Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri

Painted for Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, September 1981 (catalogue number TL810904)

Gallery A, Sydney

Private Collection, United Kingdom, acquired from the above in 1981

Acquired from the above by the present owner with the assistance of Tim Klingender Fine Art, Sydney in 2019

Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri’s main concern in the latter years of his life was the detrimental impact of European culture on of Aboriginal society, which he expressed in paintings through the metaphor of the loss of natural resources, fauna and flora. Painted in 1981, Rock Wallaby Dreaming at Ngunyunpa relates to two major works by Tim Leura from the previous two years. Men’s camps at Lyrrpurrung Ngturra in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, painted in 1979, shares a number of formal traits.¹ The focus in each painting is the great Ancestral Hunter identified in Rock Wallaby Dreaming at Ngunyunpa by his weapons: a hooked or No.7 boomerang, spears, spear thrower and a decorated shield. Below the spears and to the right of the black arc, likely representing a windbreak, rest another type of boomerang, clubs and a stone knife with a black resin handle. The roundels represent camp sites, the largest of which being the main camp, belonging to the ancestor. A line of footprints enters the canvas from lower right.

In the lower left corner of the painting, the skeletal figure of the Great Hunter – with its tool kit of spear, spear thrower, boomerang and club – walks into the scene. The same figure appears in the monumental Napperby Death Spirit Dreaming, a journey through the artist’s life painted by Tim Leura with his half-brother Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri in 1980, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.²

¹ See Caruana, W., Aboriginal Art, World of Art Series, Thames and Hudson, London and New York, 2025, p. 134, pl. 107.

² Ibid, pp. 134-135, pl. 108; and Johnson, V., Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2003, pp. 128-129.