family in Haasts Bluff before moving to Papunya.

A pensioner, known as ‘Old Walter’, he was one of the elders responsible for authorising the designs used in the mural on the Papunya school walls. Walter was one of the original Papunya artists, renowned for his constantly varied paintings of Kalipinya, the Water Dreaming site of which he was the senior custodian. By the time he started painting in 1971, Walter said he considered himself too old to visit his homelands but he continued to represent the country he knew so well as a child from memory, until his eyesight failed him towards the end of his life.

Uta Uta was what English people would have called a cock-sparrow of a man, always alert. Like virtually all Pintupi warriors of that era, he carried two spears and a mirru (spear thrower) whenever he walked anywhere, and sometimes a boomerang in his belt. He had a short beard, and wore a red-ochred hair-string or red woollen yakirri, the headband indicating manhood. (R. G. (Dick) Kimber, 2011)

Born at Dovers Hills, west of present-day Kiwirrkura, Uta Uta’s conception site was Ngurrapulangu, occasioned when his mother ate the seeds of a mungilpa plant, which associated him with the Old Man Dreaming that runs from Kampurarrpa to Yumari. During the severe drought of the mid 1950s, Uta Uta and his family were led by Charlie Wartuma Tjungurrayi eastwards to Haasts Bluff.

An expressive and dynamic dancer and a foremost authority on men’s ritual, Uta Uta was one of the Pintupi artists who made pencil drawings on the verandah of Geoffrey Bardon’s flat. He readily embraced the new medium of painting in acrylic on board in the Men’s Painting Room and created intense and powerful invocations of place, marked by a totality of gesture.

A fierce advocate for the outstation movement, Uta Uta spent most of the 1970s at Yayayi west of Papunya and moved to Walungurru in 1981. Thereafter he created several masterworks, working with a team of Pintupi assistants drawn from outlying communities in the Gibson Desert. As his children grew older he was concerned that they should visit and become familiar with the main sites and songs of their ngurra (home country), to ensure that this knowledge lives on.

For those of us who knew Mick Namarari as an artist, the dramatic events that shaped his youth are hard to reconcile with the warm but reserved person we encountered in his later years. While Namarari came into manhood during a period of violence expressed on both sides of the pastoral frontier, his artistic output is characterised by the celebration of his ancestral home while capturing the dynamism of natural forces associated with its creation. (John Kean, 2011)

Mick Namarari was born at Marnpi, a Kangaroo Dreaming site south-east of Walungurru, where as a small boy he witnessed the killing of his father by a revenge party and the subsequent loss of his father’s mother. After a period of mourning, the family travelled east, reaching Putati, a ration depot established by the Lutheran pastor F. W. Albrecht and Arrernte evangelist Titus. From here Titus led them into Mt Liebig where they were caught up in the scientific experiments of the Adelaide University research party led by Norman Tindale. Later they travelled to Hermannsburg where Namarari attended the mission school before working briefly as a stockman and moving to Haasts Bluff.

Namarari settled in Papunya during the late 1950s and was serving on the Papunya Council when Geoffrey Bardon arrived in 1971. He was one of the most committed and accomplished of the Papunya artists, on small or monumental scale. His Dreamings included Moon, Kangaroo, Dingo, Water, Wild Bandicoot, Wind and Marsupial Mouse. His principal sites were Marnpi, Tjunginpa, Tjangimanta and the Dingo Dreaming site of Nyunmanu.

Namarari stayed at Papunya until the mid 1980s when he moved to Walungurru and worked to establish an outstation at Nyunmanu. In 1991 he won the 8th National Aboriginal Art Award and his first solo exhibition was held at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne. During this period, he developed a pared down style, which plays on subtle variations of tonality, texture, straightness of line, or density of dotting, to create a shimmering surface. In 1994 Namarari tied for first place in the Caltex Art Award and was the recipient of the Australia Council’s prestigious Red Ochre Award.

