JOHNNY WARANGKULA TJUPURRULA | CAMP AT WALUNGURRU - DINGO CAMP AT TINKI

Painted at Papunya in November 1973, Papunya Tula Artists catalogue number JW731201

Private Collection, United Kingdom, acquired while visiting the community of Papunya in late 1973

Johnny Warangula Tjupurrula was born in the mid-1920s at Mitjilpirri, in sand dune country, 350 kilometers west of Alice Springs. Warangula’s family relied on a handful of permanent water sources dotted over a vast land, none more vital than Ilpili, a bountiful spring in the Ehrenberg Ranges.  

The Ilpili clan’s isolation was shattered when a caravan of huge, unfamiliar beasts lumbered across the plain towards their camp. Led by Bob Buck, it was a string of heavily loaded camels and a party of men including two ‘Afghan’ cameleers - the year was 1930. Later that year, and persuaded by the promise of flour and sugar, the Ilpili clan left their desert home and followed a group of evangelists to the Finke River Mission at Hermannsburg.[1]

By the winter of 1935, the clan had regrouped to the west of Hermannsburg, near Haasts Bluff. Warangula continued to use the Haasts Bluff ration station as his base while working as a labourer on road gangs and clearing airstrips. These periods of manual labour were interspersed with ceremony and trips to desert homelands. Officially, these excursions were for ‘Dogging’, or dingo hunting for the £1 bounty that could be redeemed on each ‘scalp’. In fact, the journeys provided a profitable pretext to cross the frontier from ‘station’ to ‘bush’, where small family groups could enjoy their country away from the gaze of missionaries and government officials. It was on these journeys that Warangula learned the mysteries of the land and its creation - the truths upon which his career as a painter would be founded.[2]

Warangula was among the cohort employed to construct a new settlement on Honey Ant country at Papunya in the late 1950s. More than a decade later, he joined a small group of men who gathered at Papunya, painting totemic designs on salvaged boards. [3] Warangula’s verve, and the innovations he generated were critical to the emergence of Western Desert Art. Calling on iconographic elements available to him through his inherited rights to country, Warangula created a personal language in which customary motifs were reconfigured as declarations of affinity to his land. Within months of commencing painting, he explored the plastic qualities of the medium, establishing an analogy between the dotted field – traditionally associated with ceremonial decoration – and the depiction of a variety of phenomena in the desert landscape. Warangula painted with unparalleled flair and the works he created over the next few years are counted among the great masterpieces of contemporary Aboriginal art.

Dingo Dreaming Series

In the late spring and early summer of 1973, Warangula painted a series of six boards that feature sites associated with a Dingo Dreaming songline. Women’s Camp at Walungurru – Dingo Camp at Tinki is the largest and most ambitious of the group.[4] Warangula’s characteristic inflected dots are evident in Women’s Camp at Walungurru, Dingo, Camp at Tinki, where they are used to signify the textures of earth, rock and vegetation. Collectively the Dingo Dreaming paintings show the activities of a family of ancestral dingoes across a swathe of country west of Yamunturrngu (Mt Liebig) to Walungurru (Kintore Range) near the Northern Territory/Western Australian border. The series is of note for several reasons: firstly the paintings focus on Dingo Dreaming sites rarely encountered in Warangula’s oeuvre. Secondly, several of the paintings represent land to the south and east of the country for which the artist had custodial responsibility. Why then did Warangula choose this subject at this particular point in time? The answer to the puzzle may be found in Peter Fannin’s documentation of Dingo Dreaming at Talitjarayi (1973) in which he muses, ‘It is not surprising, then that the dingo pupping season gives us a series of dingo stories.’[5]

