Melinda Hinkson on Papunya's place in history.

Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, The Miegunyah Press, 2004.

When Geoffrey Bardon arrived at Papunya in January 1971 to take up a teaching position in the school, the government settlement was just a decade old. Sited for its decent supply of bore water, Papunya had on one level been established in response to a severe drought that had dried up water sources and denuded the hunting grounds of Central Australian Aborigines in the mid to late 1950s. It would become home to hundreds of people from four major tribal groupings, drawn by starvation, curiosity or in pursuit of relatives who had earlier left their customary lands to the west, north, south and east. But the new sedentary existence did not suit these nomadic people and trauma, distress, sickness and death followed. People who had once lived in small mobile groups and only congregated in large numbers for special events were now forced to live cheek by jowl. The indifference and disdain expressed towards them by many of the white officials charged with running the settlement, and the melancholy despair that flourished as a result of the stifling deeply held cultural imperatives, produced the demoralising features of this new outback ghetto.

That out of such a devastated social landscape would grow one of the most significant art movements of the twentieth century remains a matter of considerable wonder. Three decades after Aboriginal men of Papunya began to paint their ancestral designs on plywood, particle board, scraps of old wood, and any other materials they could get their hands on, their early paintings trade on the secondary art market for hundreds of thousands of dollars. If anything, the passing of time has witnessed an intensification rather than a waning of interest in Papunya paintings.

Geoffrey Bardon is a key figure in this history. What started as his simple encouragement of children to paint 'blackfella way' in the Papunya school classroom soon expanded into a thriving set of programs in drawing, painting, ceramic art production and screen printing that drew in significant numbers of Papunya's adult residents. The pinnacle of all this activity was the establishment of the Great Painting Room in which the men of Papunya secured for themselves a semi-private space in which they produced the crown jewels of this creativity, and many of the 1000 paintings completed during the eighteen months Bardon spent with them.

Papunya, A Place Made After the Story documents an extraordinary moment in Australian (post)colonial history. It is also the culmination of a remarkable life's work, work largely achieved in an eighteen-month period, and at immense personal cost. Bardon's own story is one of great tragedy. He was forced to leave Papunya after suffering a major physical and mental breakdown. As a result of the treatment he subsequently received at Chelmsford psychiatric hospital, Bardon spent the rest of his life on a disability pension. He produced two earlier books and a film on Papunya art, but Papunya stands in a league of its own. It was published eighteen months after Bardon's death, with his brother James credited as co-author. Its centrepiece is the photographic reproduction and documentation of nearly 500 of the works produced by men in the time Bardon spent with them. The cataloguing of the works on its own makes the book an impressive and important historical document. But Papunya is fascinating for other reasons as well.

Bardon's introductory essays convey a raw and vivid sense of the social context in which this explosion of artistic expression occurred. He incisively conjures up the Papunya of his time, and his candid reflections on his own interventions in the men's painting practice bring to the fore issues regarding the complex intercultural enterprise of contemporary Aboriginal art production. The critical and precarious role of white intermediaries and the complex and ultimately unbridgeable gulf of cross-cultural communication are themes lodged at the heart of Bardon's venture. Filtering through these tensions is a strong sense of the high regard and friendship that bound Bardon to the black residents of Papunya.

This is not a book to read for orthodox anthropological insight into Western Desert painting. Bardon reveals his astonishment at the gulf of miscommunication that continued between him and his painting companions despite the many months they spent in intensive daily interaction. While his capacity to grasp the cultural imperatives that lie at the heart of Western Desert painting is, by Bardon's own admission, limited, he successfully conveys a social context that tends to receive only passing attention in many scholarly works on Aboriginal art: the dire poverty and dependence that drew Aboriginal men and women into menial forms of work, which in turn reinforced the settlement's stark racialised hierarchy; the hostile disregard, if not outright disdain, shown towards them by many white residents; the apocalyptic living conditions and ill health; the despair and distress are conjured up by Bardon with vivid starkness.

Against such a backdrop it is not surprising that the arrival of a person with genuine interest in and respect for Aboriginal people would draw forth such a deluge of passionate and productive activity. Bardon broke the mould of what Aborigines living at Papunya had come to expect of white residents. He presented himself as eager to learn, moving freely through the camps, regularly taking children on picnics and swimming excursions and men on hunting expeditions in his Kombi van. And above all else, as an accomplished artist himself, Bardon showed great interest in Aboriginal artistic traditions.

