Australian
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Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Indigenous Australian artists from the Warlayirti Art Centre at Balgo arriving at Kiwirrkurra, a remote community in central Western Australia, on a journey back to country. The group is shown meeting up with artists Brandy Tjungurrayi and Charlie Wallabi, who will join them on the next leg of the journey. It concludes with artist Tjumpo Tjapanangka inside one of the houses at Kiwirrkurra.

Educational value points

• For many of the Balgo artists, who live hundreds of kilometres from their country, painting is a way of maintaining a link with country. While Balgo is more than 400 km from Kiwirrkurra, strong familial ties ensure that firm links are maintained between the two communities. The Balgo artists are renowned for their vivid use of colour, strong iconic images and bold compositions, and tend to use acrylic paint on canvas – a Western medium adopted by many Indigenous Australian artists in the 1970s.

• In the clip Brandy Tjungurrayi indicates that he can ‘talk for’ the land that the Balgo artists are travelling to. Elders such as Brandy Tjungurrayi and Charlie Wallabi have a significant responsibility to continue to pass on knowledge, language and cultural practices and to protect country. Elders from particular country are permitted to ‘talk for’ or depict their country and culture in their artworks.

• Brandy Tjungurrayi was born in the bush about 1930 and paints stories connected to his country around Nyilla (Jupiter Well). He started painting at Balgo in 1985. He also lives at Kiwirrkurra with many of his relatives. His paintings are elegant linear compositions comprising fine dots that run together to create lines. In 2000 Tjungurrayi had his first solo exhibition and participated in the Kiwirrkurra Men’s Painting, which was exhibited at the Papunya Tula retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

• Charlie Wallabi Tjungurrayi is a well-known Pintupi artist whose early years in the bush influence his work. He was born in the late 1930s or early 1940s near Nyilla in Western Australia like his elder brother, Helicopter Tjungarrayi, another major Balgo artist referred to in the clip. Charlie Wallabi has been exhibiting his artwork for more than ten years. He and his wife, the artist Josephine Nangala, come from the Western Desert community of Kiwirrkurra.

• Tjumpo Tjapanangka (1920s–2007) is shown in this clip as a senior artist and Elder with important ceremonial responsibilities who continues to value his childhood and youth spent in the bush. He was born in the late 1920s or early 1930s. He began painting in 1986 and his art varies from very large to smaller paintings with a focus on subjects connected to water and to Dreaming. He continued to eat bush foods into old age and was a marpan (healer). He died in 2007.

• The Kiwirrkurra community, situated in the Gibson Desert of central WA, is one of the most remote Indigenous communities in Australia, and has a population of about 200 people. It was established in 1982 by Pintupi people – who from the 1940s were moved off their land in the Western Desert – so they could live close to their country. In 2001 the people at Kiwirrkurra were granted native title over the land and waters of approximately 42,000 sq km of the Gibson Desert.