Standing tall, and with a lean hunter-warrior build, there was a touch of vanity about him. He knew that he was a handsome man. He wore a tightly bunched cluster of white feathers in his bright red headband and a long nose-bone horizontally through his nose. There was no more striking figure in the Pintupi camp. (R. G. (Dick) Kimber, 2011)

Timmy Payungka was born at Parayirpilynga near Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay). During his childhood and adolescence, a time of severe drought, he travelled with his family in search of rations, east to Haasts Bluff, north to Balgo and south to Warburton, where he met his wife. In 1957 Timmy and his young family were met by Welfare Branch patrol officer Jeremy Long at Yarannga rockhole. The following year he walked with his extended family and his father-in-law Uta Uta Tjangala into Haasts Bluff and then moved to Papunya.

Timmy used his language skills to assist Geoffrey Bardon and was one of the few to speak Warlpiri, which he used to encourage a sharing of ritual knowledge. In 1971–72 he was an inventive artist, painting a range of subjects, including those of Dancing Women, Dingo, Snake and Water Dreaming. In 1994 a solo exhibition of Timmy Payungka’s work was held at Aboriginal and South Pacific Gallery, Sydney.

Timmy was a keen advocate for the resettlement of the Pintupi homelands. From the mid 1990s, he lived in Alice Springs with his wife and two daughters to be close to the dialysis unit, where he received regular treatment. During this period he painted some optical geometric works in black and black or red and white, which reference the interlocking key design that is incised on pearl shell pendants, shields and other men’s objects and is associated with water.

[Tutuma’s] spontaneous compositions are a reflection of the direct way in which iconographic forms are applied onto the body or onto the earth for large ground paintings. Indeed, more than most of the other early Papunya paintings, Tutuma’s work retains a palpable sense of immediacy and ritual purpose. (Philip Batty, 2011)

Tutuma was born at Wirrilinya, south-west of Lake Hopkins, where he lived until walking some 500 kilometres to Haasts Bluff in 1943, being drawn eastwards by stories of Europeans distributing food and water. He found Haasts Bluff noisy and unsettling at first but gradually adapted to settlement where he became a competent cameleer, using his team of camels to make extended visits to his homelands.

Tutuma moved to Papunya in 1960, where he was the most senior of the southern Pintupi artists. A pensioner, known as ‘Old Tutuma’, he was always eager to express his Tjukurrpa (Dreaming) in acrylic on composition board. The bold iconographic elements of his early works echo the way such designs are painted straight onto the body or the ground for men’s ceremonies. In common with many other Pintupi people, Tutuma moved to Walungurru after its establishment in 1981. Here he continued to paint until his eyesight deteriorated in the mid 1980s.

Charlie Wartuma Tjungurrayi was one of the friendliest and most helpful people I have ever met. In many ways he was a naturally good teacher who enjoyed introducing anyone with a genuine interest, to his country and discussing other aspects of traditional Pintupi culture. (R. G. (Dick) Kimber, 2011)

Born at Tjitururrnga west of Walungurru, Wartuma’s family was one of the first of the Pintupi to move eastwards, settling in Haasts Bluff in 1930. Here in 1936, Wartuma was given the name Charlie by which he was subsequently known.

He was employed as a builder at Hermannsburg before working on military camps around Adelaide River, south of Darwin during World War II. After the war he travelled by camel on hunting trips to Pintupi country where dingo scalps would be exchanged for rations and also brought food to his countrymen and women still living nomadically in the desert.

Wartuma and his wife Tatali Nangala moved to Papunya at its inception, where he became one of the founding Papunya artists. He produced iconic depictions of Yam, Water and Snake and due to his familiarity and ease with Europeans he became a spokesman for the Pintupi artists.

Wartuma travelled with Andrew Crocker to England and Hong Kong in 1982 and to Amsterdam in 1983, where he participated in a performance of Nightsea Crossing with performance artists Ulay and Marina Abramovic. He was the first Papunya artist to have a retrospective exhibition, held at Orange Regional Gallery in 1987, where his well known statement was first published: ‘If I don’t paint this story some whitefella might come and steal my country.’

I think of Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi as a quietly friendly, good family man, anxious to help, and as a singing, painting, dancing and hunting man. When first I met him in 1974 he was tracking a wounded emu, his quick eyes seeing the occasional spot of blood, and both hands held out from his sides in the form of an emu’s foot as he showed others its route. (R. G. (Dick) Kimber, 2011)

Shorty Lungkata was born at Walukirritjinya south of Kaakurutintjinya (Lake Macdonald), also the place where his father died. He married and came to Haasts Bluff around 1948 and moved to Papunya in the late 1950s. He was regarded within the Pintupi community at Papunya as one of the leading senior men, well known for his hunting and dancing skills and an authority on ritual matters.

