Martha MacDonald Napaltjarri (in foreground) and Mona Nangala painting at Papunya Tjupi art centre, Papunya, 2015. Photo: Helen Puckey

Have you heard of Papunya? The birthplace of what is touted as the century’s greatest art movement? The Conversation looks at how the movement has given birth to indigenous artists’ collectives, transformed communities, empowered women and forms a grand narrative on Aboriginal art:

The emergence of ‘dot’ paintings by Indigenous men from the western deserts of Central Australia in the early 1970s has been called the greatest art movement of the twentieth century.It all changed at a place called Papunya. Papunya was a ‘sit-down’ place established in the early 1960s, 240 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory (NT). The settlement brought together people from several western desert language groups: the Pintupi, Warlpiri, Arrernte (Aranda), Luritja, and the Anmatyerr, who were unaccustomed to living in close proximity to each other. Papunya was described as a ‘centralised government settlement established as a marshalling point for Aboriginal people displaced from their traditional lands’ (Curator Hetti Perkins, Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, Art Gallery of New South Wales– external site, 2000).

In 1971 art teacher Geoffrey Bardon had been appointed to the school at Papunya. He had found a dispossessed and dispirited community, struggling to maintain cultural practices against the full force of assimilationist policy. A simple school mural project brought him into contact with senior men who were custodians for the Tjukurrpa (ancestral stories). Although Bardon encouraged the children to draw their own stories, the senior men did not permit them to do the drawings. The senior men’s mural (known only through photographs as it was painted over by the administration soon after it was made) started the process of transcribing body markings and sand drawings onto more conventional painting supports. The so-called ‘dot and circle’ style had been born.