Painting for Their Lives

Hello gorgeous. The words are painted in pink above the kitchen sink of a rundown shed in the middle of Australia's Western Desert. As unlikely as it seems, this is the engine room of one of the world's most extraordinary art movements. Outside in the heat two decades ago, Uta Uta Tjangala painted his magisterial Old Man's Dreaming, which marked the Pintupi people's return to their land from the government settlement of Papunya. They brought with them to Kintore, 500 km west of Alice Springs, a lifetime of dreamings, but also something new: Papunya Tula Artists, the movement begun by Geoffrey Bardon in 1971, which is today a multi-million-dollar industry and the community's main provider. Now a whiteboard in the Kintore shed lists their toil (Johnny - 4 by 2; Eileen - 107 by 28; Joseph - 4 by 3 … ) and linen, gesso and cadmium yellow to be ordered in. But in short supply this morning are the artists: only Josephine Napurrula and Eileen Napaltjarri are at work, cross-legged on the floor, quietly dabbing at their canvases.

Most of the town's 300 people are a red-dirt block away at the Pintupi Homelands Health Service, checking out their art movement's latest venture. Papunya Tula - a name suggested to Bardon by artist Charlie Tararu - is Pintupi for "honey ant meeting place," and on Nov. 11, a meeting place it is. A plane has descended on Kintore, and Pintupi elders mix with health officials, fine-art specialists and more camp dogs than you can poke a stick at. "What an amazing combination," notes Peter Toyne, the Northern Territory's Health Minister. "The most remote community in Australia and the international art market working together to do a health initiative." They have gathered for the opening of Australia's first desert dialysis facility, paid for in the main by Aboriginal art.

Back in Papunya, the Pintupi men were famous for their old red truck, which kept breaking down in the desert - "it was to these sometimes desperate, instinctively nomadic people a manifestation of the traveling principle," writes Bardon, who died in May 2003, in a recently published history of the movement (see box, next page). These days their vehicle for survival is the dialysis machine. Because of poverty and poor diet, the Pintupi have one of the highest rates of kidney failure in the country. "Our rates of dialysis are 40 times the national average," says Dr. Paul Rivalland, who started as a general practitioner in Kintore 20 years ago. End-stage renal disease depletes the body's ability to filter impurities in the blood and fight off infections. But while it has struck people as young as 19, it has ravaged the ranks of Pintupi elders, keepers of traditional law and culture. "They do so much to hold the community together," says Paul Sweeney, manager of Papunya Tula Artists. Many of the victims have been the art movement's luminaries. In 1998, just as the movement was about to reach its apotheosis with a 2000 retrospective at Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales, Mick Namarari, Turkey Tolson and Yala Yala Gibbs were all on dialysis in Alice Springs, far from their families (all have since passed away). Both the homeland movement and the industry that spawned it were faced with extinction.

But just as the bush mechanics got their red truck home, so too have the Pintupi managed to steer their own solution to kidney disease. Why dislocate family and culture by uprooting to Alice Springs, the late pastor and Pintupi elder Smithy Zimran asked his friend Peter Toyne, when a dialysis machine could be brought to Kintore? "It's a really simple thing to say," said Toyne at the opening. "It's been a very big battle to make it come true." While a dialysis machine can cost as little as $A40,000 - roughly the price of an off-road vehicle or a good Papunya Tula painting - nursing overheads and the need for water filters make it an expensive item in the desert. But, circulated among a group of well-connected Papunya Tula supporters, from AGNSW curator Hetti Perkins to Tim Kingender, the Aboriginal art specialist at Sotheby's auction house, the idea took hold. In late '98, with "Genesis and Genius" just over a year away from opening, Kingender recalls Toyne phoning him: "I said, 'O.K., if I make the money, you make it happen.' "