Shorty was one of the last Pintupi men to join the original painting group at Papunya. His early paintings flow with gesture and a dancer’s vitality of movement and are imbued with a strong sense of place. He spoke almost no English and when he needed to convey his ideas to Geoffrey Bardon, would have his fellow countrymen translate.

Shorty moved to Walungurru in the early 1980s to be closer to his birth country in the Gibson Desert. He painted only a few works during the 1980s, but his legacy endures in the work of his daughter Wintjiya Morgan Napaltjarri and his stepdaughter Linda Syddick, whom he taught to paint.

He painted for his life, and, in the latter years in particular, as with many of the original Papunya Tula artists, it was his life. His world became his art mapped out on canvas for all to see. Every critical stage of every epic tale that occurred in his country could be told through a language of lines and dots. (Paul Sweeney, 2011)

Born at Iltuturunga, south-west of Kaakurutintjinya (Lake Macdonald), Yala Yala grew up in this area. In 1962 he and his young family travelled to Papunya with Welfare Branch patrol officer Jeremy Long to receive medical treatment for a sick child and returned with a group of Pintupi in July of the following year.

In 1971 Yala Yala came knocking on the door of Geoffrey Bardon’s flat in search of painting materials and became one of the founding shareholders of Papunya Tula Artists and an important artist. His powerful early works eschew figuration and often feature white dotting upon a red ochre or black background. An authority in ritual matters, he is also acknowledged for his Tingarri compositions on large canvases, characterised by serious incantations of dotted concentric circles and travelling paths, strong in country and law.

During the early 1980s he moved with his large family to Walungurru and eventually to Kiwirrkura. Yala Yala’s work was included in Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia, which toured the USA in 1988–89, and after the exhibition one of his works was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

By the winter of 1972 Warangkula had emerged as one of the most innovative and lyrical of an exceptional group of artists, a key participant who kept the atmosphere of the painting room alive with his guttural singing and infectious laughter. Working intensely with Kaapa, Tim Leura and Clifford Possum, he was one of a select group who explored the potential of their new media most fully, introducing veils of white dots to obscure and soften the key iconographic elements and in the process creating an ever shifting field to seduce the eye. (John Kean, 2011)

Johnny Warangkula was born at Mintjilpiri, in sandhill terrain 400 kilometres west of Alice Springs, where he spent his early years. He made his first contact with Europeans in 1930 when he and his family spotted the Mackay expedition accompanied by sixty camels. Warangkula’s father led the family east in search of regular rations in 1932, reaching Mt Liebig, where they encountered the Adelaide University Scientific Expedition. The family continued on to Hermannsburg Mission where Warangkula was initiated, learnt his ancestral stories and commenced clearing an airstrip to service the mission.

He later worked on the construction of the Papunya settlement from the late 1950s when he would periodically visit his country, with the assistance of camels. On these hunting trips he developed a detailed knowledge of his ancestral sites Kampurarrpa, Kalipinypa and Tjikari.

Warangkula was serving on the Papunya Council when Geoffrey Bardon arrived in 1971 and when painting started at Papunya he soon made known his interest in joining the group. He gradually developed a unique style of overdotting, often of several layers, which represented a way of describing the burgeoning of vegetation after rain, most often at the major Water Dreaming site of Kalipinypa.

In 1978 Warangkula relocated to Ilpili, a site that he had left behind as a boy, a move that reinvigorated his painting practice. He was one of the first Papunya artists to encourage his wife Yawintji (Gladys) Napanangka to paint.

Nosepeg had an encyclopaedic knowledge of all desert Aboriginal lore and law, and from the 1940s to the 1980s became, I believe, the greatest traveller on ‘Law business’ and the most important ritual leader the Australian Western Desert people have ever known. His countrymen considered him so perfect in his knowledge of the finest details of ceremonial protocol that it was commented that he was as one with the Dreaming. (R. G. (Dick) Kimber, 2011)

Born in Winanpa (Southern Pintupi) territory south of Kaakurutintjinya (Lake Macdonald), where he grew up, Nosepeg Tjupurrula developed an intimate knowledge of his country before he moved to Haasts Bluff. Here he worked as a guide and interpreter on all Welfare Branch patrols into Pintupi country between 1957 and 1964. His brilliant acting ability was also recognised by film-makers and he became one of the most popular Aboriginal actors of the mid twentieth century.