Much writing on Western Desert art has focused on what the anthropologist Fred Myers has termed the ‘revelatory regime’ associated with the transfer of esoteric knowledge in a ritual context.[6] I argue that the Dingo Dreaming series is significant, for, as well as depicting religious truths, it is based on the artist’s recollection of everyday experience, working in the post-contact cash economy. Stimulated by fecund seasonal conditions, the Dingo Dreaming series can be understood as an autobiographical account of the artist searching the country during ‘the dingo pupping season’.[7] The sinuous lines (representing limestone ridges) and paw prints, in Women’s Camp at Walungurru - Dingo Camp at Tinki evoke Warangula’s concentration as a tracker, following adult dingoes along rocky outcrops to pups waiting in the cool of their dens. While the series is set in Dingo Dreaming country, Warangula used the new media of paint on board to evoke his personal experiences (in the 1940s and 1950s) within the ‘totemic landscape’ where he worked as a ‘dogger’.[8]

After decades of exile at Haasts Bluff and Papunya, the Pintupi made a triumphant return to their country in the early 1980s, and the site to which they headed was Walungurru, or Kintore as it is sometimes called. Marked by the large concentric circle at the centre of the current work, Walungurru was a favoured refuge where spring water sustained people through the most prolonged droughts. Since 1982, the location has become a permanent community, made famous by its artists. Tinki, the Dingo Dreaming site depicted by the roundel to the right of the current work, was also reclaimed. Jack Kunti Kunti, who first hitched a trailer to his tractor and transported people from Papunya to Walungurru, established a small outstation there for his family. Women’s Camp at Walungurru - Dingo Camp at Tinki can therefore be read in equal measure as history and prophecy; it shows the country for which Pintupi people yearned and the land to which they would return.

Women’s Camp at Walungurru - Dingo Camp at Tinki brings together the circular understanding of time in Aboriginal Australia. The painting depicts episodes from the creative era, the Two Women and Dingo songlines, epics that traverse vast areas and link people from distant countries. Seen as an autobiographical document, the painting recalls an individual’s experience, tracking dingoes for a bounty during the mid 20^th century. The painting also looks forward, through the lens of Warangula’s recollections, to the enduring association of Pintupi and their land.

John Kean

[1] Kimber, Richard G., ‘Walawurru, the Giant Eaglehawk: Aboriginal Reminiscences of Aircraft in Central Australia 1921-1931.’ Aboriginal History 6 1982: pp. 49-60.

[2] Kean, John, 'Johnny Warangula Tjupurrula: history, landscape and La Niña 1974' in Indigenous Archives: the Making and unmaking of Aboriginal Art, Perth: UWA Publishing, 2017 pp. 113-166.

 [3] Benjamin, Roger, Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, Ithaca: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art Cornell University, 2009.

 Bardon Geoffrey and Bardon James, Papunya: a place made after the story : the beginnings of the Western Desert painting movement, Carlton: Miegunyah Press. 2004.

[4] The Dingo Dreaming paintings created by Warangula in from late October to early December 1973 are: Dingo Dreaming at Talitjarayi (JW731068), Mala, Matinpilangu, Carpet Snake and Dingo (JW731107), Piruwata, (JW 731111), Dingo Camp at Tinki (JW 731152), Women with Dingoes at Ngutlulnga, (JW731167), Women’s camp at Walungurru, Dingo, Camp at Tinki, (JW7312 01)

[5] Fannin Peter, original documentation for JW731068, October 1973 (private archive)

[6] Myers Fred, 'Emplacement and Displacement: Perceiving the Landscape through Aboriginal Australian Acrylic Painting', Ethnos 78, 4, 2013, pp. 435-463.

[7] For a comparable analysis of the relationship between ‘Dreaming’ and history see Myers Fred, 'Emplacement and Displacement: Perceiving the landscape Through Aboriginal Australian Acrylic Painting,' Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 78:4, 2013, pp. 435-463. 

[8] Strehlow, Theodor George Henry, ‘Geography and the Totemic Landscape in Central Australia: A Functional Study’, in Australian Aboriginal Anthropology: Modern Studies in the Social Anthropology of the Australian Aborigines, Nedlands: Published for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies by the University of Western Australia Press, 1970, pp. 92–140.