In the late 1960s, the
Australian Government moved several different groups living in the Western Desert region to
Papunya, north-west of
Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, to remove them from cattle lands and
assimilate them into
western culture. These displaced groups were primarily
Pintupi,
Luritja,
Walpiri,
Arrernte, and
Anmatyerre groups. In 1971,
Geoffrey Bardon, the school teacher at the community, encouraged the children to paint a mural using the traditional style of body and sand
ceremonial art. This painting style was used for
spiritual purposes, and so had strict
protocols for its use. Many
symbols depicted personal
totems and
Dreamings, and others more general Dreamtime
creation stories. When some of the
elder men saw what the children were doing, they felt the subject matter was more suited to adults. They began creating a mural depicting the
Honey Ant Dreaming. Traditionally, Papunya is the epicentre of the Honey Ant Dreaming, where
songlines converge. The European-Australian administrators of Papunya later painted over the murals, which the curator Judith Ryan called "an act of cultural vandalism", noting that "[t]he school was de-Aboriginalized and the art no longer allowed to stand tall and defiant as the symbol of a resilient and indomitable people". While visible, the mural proved highly influential, leading other men to create smaller paintings of their
Jukurrpa (Ancestral stories), on any available surface, including bits of old
masonite, car bonnets, tin cans, and matchboxes. This explosion of artistic activity is generally regarded as the origin of
contemporary Indigenous Australian art. The collective, originally entirely Aboriginal Australian men, formed in 1972. They derived the name
tula from a small hill near Papunya, a Honey Ant Dreaming site. A few women, notably
Pansy Napangardi, began to paint for the company in the late 1980s. It was not until 1994 that women generally began to participate. While the collective artists used a style of painting traditional in the sand and for body adornment in ceremonies, most of them had never painted before in Western style – that is, using
acrylic paint and a hard surface. As their work gained in popularity, the artists omitted or changed many of the spiritual symbols for public viewing, as the Aboriginal community criticised the artists for revealing "too much of their sacred heritage". According to Ryan: the artists through their paintings "trace the genealogies of their ancestral inheritance". And comment that "Through the paintings of the Papunya Tula Artists we experience the anguish of exile and the liberation of exodus. ... In refiguring the Australian landscape, the artists express what has always been known to them. And in revealing this vision to an outside audience, Papunya Tula artists have reclaimed the interior of the Australian continent as Aboriginal land. If exile is the dream of home, the physical longing for homelands expressed in the early paintings has now been answered". In the late 1970s and early 1980s, after the establishment of the
Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976, many of the people left Papunya for their traditional lands, but the art cooperative persisted and continued to grow. For many years the market and museums virtually ignored their work. A major exception was the
Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT), that has the largest collection of just over 220 early works acquired between 1972 and 1976, thanks to the visionary efforts of the MAGNT Director Dr Colin Jack Hinton and Alice Springs gallery owner Pat Hogan. This was still as of 2008 the nation's largest collection of early boards. The
National Gallery of Victoria did not acquire any works produced by the collective until 1987, when Judith Ryan convinced the current director to purchase 10 of the works. At the time, the asking price was , which Ryan described in 2008 as "a steal", given the escalation in value. ==Today==