www.LumaLuma.com - your resource for aboriginal art.

Desert art

The renaissance of modern-day aboriginal art started at the tiny Central Desert community of Papunya, 230 km from Alice Springs with the arrival, in 1971, of a young New South Wales teacher, Geoffrey Bardon.
Bardon was initially fascinated by the children’s drawings of traditional designs in the sand.

The vivid sight of these designs led him to seek out explanations as to their meaning and to suggest the children that they re-created the drawings in the classroom in watercolour on paper. Next a mural project was planned. Seven men started painting on the far, empty wall and created the first acrylic version of the Honey Ant Dreaming., the major dreaming of the area and one which has since probably become the most often painted of all Central desert stories.
In sister Western and Central Desert communities- especially Yuendumu, Balgo Hills, Lajamanu and Utopia- people watched Papunya’s artistic development with interest, but no little reservation.

There were debates about whether traditional art, meant only to be seen by those initiated to a higher level of responsibility, should be made available to a wider audience and whether the art should be sold at all. Reaction was strongest by the Pitjantjatjara of the Ernabella area, who in the early 1970’s lodged a formal complaint to the Aboriginal Art Board about Pitjantjatjara images being viewed publicly. In 1986 Lajamanu elders decided that, properly used, painting for the purpose of selling could be a positive means of keeping the culture alive.

The main forms of traditional visual representations by desert people are sand and body painting made as part of a ceremony. Weapons such as spears and clubs, utilitarian objects such as coolamons (woman’s carrying vessels) and the sacred wood or stone man’s ‘message board’, tjurunga, were also engraved for either decorative or ceremonial purposes.
Body decorations are also an important part of ceremonial practice and made from ochre grounds to a paste with water, then is applied in striped or circular designs to the face and torso.