Nosepeg was a leading identity at Papunya when the art movement started. He was one of the founding artists but his role in the community always took precedence over his painting. He was acknowledged as a ritual leader by Pitjantjatjara, Pintupi, Winanpa, Matjatjara and Warlpiri peoples and there was not a traditional artefact that he could not make.

An occasional painter, his works are imbued with his deep understanding of Pintupi law. His principal sites included Payarrnganya, Pirrymalnganya and places southwest of the Kintore Ranges.

Wallangkarri cultivated a unique palette, generally choosing to paint on a black background with semi-transparent dots in a range of soft pinks and earthy greens. He worked slowly, usually for no more than an hour or two at a time and with a lightness of touch, putting emphasis on a mosaic of vegetation within a conceptual map of his country. (John Kean, 2011)

Mick Wallangkarri was born at Watikinpirri, west of the Eagle Dreaming site of Karrinyarra, near Watulpunyu and became a senior custodian of these three significant sites in his country. Wallangkarri worked as a stockman on Glen Helen and Narwietooma Stations east of Papunya, before moving to Papunya where he lived for the rest of his life.

A pensioner at Papunya, who was known as ‘Old Mick’, Wallangkarri shared with Tom Onion Tjapangati the custodianship of the Honey Ant Dreaming, authorising its representation on the Papunya school walls, a crucial moment in the genesis of the Western Desert art movement. He was an enthusiastic painter, driven to paint by his ritual seniority. He had been painting on the body and the ground, in ritual contexts, for many decades as is reflected in his earliest works composed of graphic designs silhouetted on the dark backgrounds of rough-cut boards. He was the first Papunya Tula artist whose work was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia.

Kaapa was often the first Aboriginal person to introduce himself to newcomers to Papunya. He instantly sought to establish a relationship based on mutual interest and good humor. His candour was too much for many settlement officials who having been schooled in the assimilationist period bristled at his apparent disregard for their assumed authority. Kaapa was branded as a ‘troublemaker’, a necessary mediator to be sure but certainly not one to be trusted. (John Kean, 2011)

Kaapa was born at the Emu Dreaming site of Yaltjijira on the western edge of Anmatyerr country. He was initiated on Napperby Station where his family moved to escape the violence, which culminated in the Coniston Massacre of 1928. As a young man he worked as a stockman before settling in Haasts Bluff and moving to Papunya in 1957 when it was still under construction.

Prior to the emergence of painting at Papunya, Kaapa had already established himself as an independent artist. To supplement his meagre training allowance paid by the settlement authorities, Kaapa sold his carved wooden artefacts and watercolour paintings to support his family. His formative works illustrate elements of Anmatyerr ceremony in explicit figurative detail, which also became the focus of his works painted in the Men’s Painting Room.

In August 1971, Kaapa led the painting of the Honey Ant Mural, which was produced in collaboration with senior custodians – who chose Kaapa for his mastery of the medium – and four other painters. In September 1971 Kaapa jointly won the Caltex Art Award in Alice Springs for his Men’s Ceremony for the Kangaroo, Gulgardi. This breakthrough moment would propel the Papunya artists into the limelight through their forging of a radical style and iconography hitherto confined to the ceremonial ground.

Kaapa was instrumental in the establishment of Papunya Tula Artists, serving as the company’s inaugural chairman in 1972 and as a board member throughout his painting life. His passing in 1989 coincided with the public acceptance of the movement that his genius had helped to inspire.

Billy Stockman was an infant survivor of the 1928 Coniston Massacre. His mother and a brother were shot by Constable Murray’s revenge party: ‘All the people were running. I was a little one in a coolamon. My mother put me under a bush… They killed my mother.’ (Vivien Johnson, 2008)

Billy Stockman was born at Ilpitirri near Mt Dennison, north-west of Yuendumu, the year before the Coniston Massacre savaged his family. He was rescued as an infant and raised by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s parents and grew up on Napperby Station, where as his name clearly states, he worked as a stockman. In about 1955 he moved to Haasts Bluff where he married a daughter of Uta Uta Tjangala’s brother.

