Befitting his high ceremonial status, the main subjects of Anatjari III Tjakamarra’s paintings concern the activities of the Tingari, the ancestral beings who travelled across the land and gave people the law. Because the stories relating to the Tingari are deeply religious in nature, their innermost details are not divulged publicly. The public interpretation of this work relates it to a flock of Emu Ancestors who travelled from near Haasts Bluff to an area due west of Walungurru (the Kintore Range in the west of the Northern Territory), close to the artist’s homelands.

The route takes the ancestors past a series of low hills, rockholes in granite outcrops and claypans. The site depicted in the painting is a long shallow depression in which, after rains, claypans fill with water and the vegetation is lush in comparison to the surrounding spinifex-dominated sand-plain and sandhill country. Tjakamarra’s choice of palette seems to reflect the colours of this landscape: the dark grey of the claypans, the rich brown and black of the surrounding low sandstone and ironstone hills, and the white of the limestone-like depression.[1]

Tjakamarra and his family were among the last of the Pintupi groups to leave their ancestral lands in the Gibson Desert. In 1966 they went to the government settlement of Papunya where, five years later, Tjakamarra was among the first group of artists who began creating flat portable paintings intended for the public domain, which was the foundation of the modern painting movement in the western deserts.

Wally Caruana