The Last of the Nomads: Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Walala Tjapaltjarri and Thomas Tjapaltjarri

Antiques & Art In Victoria

April-August, 2003

From the ancient rites and song cycles of the Pintupi, the remote Western Desert language group, (several of whom were still living in the Gibson and Great Sandy Deserts right up until the later 20^th century), come the contemporary paintings of Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Walala Tjapaltjarri and Thomas Tjapaltjarri.

These three brothers made international headlines in 1984 when they arrived out of the desert at Kiwirrkura, a Pintupi settlement near the boarder of Western Australia and the Northern Territory. They can now be counted alongside Australia’s most interesting artists, having been involved in many exhibitions in Australia and overseas.

Their wonderful, seemingly abstract designs, derived from body painting, ground painting and the decoration of traditional artefacts, are being increasingly well received in Australia.

They first made contact with Europeans when they appeared under Kiwirrkura’s water tower in October 1984. A group of nine, it included three women who are now artists, Yakultji Napaltjarri, Yalti Napangardi and Takarria Napaltjarri. Two of the ‘nomads’,Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri and his other brother Pierti Tjapaltjarri (who went back into the desert and became a myth until re-appearing at Ti Tree), had previously approached two the men from Kiwirrkura, the famous artist Pinta Pinta Tjapanangka and his son, at hills north of the settlement: a place called Winparrku.

Tjapanangka and his son, fearing the nomads were ‘Kadaitcha men’, or retribution killers, panicked, scaring off the desert nomads. But these people were relatives of theirs, not seen since the 1950s when most Pintupi had come in to the government reserves. As part of traditional Pintupi law, the nomads had come to make contact with their relatives to perform ‘sorry business’, a mourning process, for a relative who had died. The Pintupi from Kiwirrkura tracked them down and eventually they ‘came in’ from the desert, for good.

Several years later Warlimpirrnga, the eldest of the men, took up a paintbrush after observing artists painting at Kiwirrkura. His first eleven works, exhibited in Melbourne, were bought and donated to the National Gallery of Victoria now NGV Ian Potter Centre for Contemporary Art at Federation Square, a gallery which places Aboriginal art on a worldwide stage. This will no doubt increase local interest in an art movement that has long been held in high-regard by those overseas, particularly Europeans and Americans, who have collected and mounted exhibitions of these works with a vigour that we in Australia should attempt to attain.

Perhaps these Western Desert works, which can be seen as being both representations of an important ancient culture and a fascinating contemporary, seemingly abstract art, are more readily accepted by an audience familiar with Abstract Expressionism and Abstract Minimalist art. In Australia we have never really had a very strong Abstract Expressionist art movement as has the United States, tending to rely on figurative, landscape or narrative works, In fact, it has been argued very convincingly that our greatest Abstract Expressionist artists are Aboriginal artists. They are also Australia’s greatest landscape artists; being the only indigenous people, they have the authority and knowledge to paint the land in a way in which no-one else can. Their ochre paintings are not only depictions of land, they are the land, having been created from the earth itself.

One look at these three artists certainly confirms this view. Their works mostly consist of line work and geometric forms, with the more recognisable ‘dots’ so familiar to us as the major feature of Aboriginal Desert art often used to highlight the lines, as in the early Papunya Tula boards, rather than to fill in the canvas.

The eldest of the skilled draughtsmen in paint is Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri. He was born east of Kiwirrkura in the late 1950s. His paintings depict Tingari stories for his country which is around the sites of Marua and Kanapilya. The Tingari Cycle is a series of secret-sacred mythological songs that are associated with many places throughout Pintupi land, which covers the Gibson and Great Sandy Deserts.

One of his works in Nangara, the Ebes Collection, is a classic example of the Tingari Cycle as represented in Pintupi art. Entitled ‘Tingari at Wala Wala’, this 1995 painting Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay). In mythological times, a group of Tingari men and women travelled to this site to perform ceremonies. Warlimpirrnga has painted roundels, representing rock holes in the country through which they passed, and straight and sinuous lines, which are body paint designs. He creates other paintings derived straight from ancient Pintupi mythology, such as a ‘Bushfire at Wilkinkarra’ and a ‘Dingo Dreaming at Marawa’.

Walala Tjapaltjarri’s work, like all Pintupi painting, represents the travels, camps and activities of the Tingari people in mythological times. Born in about 1960, he was instructed by Warlimpirrnga in the use of acrylic paints, and paints his inherited Dreaming sites. These include eleven sites, located throughout his country near Wilkinkarra. They are Marua, Minatarnpi, Tarrku, Njami and Yarrawangu as well as Mina Mina, an important women’s site made famous by Warlpiri artist Dorothy Napangardi Robinson.

Walala’s works often relate to the ancestral Tingari men’s initiation rites (called malliera) held in the Gibson Desert. Like other great masters of contemporary Aboriginal art, such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Rover Thomas, Walala often used a bi-chromatic colour scheme that is simultaneously incredibly contemporary and also ancient.

His younger brother Thomas Tjapaltjarri, born at Murruwa, east of Kiwirrkura, sometime in the 1970s, started painting once he reached the correct age. Like many Aboriginal artists, he depicts his birthplace in his paintings. Marruwa has ‘tali tjuta’ many sand hills and also contains imagery, like Walala’s works, associated with malliera. This he inherits from his Tjungurrayi father and his Tjapaltjarri grandfather. I find his work to be as compelling as his brothers’, if not even more so, not just for the exquisite beauty of some of his paintings, but also for the variety of styles he is capable of painting in.

Pintupi art is undisputedly one of the most important art movements to have happened in Australia over the past 30 years. The desert art movement which began at Papunya in 1971 was largely comprised of Pintupi men, now all deceased. Their great spirits and knowledge of the land are remembered only in the few public galleries and museums where this work can be viewed, or seen once a year when they appear for tens or even hundred of thousands of dollars in the Aboriginal art auctions. Their remaining wives, sisters and daughters are continuing their mission, to preserve in paint the laws and mythology of the Pintupi those ‘great free men of the Gibson Desert’, as Geoffrey Bardon called them. Very few of their sons and grandsons are painters, not willing or able to keep up the traditions.

The three Tjapaltjarris paint designs which have been passed down for thousands of years unchanged; evidence of an important and unique civilisation that has survived at the end of the 20^th century in one of the harshest terrains known to humankind.