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once before – an utterly mad distance at the time – to
paint watercolours of the desert’s interior and take them
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have been deeply inspired, so much so that he might
have asked himself the logical question: if a foreigner
could paint his country and get money for it, why couldn’t
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nius would lead to an explosion in modern Australian
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economic empowerment and, in doing so, fundamentally
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this country. The Papunya Tula artist cooperative and the
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more than one hundred paintings a year.:LWK %DWWDUEHHpV
instruction, encouragement and promotion in Melbourne,
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room may seem clichéd today, but the image betrayed
something far more profound about what was then a
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straightforward and domestic way, a popular trend that
could have easily been mistaken for cultural appropria
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buildings and gardens now, however subtly, adorned
their walls.
This wasn’t intellectual painting – not in the mod
ernist sense, at least. And not surprisingly, academic
critics at the time had neither the sensitivity nor the
feeling for Central Australian nature to appreciate and
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nation’s injustices back onto the popular conscious
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tinction – as an Australian citizen, with rights not shared
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upon his death pronounced: ‘In spite of many honest
attempts to make him happy and a valuable member
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tary about the famed painter’s life – and a very admi
rable one at that. Constructed out of three intertwining
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tive quality, threading its convergent stories into one
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much bigger social and cultural challenges. One strand
uses remarkable archival footage to chart his biography:
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