New start in Papunya

Called Papunya Tjupi: A New Beginning (Tjupi means honey ant), the exhibition has been organised to launch a new arts centre established at Papunya by Vivien Johnson, professor of fine arts at the University of NSW and an expert in Aboriginal art.

"There hasn't really been a place where people could work together making art since the '70s," says Johnson, who describes the exhibition as strong and surprising.

Johnson has been visiting Papunya since 1980 and has leased a house in the town, which will be used as a base to start up the new arts centre, using NT and federal government funding. Later, she says, she hopes to organise a purpose-built home for the centre.

In Bardon's time the arts centre was a painting room at the back of the town hall, a corrugated-iron army cupola shed. While arts centres have sprung up in almost every central Australian town, however, Papunya - the name almost synonymous with the Western Desert movement of Aboriginal painting - has remained without one.

There was a gallery: Warumpi Arts, in Alice Springs, from 1993 to 2004. The community's collection of seminal 1971-72 board paintings, the remnants of a collection Bardon put together for Papunya's school, are on loan to the Araluen Gallery in Alice Springs. Local NT parliamentarian Alison Anderson, who grew up at Papunya in the '70s, wants to see the collection returned to her home town if a museum can be built to accompany the arts centre.