Fifty years ago, Aboriginal art took on a radical new form. In 1971, artists at Papunya began using acrylic paints to tell traditional desert stories. They initially painted on whatever discarded materials they could find, such as composite board and plywood. This was an important moment in the development of the western desert art movement - the ‘dot paintings’ that would eventually excite art-lovers around the world.

Papunya was a government-run settlement west of Alice Springs where diverse peoples with different languages and backgrounds were resettled away from their traditional lands. Art became a means of expressing their enduring connection to their country and culture.

At the centre of Papunya’s painting movement was a former stockman named Kaapa Tjampitjinpa. In the 1960s, Kaapa, an Anmatyerr man, had painted in the Hermannsburg watercolour style made famous by Albert Namatjira, who had lived for a time at Papunya. In 1971, however, Kaapa began painting traditional ceremonial imagery, entered his work into a major art prize in Alice Springs – and became the first Aboriginal artist ever to win a contemporary art award. At the same time, he also orchestrated a landmark collaborative mural project that painted a traditional Honey Ant design at Papunya’s school. He was soon the artistic maestro leading about 30 male artists in Papunya’s Painting Room – a tin Nissen hut that has since been described as the most significant painting studio in Australian art history.

Those early desert artists included Kaapa’s cousins Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and the renowned Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, as well as Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, and many others. Several of their earliest paintings – including some in this display – depicted subjects that only senior men were meant to see. But the artists soon masked and abstracted the cultural meaning of their paintings by increasingly using dots, lines and circles – the artistic language of traditional sand drawings and body-paint designs. This became the internationally-recognised hallmark of their new artform.

Daisy Leura Nakamarra, the wife of Tim Leura, became the first woman recognised as an artist in her own right when she painted Women’s Dreaming, the first work by a Western Desert woman artist acquired by a state gallery.

Bringing together people from different lands and languages, Papunya was a social melting pot that became an artistic crucible. Creatively dynamic, its early artists realigned the centre of Australian painting geographically from the coastal cities to the country’s desert heart – and culturally from European to Aboriginal Australia.