The contemporary Aboriginal art movement owes its beginnings to the convergence of a number of unique factors - the position of Aboriginal society in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, a climate of change in Aboriginal and White Australian politics, and the point in Art History at which the movement began. And since the early 1970s, Aboriginal contemporary art has grown rapidly and with amazing diversity and vigour.

The art movement began at a moment, which may be considered the turning point in white Australian/Aboriginal relations. It occurred at the end of the assimilation era, when many Aboriginal Australians were living in designated settlements, which had been created according to geographical rather than cultural criteria. Thus many tribes found themselves in communities with Aborigines not of their own tribal group, and sometimes in the territory of another dispossessed group. Far removed from their traditional lands, the source of their physical and spiritual nourishment, the art movement had its beginnings in a climate of dispossession and despair.

Papunya was one such community in the Western Desert, which largely comprised the Pintupi and Warlpiri speaking peoples, and was located on traditional Luritja lands. In 1970 Geoffrey Bardon, a Sydney school teacher posted at the community, recognised that the Aboriginal people had a visual iconography of their own. He encouraged senior men from the community to reproduce their traditional stories and Dreamings on board, and subsequently on canvas with acrylic paints. Previously (with the exception of rock art and bark paintings from other regions) art had been strictly impermanent - ground paintings and body paint designs for ceremonial purposes, which lasted only for the duration of their ceremonial use.

This ostensibly “abstract” art was met by a curious and interested western art audience, which had become increasingly acclimatised to non-representational art and a diversity of creative expression throughout the twentieth century. Within a year the Papunya Tula Artist’s Cooperative was established to market and sell the works being produced by the community, and the contemporary Aboriginal art movement was born. The success of Papunya Tula Artists fired the interest of other Aboriginal communities and acted as a catalyst for art production in other regions.

Initially men were the only members of the community who produced works on contemporary materials for sale. The reason for this is now understood to have originated in social factors: the fact that anthropologists and art co-ordinators were predominantly men. In other regions women took the lead in art production as the movement evolved, and in areas such as Utopia and Lajamanu women began painting on canvas in the 1980’s, and are now the principal art producers. Women began painting for Papunya Tula Artists in the mid 1990’s.

Contemporary Aboriginal art is a vital part of the world’s oldest continuous cultural tradition. It is also the one of the most brilliant and exciting area of modern art, and an emerging art market, which has emerged over the last decade. It is new enough that excellent work is still affordable, yet established enough that the reputations of many major artists have already been firmly secured through extensive exhibition histories and the continuing desirability of their work in the auction market.