Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya

Aboriginal art has been a dominant movement in contemporary Australian art over the last 10 years. This statement would have been almost unthinkable 20 – or even 15 – years ago as Australia’s indigenous populations struggled for mainstream recognition of the importance of their culture to their very existence. Here were a people decimated by the arrival of Europeans, people whose land had been stripped from them and their families torn apart by official government policy. Not only in the 18th or 19th centuries, but well into the 20th as well. Tens of thousands of years of Dreaming washed away by a flood of convicts and settlers, their diseases, their ideas, their intentions, both good and bad.

Aboriginal people – like many prehistoric cultures – had expressed themselves through rock and cave art prior to European settlement, but the transition from ancient expression to modern art is a relatively recent phenomenon.

One of the early and most celebrated contemporary movements emerged in Papunya, a remote settlement in some 240km north-west of Alice Springs (and Uluru) in the Northern Territory. The settlement was the creation of the Australian Government, intended in the 1950s to house indigenous people who had moved (or been moved) in from the desert. But as the community grew, so did its problems: poor standards of living, health problems, and issues between tribal and linguistic groups who had been absentmindedly thrown together.

It wasn’t until 1971 that art and culture were again allowed to flourish. The ex-Sydney school teacher Geoffrey Bardon had arrived to work in the settlement, and it was he who provided the people of Papunya with the resources and encouragement they needed to express themselves using paint. The artists – mostly high-ranking tribal men – went about transferring their cultural identity onto a permanent surface.

The art movement itself may have been new, but the inspiration behind it was largely based on tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal culture, on the Dreamtime – the very foundation of Aboriginality and the story of creation.

Taking Papunya to the World

Icons of the Desert Catalogue: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya is the catalogue that accompanied an exhibition of the same name when it visited the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, UCLA’s Fowler Museum and the Grey Art Gallery at New York University during 2009. A catalogue this book may officially be, but like all good exhibition catalogues, it’s also a fine book in its own right. It's a wonderful record of one of the Australian art world’s most important contemporary movements, and the first to systematically involve Aboriginal people in modern art.

The book features 49 dot paintings from the exhibition – some of the earliest paintings by indigenous Australians, and also some of the most important. Not only are the paintings extremely important to the Australian art world, they are significant to the world art movement – and in particular those reflecting indigenous art – because some of the featured works have rarely been seen outside a small circle of Papunya insiders. That's because several of the paintings include sacred imagery and depictions of ritual objects used in men's ceremonies that would normally be viewable only by initiated men within the Aboriginal community. However, for the first time, some of these senior painters granted special permission for their work to travel to America for inclusion in this exhibition.

Many of the other featured paintings are from the collection of Americans John and Barbara Wilkerson, who thanks to their admiration for the Papunya movement and their careful and astute research, have amassed one of the most prestigious Aboriginal art collections in the world.

Artists featured in the book include some of the great names of 20th century indigenous art: Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Uta Uta Tjangala, Charlie Tarawa (Tjaruru) Tjungurrayi, and Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi, among others. The exhibition's centrepiece is Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula's 1972 work Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa. This painting set the world record for Aboriginal art when it was sold for $210,000 by Sotheby's in 1997; it sold again three years later for $486,500. 

A Permanent Record of Important Ancient Stories

Icons of the Desert is the first book to focus on the foundations of the Papunya movement, which flourished between 1971 and 1973 against the wishes of the Australian government. The paintings – only around a thousand were produced with fewer than 800 surviving the years – have the freshness of trial and error, of experimentation, and of growth and development of expression. Documentary photographs of some of these works being produced are included in the book, allowing the reader to meet the artists and see them at work.

There is a chronological catalogue documenting the works, and a preface by Hetti Perkins, one of the country’s leading indigenous curators. The lead essay is authored by the book's editor Roger Benjamin, who situates the works in their historical and cultural context.

There are also fascinating interviews with relatives of some of the now deceased painters. These provide a wonderful insight into the development and importance of the movement, as well as the way it evolved in line with the rules of the cultural beliefs system. One woman interviewed, Emma Nangala, had been only a young girl when her father, Old Walter Tjampitjinpa, was painting. The Papunya school had been regarded as ‘men’s business’, so Emma had never actually seen her father’s work until Dick Kimber, who had been a schoolteacher at Papunya in 1971, returned to interview her for this book. Upon seeing one of her father's paintings, she pieces together its significance, and highlights features of the work that relate to her father's understanding of the Dreamtime, and to a sacred place he once lived.

These interviews, woven together in a beautiful narrative, are insightful and inspirational, and shed light on the importance of the Dreaming. The artists – largely tribesmen who had had no contact with white people until the 1930s – were able to use their art to capture their heritage and to document their ancient stories, thus keeping alive the core essence of Aboriginality, one that was once threatened with extinction. Through the fame and the beauty of Papunya, those stories are now being heard by an even wider audience.