Bears artist’s name, title, catalogue number A731065 and date on Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Pty Ltd label on the reverse, together with a description of the story depicted and an annotated diagram

Likely to have been painted at Yai Yai, the Pintupi outstation near Papunya in October 1973
Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, catalogue number A731065
The Anvil Gallery, Albury, New South Wales, 1974
Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbournerivate collection, United States of America
Sotheby’s, Important Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 29 June, 1998, lot 101

Private collection, acquired at the above sale

Aboriginal Art from Papunyay,The Anvil Gallery, Albury, New South Wales 1974
A Myriad of Dreamings: 20th Century Aboriginal Art, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art at Westpac Gallery, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, October 5 - October 22, 1989, cat. no.56

Lauraine Diggins (ed.), A Myriad of Dreamings: 20th Century Aboriginal Art, Melbourne: Malakoff Fine Arts Press, 1989, p.59, pl.56 (illus.)
Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2004, painting 430, p. 455, where the work carries the title ‘Kuningka’ Kangaroo Rat Dreaming (Version 3)

Anatjari Tjakamarra was one of the last Pintupi people from the Gibson Desert to move to Papunya in the 1960s where he became one of the original members of the painting group in 1971. From 1973 to 1975 a number of initiation ceremonies were conducted at the Pintupi camp at Yai Yai to the west of Papunya. Myers (2002, p.86) suggests that this period of intense ritual activity may have been the stimulus for Anatjari to create a significant body of paintings that refer to the Tingari. The paintings feature two sets of iconographs, the concentric rectangle and the concentric circle, which appear in paintings either separately or in combination. The forms relate to the designs engraved into the surfaces of sacred objects and painted onto the bodies of initiates. Indeed, Anatjari recalled the painting of the rectilinear iconographs on his own body at his initiation: ‘Ngaaluni patjarnu tjaminpa (This one bit me when I was a young novice)’ was his way of expressing this fact to Myers (2002, p.101). In later years Anatjari adopted canvas as his painting support with a consequent increase in scale. He developed matrix-like compositions based on graphic elements such as the concentric circle, joined by journey lines that became the convention for depicting Tingari subjects in the public domain. Anatjari’s exploration of form is indeed, as described by Myers, ‘virtuosic’ (2002, p.106).

In Bardon and Bardon, 2004, p.45, Geofܫfrey Bardon states that this painting was one of several made when the artists at Papunya had been encouraged to talk about their traditional lands that lay far away from the government settlement. Settlements like Papunya had been established to accommodate groups throughout the western deserts but had the effect of distancing people from their homel♋ands. Consequently, the ability for an artist to paint his or her country reconnected them to those places and fulfilled the traditional obligation of ‘caring for country’.

In his discussion of a similar painting featuring the squares and the quoll’s tracks, Rilynga, 1974, Professor Fred Myers, who conducted extensive field work with Anatjari Tjakamarra in the early 1970s, asserts that the repetition of a motif in Anatjari’s paintings of the period indicate a number of sites associated with the ancestors; this interpretation is reinforced by the lines of cats’ tracks that signify their journeys between sites. In addition, the repetition of an iconograph emphasizes the importance of these ancestral events (Fred R. Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002, pp.98-9). Furthermore, the formal nature of the composition reflects the highly sacred nature of the subject. According to Bardon, in this painting the squares represent the an🍨cestral animal’s lair and the central roundel a freshwater rockhole.

WC