The Western Desert Movement had its beginnings in the use of rubbish materials on which to paint; the human agents, the painters were people rejected from a society in its esteem for its values and they were very much aware that the white authorities considered them rubbish too.
Geoffrey Bardon
Geoffrey Bardon’s Papunya: A Place Made After the Story captures a pivotal moment in the history of Australian Aboriginal art: the beginnings of the Western Desert painting movement. This movement altered the course of Australian contemporary art and changed the way Australia and the rest of the world viewed Aboriginal art and culture. James Bardon in his eulogy for his brother Geoffrey in May 2003 described this book as ‘a vast and benign planet approaching us even as I speak, so as to change the lives of all Australians forever’.
Geoffrey Bardon was a young and naïve schoolteacher who came to Papunya in 1971. Papunya was a government ration station in which indigenous people from Pintupi, Walpiri, Anmatjira Aranda and Loritja language groups had been coerced to live together. He was shocked by the despondency of the Aboriginal people and the hostility and vindictiveness of white authorities.
Bardon encouraged the children to create images based on their own culture rather than Western-style drawing, and earned the nickname Mr Patterns. His activities inspired the trust and interest of senior men, which led to a remarkable outpouring of their cultural knowledge through painting. These men were employed at Papunya to do menial tasks such as chopping wood and sweeping yards. Some had previously worked in the pastoral industry; others, such as the Pintupi, had made contact with white society only in 1960. Many of these men spoke no English. On masonite and building scraps they began to paint designs derived from ceremonial practices that revealed knowledge of their law and country.
Some 25 artists began working with Bardon, and this publication is a tribute to their achievements. Paul Carter in his introductory essay considers the publication of the documentation of these early paintings of the Papunya Tula movement as equivalent to recovering the frescoes painted by Giorgione and Titian that once graced the Grand Canal. There is no question of the cultural significance of these paintings. They were not art for art’s sake, in a Western sense, but a resolute assertion of Aboriginality.
Geoffrey Bardon has two previous publications on his time at Papunya: Aboriginal Art of the