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Melinda Hinkson on Papunya's place in history.

Article Excerpt
Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, The Miegunyah Press, 2004.

When Geoffrey Bardon arrived at Papunya in January 1971 to take up a teaching position in the school, the government settlement was just a decade old. Sited for its decent supply of bore water, Papunya had on one level been established in response to a severe drought that had dried up water sources and denuded the hunting grounds of Central Australian Aborigines in the mid to late 1950s. It would become home to hundreds of people from four major tribal groupings, drawn by starvation, curiosity or in pursuit of relatives who had earlier left their customary lands to the west, north, south and east. But the new sedentary existence did not suit these nomadic people and trauma, distress, sickness and death followed. People who had once lived in small mobile groups and only congregated in large numbers for special events were now forced to live cheek by jowl. The indifference and disdain expressed towards them by many of the white officials charged with running the settlement, and the melancholy despair that flourished as a result of the stifling deeply held cultural imperatives, produced the demoralising features of this new outback ghetto.

That out of such a devastated social landscape would grow one of the most significant art movements of the twentieth century remains a matter of considerable wonder. Three decades after Aboriginal men of Papunya began to paint their ancestral designs on plywood, particle board, scraps of old wood, and any other materials they could get their hands on, their early paintings trade on the secondary art market for hundreds of thousands of dollars. If anything, the passing of time has witnessed...