Like Kaapa Tjampitjinpa and Clifford Possum, Billy Stockman was a wood carver before he became a leading figure in the first few years of the painting movement. Together with Kaapa, Long Jack Phillipus and others, he participated in the painting of the Honey Ant Mural and he was one of the most enthusiastic artists in the Men’s Painting Room. He painted Yam, Wallaby, Budgerigar, Spider, Rainbow and Water Dreamings and was one of the first to begin painting large-scale canvases.

Billy Stockman served as chairman of Papunya Tula Artists from 1976–1977 and as a member of the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council from 1975–1979. He represented Papunya Tula Artists on several international cultural exchange projects and also travelled to New York in 1988 for the opening of Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia. He has now retired from painting and lives at Hetti Perkins Home for the Aged in Alice Springs.

While working in the saddle, Clifford learned the stories for the country through which he travelled and participated in ceremonial cycles thus acquiring an encyclopaedic knowledge of the songlines that criss-cross Central Australia, an endowment that he would use later in his second career as an artist. (John Kean, 2011)

Born in a creek bed at Laramba near Napperby Station, Clifford grew up in the bush together with his classificatory brother, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri. As a young man he learned the narratives of his country by traversing Central Australia with his adopted father, One Pound Jim Tjungurrayi who worked as a stockman. Clifford also worked on various pastoral stations and would carve in the evenings as a respite from this physically demanding work.

In February 1972 Clifford joined the group participating in the Men’s Painting Room, being encouraged by leading artists Kaapa Tjampitjinpa and Tim Leura. Drawing on the spatial sense he developed in his carvings, Clifford soon distinguished himself for his striking three-dimensional visual effects. In 1976 he began his successful collaboration with Tim Leura with Warlugulong, the first of their major cartographic works mapping the Dreamings that criss-cross their country on an epic scale.

Clifford was voted chairman of Papunya Tula Artists in 1980, a position that he held until 1985. Later, in the wake of his growing celebrity, Clifford branched out, producing works independently. In 1988 he had a solo exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London. In 2003 the Art Gallery of South Australia staged the first Clifford Possum retrospective, a year after the artist passed away, on the same day that he was to be presented with the Order of Australia medal.

Tim Leura grew to manhood in a cross-cultural world where both Anmatyerr law and pastoral occupation prevailed in uneasy tension. At out-of-the-way Malierra ceremonies, performed for his cohort of novices, Leura absorbed designs and songs associated with the network of songlines that passed though his country. At the same time, he learned horsemanship and cattle wrangling at nearby stock camps. (John Kean, 2011)

Tim Leura was born in a creek bed at Laramba on Napperby Station, a few years earlier than Clifford Possum. The two boys grew up together as brothers, although they had different biological parents. Their mothers were sisters, and they shared grandparents and a rich cultural inheritance. Together they would become leading instigators and brilliant exponents of Papunya Tula art.

As a young man Tim Leura worked as a stockman on Narwietooma Station, becoming familiar with the network of songlines that passed though his country. Here he married Daisy Leura Nakamarra, whom he later encouraged to paint independently, and developed prowess as a carver of weapons and of lifelike representations of reptiles.

Tim Leura moved with his wife and young family to Papunya as part of the construction team. His association with the Honey Ant Dreaming gave him agency at Papunya, even though his country lay to the north. Apart from the converging Dreaming trails of the Honey Ant, he also depicted Possum, Yam, Fire, Blue-tongue Lizard, Sun, Moon, and Morning Star Dreamings. A left-hander, Tim Leura’s paintings are distinguished by his delicate touch, subdued palette and layered subtlety of dotting and wash.

By the mid 1970s he was a member of the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council. His Spirit Dreaming through Napperby country 1980, painted collaboratively with Clifford Possum, is often cited as one of the great paintings of the movement and has been the centrepiece of many major exhibitions, beginning with Perspecta 1981 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

One of the central motivations behind the exhibition is to illustrate the close connection between the all-pervasive iconographic symbolism of the Western Desert and the graphic forms that appear in the early Papunya paintings on board. A variety of decorated artefacts, photographs and films that depict the same iconography in divergent settings is presented in the exhibition space to draw attention to these complex interconnections.

