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40th Birthday

Updated October 04, 2011 14:24:00

A new exhibition looks back at the early development of Western Desert Art.

Source: 7.30 NT | Duration: 6min 29sec

Topics: indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, painting, events, library-museum-and-gallery, indigenous-culture, community-organisations, aboriginal, australia, nt, papunya-0872


LOUISA REBGETZ, PRESENTER: It's been labelled a watershed moment in the history of art. Forty years ago Aboriginal people in the community of Papunya in Central Australia began painting their traditional designs on boards. The Western Desert Art Movement was born. Today Indigenous art is an industry worth tens of millions of dollars. Now a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria looks back at those first works from four decades ago. Genevieve Hussey reports.

JUDITH RYAN, NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA: We have two hundred of these early works and there was a great sense of passion excitement and also a strong bond between the artists.

TIM KLINGENDER, SENIOR CONSULTANT, BONHAMS: They were really revealing to the outside world their connection to their land and to their country and what's more they were absolutely beautiful and stunning designs.

GENEVIEVE HUSSEY, REPORTER: This exhibition of hundreds of rare paintings and artefacts celebrates the beginning of the Western Desert art movement - the movement that emerged just forty years ago when Aboriginal people in Central Australia first began painting on boards.

TIM KLINGENDER, SENIOR CONSULTANT, BONHAMS: The birth of the Western Desert art movement in the early 70s was really the catalyst for the whole flowering of Indigenous art throughout this country.

LOUISA REBGETZ: In the early 1970s art teacher Geoffrey Bardon was posted to the central Australian government settlement of Papunya. It had about two and half thousand Aboriginal residents. Geoffrey Bardon encouraged them to take the depictions of their stories that they made in the sand and paint them on permanent surfaces.

PAUL SWEENEY, MANAGER, PAPUNYA TULA ARTISTS: They painted on anything they could find - a fence paling or pieces of cardboard.

GEOFFREY BARDON, FILE: They'd even use my shoe polish - white shoe-cleaner - when we ran out of white and painted on floor tiles that were just lying idle where the tilers had left them.

JUDITH RYAN, NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA: Geoffrey Bardon knew that he was witnessing something profound. Ephemeral designs usually only seen in a ceremonial context were transformed into a new art medium.

TIM KLINGENDER, SENIOR CONSULTANT, BONHAMS: Within six months they become really quite elaborate and intricate designs and you can see that the artists were really trying to beat each other at what they were doing and being inspired by each other. So it was certainly an extraordinary artistic frenzy.

GENEVIEVE HUSSEY: Geoffrey Bardon made the operation a commercial enterprise, establishing Papunya Tula Artists - a company owned entirely by the artists.

JUDITH RYAN, NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA: This first co-operative of artists has been the model for art centres Aboriginal owned throughout Australia. This is a company that is still flourishing.

GENEVIEVE HUSSEY: In Alice Springs one famous early Papunya work - the Karpa board which won an art prize in 1971 - has been taken from the gallery wall and is being shipped to Melbourne for the exhibition. It's just one of 200 early works gathered from galleries and private collectors worldwide.

TIM KLINGENDER, SENIOR CONSULTANT, BONHAMS: Judith Ryan and her team have really scoured the globe looking for the greatest early Papunya boards and bringing them back together for the first time on such a grand scale.

GENEVIEVE HUSSEY: Today Papunya Tula has 120 artists on its books. Their work is worth millions of dollars and sells around the world.

TIM KLINGENDER, SENIOR CONSULTANT, BONHAMS: There've often been the naysayers who've said that when the older generation of artists pass on that there won't be a continuing tradition or there won't be such great art being produced but it couldn't be further from the truth.

GENEVIEVE HUSSEY: Bobby West Tjupurrula's father was one of the original Papunya Tula painters.

BOBBY WEST TJUPURRULA, ARTIST: I wanted to paint too because that's the only way to you know, show and tell a story about your places, your rock hole, dreamtime.

GENEVIEVE HUSSEY: Artists from Central Australia - including some of the original Papunya Tula painters have travelled to Melbourne to see the work on display.

BOBBY WEST TJUPURRULA, ARTIST: We're going to show the paintings in Melbourne, really old painting and have celebration and tell the story.

GENEVIEVE HUSSEY: In Kintore, 500 kilometres west of Alice Springs, painting is still a way of life and art has brought real benefit to the community. Money raised by an art auction funded a dialysis unit which means locals with kidney disease don't have to travel to Alice Springs for treatment.

PAUL SWEENEY, MANAGER, PAPUNYA TULA ARTISTS: It's obviously an industry and a huge economy and it provides people with the ability to fund their own lives, to take control of them, to not sit around waiting for checks to arrive from the government.

GENEVIEVE HUSSEY: But like many businesses Indigenous art has borne the brunt of the Global Financial Crisis. The industry hopes the exhibition will generate new interest.

TIM KLINGENDER, SENIOR CONSULTANT, BONHAMS: Indigenous art, perhaps more than traditional Australian art, has been affected to some extent. I do know though when there is a retrospective on an artist's work there is a rejuvenated interest in that artist and people want to own the works.

GENEVIEVE HUSSEY: The exhibition has already generated overseas interest with a showing in Paris next year. But for now Australians are being urged to take a look.

JUDITH RYAN, NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA: This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for Australians to come and see for themselves these paintings brought together. It's an opportunity that is not to be missed.

LOUISA REBGETZ: Genevieve Hussey with that story.