New Histories of the Papunya Boards: New Beginnings for the Western Desert Painting Movement

The origins of the Western Desert painting movement lie in the Central Australian settlement of Papunya in 1971 and 1972. The story of these origins has until recently been dominated by the story of Geoffrey Bardon who assisted the early artists while employed as a schoolteacher there. Bardon and subsequent historians have focused on the experience of the Pintupi, who came into Papunya from the west after living as hunter-gatherers. Recently a group of curators and scholars have questioned this emphasis, arguing that it was instead Anmatyerr men from the east and north who made the first Western Desert paintings.