Indeed, much of the content of the early Papunya paintings directly relates to the artefacts, dance movements, songs and ritual performances that constitute the totality of Western Desert cultural traditions. In taking this approach, the intention is not only to illustrate the origins of the first Papunya works, but to question the distinction between ‘anthropological’ and ‘art-historical’ interpretations of Aboriginal art.

The anthropologists Baldwin Spencer (1860–1929) and Francis Gillen (1855–1912) amassed the most influential collection of Australian ethnographic material ever assembled. It is composed of thousands of objects, photographs, expedition diaries, drawings and some of the earliest ethnographic sound and film footage ever recorded. They acquired their collection at a time when Aboriginal people in Central Australia were relatively unaffected by European contact (between 1875 and 1923) and as such it constitutes one of the most comprehensive inventories of a regional Aboriginal group in existence.

Their work had a decisive influence on the early development of anthropology as an academic discipline, particularly in Europe. In his 1913 review of Spencer and Gillen’s book Across Australia, Malinowski commented, ‘Since the publication of their first volume, half the total production of anthropological literature has been based on their work and nine tenths affected or modified by it.’

Their influence was felt in several other branches of the social sciences. One of the foundational figures of modern sociology, Emile Durkheim, based his famous tome The Elementary Forms of Religious Life on Spencer and Gillen’s ethnography. Similarly, Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo was primarily inspired by Spencer and Gillen’s work on Aboriginal religious belief.

Their extensive collection and published works continue to shape the production of knowledge about past and present Aboriginal life in both anthropology and the popular imagination. Just as importantly, it also provides an invaluable cultural archive for the descendants of the Aboriginal people with whom Spencer and Gillen worked in Central Australia: the Arrernte, Anmatyerr, Kaytej, Warumunga, Luritja and Arabana people who still have a substantial presence in the region.

These shields were manufactured by Aboriginal men primarily for fighting but they were also used on ceremonial occasions. Depending on the nature of the ceremony, certain iconographic designs were painted on the surface of the shield and employed in different parts of the ritual to evoke the power of ancestral beings originating in the Tjukurrpa (Dreaming). Like the iconography in the early paintings, the designs represent certain events and activities relating to the ancestral heroes as they wandered across the landscape. The design that appears on shield number X 14024 relates to an important ancestor of the Warumungu people, Pukulungara. He is connected with a Wind Dreaming site situated around the Davenport Range, south of Tennant Creek in Central Australia. The meandering lines that curl and skip across the surface of the shield are reminiscent of the turbulent gusts of wind, or ‘willy willies’ that blow hither and thither across the Western Desert, producing great columns of dust and flying debris. Similarly, every design painted on the shields here represents an ancestral being relating to an actual Dreaming site, all of which are maintained and celebrated by living custodians.

For people of the Western Desert the Tjukurrpa (Dreaming) is the very foundation of their being. This active life force informs their spiritual and social identity. It is established out of a vast series of complex narratives that describe the actions and events of the ancestors who entered into and became the land, its plants, animals and people. It is from this period of creation, embodying past, present and future, that Western Desert peoples inherit their highly organised system of kinship, language, ceremonies and ritual law, which remains strong.

Tjukurrtjanu (from the Dreaming)
The powerful iconographic language and philosophy of Western Desert art is tjukurrtjanu (from the Dreaming). The designs and images express the artists’ intimate connection with men’s ritual, special places in their country and the Tjukurrpa.

Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula and Walter Tjampitjinpa were custodians of the Water Dreaming and of the important site of Kalipinypa, where Winpa the Lightning Boss sang up a huge storm and created a series of waterholes, which now mark his songline. Both artists are best known for their paintings of the Storm Dreaming at Kalipinypa, producing many variations of Kalipinypa in 1971–1972, the time of an unusual season of flooding rains and its ensuing regeneration of plant life in the Papunya area. This season of abundance caused the song cycles of the Water Dreaming performed in ritual to resonate in the imagination of many Papunya artists.

