Aboriginal Art.
A living story.

A much longer beginning

Art did not begin in 1971.

Aboriginal art belongs to many peoples, languages and Countries. Its histories reach back many thousands of years and include rock painting and engraving, work on bark and objects, weaving, designs on the ground and the body, and much more. There is no single Aboriginal art style, and dot painting does not stand for every community’s traditions.

Country is also more than scenery. It includes relationships among land, waters, skies, living beings, knowledge and cultural law. A painting can carry responsibilities and connections that are not immediately visible to an outside viewer. Contemporary Aboriginal artists work across a wide range of materials and forms; being contemporary does not make that cultural connection less significant.

What changed at Papunya was a particular public painting practice: artists brought inherited knowledge into works made with new materials that could circulate beyond the community. Acrylic paintings on boards and canvas became a powerful new chapter within much older, continuing cultures.

Central Australia · 1971

A turning point at Papunya.

Papunya was established as a government settlement in 1959, west of Alice Springs. People from different language groups lived there, including Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri, Anmatyerr and Kukatja families. Displacement from homelands and the pressures of assimilation form an essential part of the background. This was not an empty place waiting for someone to bring culture to it.

In 1971, men began making portable paintings with acrylic paint and small boards. Early sales brought both recognition and a possible livelihood. The National Museum describes the excitement when paintings taken to Alice Springs earned money for their makers, although finding dependable markets and supplies remained difficult.

The school wall

The Honey Ant mural became a focal point. Senior custodians Mick Wallangkarri Tjakamarra and Tom Onion Tjapangati directed the work, with painters including Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula and Don Ellis Tjapanangka. Permission and cultural authority mattered: this was a community-led expression, rather than decoration chosen by an outsider.

Geoffrey Bardon—and the people beside him

Bardon, an art teacher who arrived in 1971, encouraged the school-wall project and helped artists obtain materials and reach audiences. His role was important, but the artists brought the knowledge, designs, skill and authority. Papunya Tula’s own history places the painters and the company they established at the heart of the movement.

Support that made a difference

David Wroth’s 2014 account for Japingka Gallery describes Bardon’s approximately 18 months at Papunya. When he encouraged children to paint from their own experience, senior men drew attention to the knowledge held by older people. The account describes artists from several language groups working together to decide what could be shared with a public audience.

Wroth also describes administrative resistance to supporting an art enterprise. Bardon helped obtain materials, arranged a painting area in a Town Hall hut storeroom in 1972, and sought buyers in Alice Springs. These practical efforts helped paintings reach an audience. The artists’ knowledge, choices and work remained the foundation of the movement.

Obed Raggett, Bardon’s Arrernte assistant, also deserves recognition. The NGV account records his work as a translator and negotiator. Such relationships helped the project happen, even when brief retellings remember only the teacher’s name.

An essential part of the story

Where were the women?

The 1971 mural and the first publicly recognised Papunya painting group were led by men. That is different from saying women had no art or cultural knowledge. The National Museum records that women at Papunya were discouraged from painting independently during the 1970s, partly because management believed the company’s limited resources could not support more painters. Women continued making work in other forms, including painted and carved coolamons and dancing boards.

The exhibition developed by Kluge-Ruhe with Papunya Tula Artists describes wives and daughters helping the early male painters, sometimes dotting backgrounds, and some women painting informally. It also identifies Pansy Napangardi among the women making a place for themselves in the early 1980s. Informal assistance, cultural authority, and formal recognition as a company artist are different kinds of involvement; the surviving records do not give us an evenly mixed founding group in 1971.

Daisy Leura Nakamarra

Daisy, an Anmatyerr artist, learned painting from her husband Tim Leura and joined Papunya Tula in the early 1980s. The National Museum describes her as one of the first women in the company to gain recognition. A senior law woman, she deliberately kept restricted ceremonial imagery out of her paintings and often painted bush-food subjects. Her choices show an artist actively deciding what to share with a public audience.

The women who insisted on painting

In 1994, women at Walungurru (Kintore), including a group led by Mantua Nangala, secured support from Marina Strocchi for a collaborative workshop. Another workshop followed in 1995, and the paintings were shown at Tandanya in Adelaide that July. Papunya Tula held its first exhibition of women’s paintings in 1996. Artists including Makinti Napanangka, Ningura Napurrula, Tjunkiya Napaltjarri and Wintjiya Napaltjarri helped transform the company’s painting practice.

A wider story than one company

Women’s painting across Central Australia cannot be reduced to Papunya Tula’s chronology. At Utopia, Emily Kame Kngwarreye developed a remarkable approach to dots and colour. The National Museum traces her movement from the structures of batik into expansive fields of dots, varying their scale, density and rhythm. Her example belongs beside the Papunya story without being folded into its 1971 founding group.

Looking with a little more care

Why dots—and why no single answer?

Dots were not invented by a schoolteacher in the 1970s. Earlier body and ground designs were part of the cultural knowledge artists brought to painting. Public images raised difficult questions about what could be shown, and to whom. Some painters altered or veiled imagery, with layered dots helping reveal and conceal different levels of knowledge. That is part of the history, rather than a complete explanation for every dot in every painting.

Dots also became a field of extraordinary artistic invention. In Johnny Warangkula’s work, layered marks can evoke vegetation responding to rain, as well as producing an active, shimmering surface. Artists varied spacing, colour, pressure and rhythm. Treating all dot paintings as interchangeable camouflage would overlook that creativity and each painter’s particular relationship to place.

A visual language is not a universal code

A circle, a line or a field of dots cannot be reliably translated with a single internet “symbol dictionary”. The National Museum shows how a similar motif can carry different meanings in different works. The artist’s own account, and what the artist has chosen to make public, provide a better starting point than guessing from appearance.

New materials, continuing ownership

In 1972 the artists established Papunya Tula Artists. The company is owned and directed by Aboriginal people of the Western Desert. As families returned to homelands during the 1980s, its work extended to communities including Kintore and Kiwirrkurra. The company’s account explains that public paintings require careful choices about ancestral designs and restricted material. Its purpose includes supporting individual artists, economic development and the continuation of cultural heritage.

The resulting paintings belong in the story of contemporary art. The NGV’s 1985 exhibition The Face of the Centre recognised the artists’ innovation in transferring earlier, often impermanent practices into durable new media. The achievement was both continuity and change: new kinds of paintings made by artists with their own intellectual and cultural foundations.