That he was at Papunya immediately prior to the Whitlam Government's implementation of a new policy approach in Aboriginal affairs --the replacement of assimilation and integration with self-determination and recognition of land rights --gives Bardon's account a particular prescience. In the early 1970s Papunya's Aboriginal residents had no transport of their own and were restricted in their movement by government regulations. Their painting was an inexhaustible process of invoking the cosmological world that bound them to the distant country that sedentary life had taken from them. Driving the vigour of their painting was a will to keep alive this cosmological anchorage to their sense of who they were. In Bardon's words, painting allowed them to become 'free men in an otherwise brutal and degrading environment'. Tensions arose as the painting men were drawn away from their daily work as woodchoppers, groundsmen and gardeners and in response the settlement manager refused to pay their training allowances. Concerned about the ramifications of this, Bardon himself attempted to discourage the artists from coming to him to paint with such frequency. But, he recalled, 'nothing would stop them from their painting'.

A central focus of Bardon's narrative is the documentation of the painting of the majestic Honey Ant mural that senior men put on the walls of the Papunya school in 1971, under the sympathetic watch of the then Head Teacher. The painting of the mural was a powerfully symbolic act, a statement regarding the abiding vigour of Aboriginal knowledge and the authority of the men who produced it, a statement that directly challenged the prevailing views of white authorities and the imposed hegemony of European education. Yet the cross-cultural accommodation and respect reflected in the mural project was fragile, and soon after Bardon's departure the murals were painted over, re-establishing a clear and unambiguous message about where authority in Papunya lay.

Bardon was keen to portray himself as having cultivated a traditionalist approach in the painting men, from directing their aesthetic development ('nothing is to be whitefella'), through to selecting colours ('the painters used traditional colours because I did not want to harm or change what was clearly a traditional design'). Yet his reflections reveal painting at Papunya to have been a complex intercultural endeavour. Bardon's aspiration--to produce a collection of works that revealed 'nothing secret or sacred'--that could be used as teaching materials in the school, was not shared by the artists. They were driven by a different set of imperatives. They were painting not for children but for themselves, for heartfelt memories of their country, to invoke their ancestral inheritance. At times the men produced works they chose not to explain to Bardon, who was not initiated into their world of customary responsibility. Laughter, singing and 'roaring out to their creations' charged the painting room with a vital energy. Yet over time the men deliberately secularised their aesthetic. Passionate debate over what was appropriate to send into a public sphere the artists only partly comprehended, let alone controlled, saw them modify their iconography considerably. They were painting for themselves, but they were also painting to make money, and thus a particular kind of pragmatic approach was required.

Just a few years after Bardon left Papunya, the new administrative landscape of Aboriginal affairs allowed the Pintupi, the core of the early great painters, to leave the settlement and return to their customary lands. They set up a temporary outstation at Yayi Yayi--the scene of Fred Myers' Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, and his more recent Painting Culture--before moving to establish a new permanent township hundreds of kilometres further west at Walungurru (Kintore). This relocation by no means solved the problems that were prevalent at Papunya. But ceremonial life resumed and painting continued to flourish.

On Bardon's last visit to the region in 1990-1, he thought the art being produced 'a counterfeit expression' of what had been painted two decades earlier. These new paintings, it seemed to him, 'were no longer for Aboriginal people at all ... the hieroglyphs seemed to talk only about themselves in the frame, rather than any identifiable place or story'. There are echoes here of a sentiment expressed by other advisers to Aboriginal artists in Central Australia, a sentiment suggesting that truly authentic works will no longer be produced after the passing on of the first generation of path-breaking artists. It is true that those coming behind have had thoroughly different life experiences, and lack the deep understanding of their ancestral inheritance that their nomadic parents and grandparents depended upon for their very survival. Surely, in this profound ontological shift artistic expression must change. At one level Bardon's despondency about the future seems justified. But there are other things going on here that he overlooks. The current generation of artists have inherited a great legacy from those who came before them--art production is the only culturally inspired endeavour that has earned Aboriginal people a consistent income over a sustained period. Over time, more and more Western and Central Desert people have taken to painting, women as well as men. They have strategically continued to alter their aesthetic to appeal to the changing interests of the market while simultaneously withholding from this domain their most cherished cultural knowledge.

Yet the most important response to Bardon's despondency must be this: walk into any major public gallery in Australia today and Aboriginal art is prominently placed to hit you in the eye. It is just two decades since the art of Papunya and other Aboriginal communities achieved acceptance in the fine art scene and in that time it has altered the national imaginary. The current generation of artists face a similar set of challenges to that which their parents and grandparents faced thirty years ago. The re-ascendancy of social conservatism in Australia is poised to redraw Aboriginal affairs policy in ways that not only resonate with the earlier assimilation project but could also have dire consequences for those who do not share its mainstreaming goals. In these circumstances the continuing production of art that speaks of a different set of imperatives makes an unambiguous statement. As has been the case for the past 200 years, this Aboriginal spirit will not be broken.

Melinda Hinkson teaches anthropology at the Australian National University.