Whereas Walter created graphic representations of the cluster of designs that signify water embellished with dots, Warangkula characteristically laid down dots over a framework of symbolic lines and motifs associated withKalipinypa and also worked up his surfaces with tiers of irregular, impulsive marks. Warangula established an analogy between the dotted field, traditionally associated with ritual decoration, and the depiction of vegetation that sprang up in response to rain. The use of dots to describe vegetation was a metaphor that would sustain him throughout his artistic career.

Fire plays a vital role in the lives of Aboriginal people where it is used as a tool to increase food supply and as an aid in hunting. Selective burning is used to regenerate desert flora, which increases edible plant species and attracts animals, another food source, to the new growth. Fire is also used to signal to other Aboriginal peoples and was occasionally used as an aid in warfare.

Clifford Possum and Tim Leura’s monumental Warlugulong 1976 refers to the site of Warlukurlangu, which lies about thirty kilometres south of Yuendumu, where a great ancestral fire began. Lungkata, the Blue-tongue Lizard Man, had rested at this site. His two sons following behind, speared a kangaroo, cooked it, and greedily ate it all. The father sensed what had happened and determined to punish them. He blew on a firestick and touched it to a bush, which exploded into flame and burnt everything in its path. Far to the south, the two brothers perished while fighting the flames, going into the ground as the bushfire lost its fury and died.

Bush Potato or Yam Dreaming
The tubers of the bush potato or desert yam plant (Ipomoea costata) are a staple food of Aboriginal people throughout Central Australia and the Western Desert. This fire-resistant plant grows in sand plain and spinifex terrain and can be harvested at any time of the year. Increase ceremonies are performed to ensure the productivity of the desert yam, one of a number of vegetal spirit beings associated with specific sites that are represented in early Papunya paintings.

Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri’s Yam Spirit Dreaming 1972 shows many human figures seemingly germinating from and being fed by the branching tuberous roots of this vital food source. The brilliantly observed plant structure metamorphoses into spirit beings, warriors and women with coolamons. Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, by contrast, silhouettes the roots and leaves of the plant and sites associated with the Dreaming against a bright yellow ground.

This is one of two paired public ceremonies held by the Warlpiri and their neighbours originally for the settling of disputes but which today are used as memorial ceremonies for important people associated with these ceremonies. The Ngajakula belongs to the N/Jungarrayi, N/Japaljarri, N/Japangardi, N /Japanangka patrilineal moiety who are spoken of as the owners (kirda). The name of the ceremony belonging to the other patrimoiety is Jardiwarnpa.

In the preliminary phase of the ceremony members of the community gather at the ceremonial ground in the late afternoon and while the men sing of the travels of the ancestral beings, the women dance. In the climax to the ceremony the owners burn themselves with bundles of twigs set alight at a central fire to atone collectively for what they have done. Once all owners have burnt themselves, they stand together while their relatives from the opposite moiety, often called managers (kurdungurlu) who help stage-manage the ceremony, light the great wands of eucalypt leaves and shower sparks over the owners, bringing the ceremony to an end.

The Honey Ant Mural, July 1971
Geoffrey Bardon and his Arerrnte assistant, Obed Raggett, had noticed people drawing designs in the sand at Papunya. Following this precedent, they drew circles and spirals on the blackboard in an unsuccessful attempt to encourage their class of adolescent boys to paint a series of murals on a whitewashed, cement-rendered wall of the Papunya Special School.

In late July 1971, after painting a series of smaller practice murals, seven painters collaborated in the painting of a monumental mural representing the Honey Ant Dreaming specific to the site of Papunya. Working under the direction of custodians Mick Wallangkarri Tjakamarra and Tom Onion Tjapangati, the artists included Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula and Don Ellis Tjapanangka. The Honey Ant Mural, a bold expression of Aboriginal culture in a government settlement, occasioned great rejoicing at Papunya and inspired immense pride in the community.

Kaapa Tjampitjinpa was painting independently and selling his work before Geoffrey Bardon arrived to teach art at Papunya. In September 1971, judge Jo Caddy awarded Kaapa equal first prize with Jan Wesley Smith in the Caltex Art Award in Alice Springs for his Men’s Ceremony for the Kangaroo, Gulgardi. Kaapa’s work, with its pictorial elements and seductive delicacy of detail, is cultivated to appeal to the western gaze. It also recreates the dramatic spectacle of men participating in ceremony and creates an illusion of the third dimension.

