Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art

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.