Aboriginal Art - Papunya, the beginning of an art movement....

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Papunya is significant for being the birthplace of the Aboriginal Art movement in the early 1970's. This was a time when the Europeans literally rounded up the Aboriginal people and bought them into compounds. The idea was to teach them to become cooks, cleaners, handymen etc. Parents were separated from their children, they weren't allowed to speak in their native tongue. While the parents worked, the children attended school to be taught to read, write and speak english.

Geoffrey Bardon, a teacher at Papunya, noticed that while the children were in class, when he asked them to paint eg a kangaroo, they would paint white man's way; the kangaroo had two ears, nose tail, but when they were in the playground the kangaroo was depicted as tracks in the sand...the children painted their traditional way. Geoffrey encouraged the children to paint Aboriginal way in class.

A group of men, who were there to do school maintenance, watched as the children painted, they asked for paper and paints to also be allowed to paint. I guess you can imagine how wonderful it would be for the spirit to be able to do something that is so familiar to you, after being made to do things that are totally foreign.

The men starting painting on anything that was available, table tops, window frames...anything was OK when the paper and canvas ran out. Geoffrey had a huge amount of paintings so he took them to Darwin, sold them and gave the men their money. From very humble beginnings the art movement had started.........

Bardon encouraged the local elders to join together to paint a school mural, this did create some debate amongst them, they had only painted traditional way., except for Kaapa Tjampitjinpa who had painted the odd board before.

Old Tom Tjapangati, the owner of Honey Any Dreaming gave his permission for Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Mick Tjakamarra and Long Jack Tjakamarra and others to paint the school mural. Sadly when Bardon left Papunya in 1972 the authorities ordered it to be destroyed, they felt things were getting out of hand, their idea was to get rid of Aboriginal traditions, not encourage them.......as we now know this didn't work....other artists continued the journey and the Papunya Tula Artist's Cooperative was formed....

next article.....Aboriginal art to the world.....