ARTSNATIONAL Coffs Coast recently hosted a talk by Associate Professor Sally Butler on the origins of contemporary Aboriginal art.
From the Tate Modern in London to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, this ancient genre continues to attract an international following.
“This is a 60,000-year-old art story, and one of the greatest art movements in the world,” Dr Butler told attendees.
“As an art historian, I look across the world for collective responses to art making.
“If a whole group of people make art, and a whole group responds to it, then it’s an art movement.”
Dr Butler juxtaposed a 17th century Dutch landscape depicting a solitary tree, with a 1970s Central Desert canvas by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula (1925-2001).
The Dutch painting is from the time the Netherlands was recovering from its 80-year war with the Spanish and its lowlands were being reclaimed from the sea with an intricate system of dikes.
Dr Butler said the painting suggests “We are that tree” and “this is our Dutch identity”.
The 1970s painting dates to when the Whitlam Government was elected in 1972, and everything changed.
Australia’s assimilation policies were overturned and the land rights movement and restoration of Country gained momentum, enabling cultural practices and bicultural learning to reemerge.
“The modern Aboriginal art movement took off like a rocket,” Dr Butler. “Like the Dutch painting, self-determination and the reclamation of identity were overriding concerns.”
In the Western Desert town of Papunya, 250 kms from Alice Springs, local teacher Geoffrey Bardon encouraged children to create art using the motifs and symbols of their own traditions, which included Pintupi, Anmatyerre, Luritja and Warlpiri communities.
Senior men in the community joined in, using everything at hand – old bits of wood, linoleum and cardboard, for example.
The ancient tradition of abstract art making, also found in Kimberley rock art, found a new medium.
These initial works were sold everywhere but important questions arose: What to express, what to leave hidden, and how to navigate the depiction of women’s and men’s business with a wider audience.
Elders met on Warlpiri Country to map out a strategy.
In an act of extraordinary creative problem-solving, they collectively decided to overpaint certain symbols, reduce specificity, and make these artworks even more abstract.
Keeping the Dreaming alive in whatever medium presented itself, blurred boundaries between traditional and modern.
But the Australian art world was slow to recognise the contemporary art making taking place in the Central and Western deserts, Arnhem Land, and North Queensland.
Categorised as historical artefacts, there was initially no market for Aboriginal art, with the exception of Albert Namatjira’s European style water colours.
However, the complex visual language depicting survival knowledge and celestial navigation found new modes of expression.
In 2000, The Art Gallery of NSW curated “Genesis and Genius”, a major retrospective of Papunya Tula art that acknowledged the site of an “art revolution”.
Dy Butler concluded her talk by focusing on Emily Kam Kngwarray from Utopia, 280 kms from Alice Springs, who started painting in her 70s.
Her intense, monumental works, many of which are currently on exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, are teeming with the motifs and symbolic language of her Ancestral Country.
Lizards, yams, emus, seeds, Kngwarray’s abstract masterpieces contain all the survival knowledge and navigation clues common to Aboriginal art making, but in her own original way.
For eight years she was prolific, eschewing her earlier batik work, to sit outside for hours using canvas.
She barely spoke English, and never left Utopia, but she is celebrated as one of the most significant abstract painters in the world.
Dr Butler’s final point was about the contemporary political art of Vern Ah Kee and HJ Wedge which, in paintings like “Unwritten” and “Brainwashed”, address invisibility and identity within a culture still underpinned by colonial racism.
“Sally Butler’s talk was engaging, accessible and highly relevant,” said ArtsNational Coffs Coast’s Annie Talve.
“It capped off another year of eclectic and stimulating arts talks, and the opportunity for people to learn together in a convivial atmosphere.”
ArtsNational Coffs Coast 2026 Program out now, at artsnationalcoffscoast.au.
By Andrea FERRARI
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