Judith Ryan: Of paint and possession 2.

Aboriginal art has moved to the forefront
of contemporary art practice in Australia

From Western Desert symbols to Namatjira's watercolours

The origins of the Western Desert art movement in Papunya, a government assimilation settlement 250km northwest of Alice Springs, in the early 1970s are well known. The situation was very different from that in Arnhem Land, but the same attachment to country was the driving force.

The Papunya of 1971, where more than 1400 Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Pitjantjatjara peoples were stationed for their supposed advancement, was a place with a high morbidity rate, riots and despair. The senior men, ill prepared to make the transition to a sedentary existence, were motivated to take up painting by a need to assert the strength of their culture against the odds, as Charlie Tjararu Tjungurrayi famously expressed it: "If I don't paint this story some white fella might come and steal my country."

With their painting, the men positioned themselves in concerted opposition to white officialdom at a settlement built to silence their language and stifle their culture. By revealing the ancestral designs that invoke power in ritual contexts, they asserted the importance of their culture to the colonisers and controllers of their destiny.

They dared to invent a permanent visual language out of the dangerous symbols hitherto kept closeted on the ceremonial ground, away from the sight of women and young men - to the distress and anger of senior men from outlying communities.

The first works, painted on scraps of recycled board, were completely different in medium and style to other forms of Aboriginal art then known: the bark paintings, carvings and artefacts of northern Australia and the watercolour landscapes painted by Albert Namatjira and other western Arrarnda artists at Hermannsburg mission from 1936 onwards.

Namatjira's watercolours the first Aboriginal works produced in Central Australia for the commercial market - were greatly admired by the general public for his faithful observation of the landscape, their-heightened colour and the clarity of the sunlight which illuminated them. Starved of access to the red centre, the public warmed to these images of the heart of their continent, though unaware of the artist's deep spiritual affinity with this land and the sacred narratives it holds.

Namatjira was quick to adopt for his own purposes Western techniques and the Western way of depicting land: in profile perspective with a horizon line. He knew the land intimately from within and was absorbed by the impact of light on solid form and the way colour modulates over distance. He didn't include men's sacred designs, or reveal the spiritual associations of particular places, but that didn't lessen the commercial value of his watercolours to a public less informed about the wider context of Aboriginal art than it is today.

Namatjira's work was enthusiastically collected by people attuned to the dominance of the landscape tradition in Australian painting and for whom Central Australia held a certain romantic attraction.

The assimilationist policies of the time, aimed at the "whitening" of indigenous Australia, made Namaljira's watercolours more marketable in 1940s and '50s Australia than ancestral designs would have been.

Namatjira, the first Central Australian artist of renown, died tragically in custody in 1959, an outcast in his own land, but he foreshadowed the emergence of contemporary Central Desert painting 12 years later.

The founding artists worked with the detritus of the settlement unwanted fruit box ends, floor tiles and scraps of composition board. But the closeness of the first paintings to their source in men's law gave the works a solenm liturgical power, pointing to cosmological secrets. A new art form was forged that is startling in its directness and power and in its combination of figuration and abstraction.

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