Upon the announcement of Kaapa’s historic win in this mainstream art award, a flurry of activity swept though Papunya and within a month, a large group of senior men had begun painting in the ‘traditional manner’. It is the works produced in the Men’s Painting Room, inspired by Kaapa and facilitated by Bardon, that signal the genesis of a new painting movement.

Geoffrey Bardon began working as an art teacher at Papunya Special School in 1971. Concerned that the school’s curriculum, appearance and ethos seemed out of step with Aboriginal culture, Bardon attempted unsuccessfully to involve his class in painting a series of murals on the school walls. Thereupon Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri and others created the Honey Ant Mural, which inspired many senior men to ask Bardon for painting materials and eventually begin painting in the Men’s Painting Room.

Convinced of the groundbreaking importance of what he was witnessing, Bardon made comprehensive photographic, moving film and written records of the artists and the paintings that they produced while he was at Papunya. From his primary research, Bardon wrote three books and made three films that initiated public interest in Western Desert art. In 1988 Bardon was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for his unique contribution to the Western Desert art movement.

In September 1971 the Papunya School Painters Co-operative was set up with three directors: Fred Friis (Principal), Geoffrey Lawson (Deputy Principal) and Geoffrey Bardon, with Obed Raggett acting as translator and negotiator. The co-operative was absorbed into the Papunya Council in 1972.

In June 1972 the name Papunya Tula was born and became a living idea at a gathering at Charley Creek in Alice Springs. Bardon, who was with Charlie Wartuma Tjungurrayi, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, recalled asking the painters what they wanted to call the company. Wartuma blurted out, as if he’d known all his life, “Papunya Tula”. His suggestion was strongly supported by Tim Leura and Namarari because Papunya Tula ‘refers specifically to the smaller of two hills not far from Papunya, a Honey Ant Dreaming site shared equally by all traditional groups in Central Australia and the Western Desert’. (Geoffrey Bardon)

On 16 November 1972, Papunya Tula Artists was incorporated as a company of limited liability with eleven original shareholders. Kaapa Tjampitjinpa was appointed as its first chairman.

In Central Australia, 1928 is remembered as the year of the Coniston Massacre when approximately 110 Anmatyerr, Warlpiri and Kaitetye people were slaughtered on Coniston Station, a day’s ride north of Laramba where Tim Leura and Clifford Possum Leura were born. Constable William Murray and his gang of murderous officers on horseback shattered any illusion that the people of the region could continue to live independently in their own country.

Less than a decade before, Anmatyerr country was finally engulfed by the pastoral frontier with the establishment of Napperby Station. In the aftermath of the ‘the killing times’, the presence of a paternalistic but protective station owner offered several Anmatyerr families a reprieve from the bloodbath of preceding years. In this new reality, those who could adapt and exploit cross-cultural opportunities thrived, however, there were others who struggled to cling on to what was left of their world.

The Anmatyerr artists, the most fluent of the Papunya residents in Aboriginal English, initially created images that were provocative exemplars of men’s customary ritual. Their brilliantly figurative, symmetrical and audacious celebrations of the theatre of performance, superimposed with delicate precision on plain backgrounds, seem to have been influenced by Kaapa’s example. Later this direct visual correspondence mutates into composite sensations and metaphors of nature, as seen in Tim Leura’s and Clifford Possum’s works, that suggest dappled intricacies of light and shade, botanical and topographical variations, and the dynamics of fire, smoke and the brooding melancholy of darkness.

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.

The inland deserts of Australia differ from other arid deserts around the world due to the huge variations in rainfall which allows groups of plants, unique to the Central and Western Deserts, to prosper. The Anmatyerr and Arandic landscapes of mulga flats and gibber plains are punctuated by the dramatic mountains of Karrinyarra and the Western MacDonell Ranges. Further west, the Pintupi terrain of rolling sand dune fields and spinifex hills are interrupted by the vast salt lakes of Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay) and Kaakurutintjinya (Lake Macdonald).

During long periods of unrelenting drought, Aboriginal people across the desert have been sustained by their knowledge of the location of numerous water sources, including rock holes and soakage waters that are fed by underground springs. The landscapes of Central Australia and the Western Desert and the paths of its underground springs were shaped by the actions and events of ancestral beings during the creation period known as the Tjukurrpa (Dreaming).