Tiger Palpatja was born a storyteller – much like his peers and those that came before him for countless millennia. This beginning and continuity of an oral inheritance not only informs Tiger’s extraordinary compositions but permeates them. And just like Tiger, they hold within them the inherent cultural capacity of lives past, present and future. It is an act of great generosity that we are able to gaze upon a painted language that has traversed time and space and cultural borders to be here with us – this exhibition is a great tome of discovery. 

It is not a linear narrative – with a beginning, middle and end – that Tiger depicts, but a life-affirming snapshot of continuous cultural belonging, written in a symphony of colour and movement. A representation of one’s life and story being compelled into shape within the two dimensional so others may grasp the enormity of this unwritten language. Here we begin a learning, a development, an unmasking of the storyteller who sings his words in painted luminosity. 

Tiger Palpatja, the man, the artist, the storyteller, was born more than one hundred years ago, at the very place that his compositions depict – Piltati. This large semi-permanent water source lies in the remoteness of the Mann Ranges, part of the beautiful but arid north of South Australia. These ranges protrude majestically from endless, undulating fields of creamy native grass plains that transform into vibrant greens after rain. Interspersed among these plains are smaller but no less dramatic rock formations. This is a vast and contemplative panorama that has shimmered in sun-drenched hues of colour throughout time. 

Piltati has deep meaning and reverence in this ancient spiritual land – it is here that the Wanampi Kutjara Tjukurpa (Two Watersnake Men Creation Line) manifests and Tiger is attuned to the preservation of this epic as he wields his brush like a magic wand. This significant site demands that Tiger somehow convey the narrative – and disclose he does – in a painted embellishment only someone who has breathed in the hallowed habitat of Piltati from birth can do. But this cautionary Tjukurpa takes the twists and turns of an elaborate thriller as it relates the lives of those that first shaped their surrounds into the landscape we see today. 

We have two men-brothers, married to two sisters, all of whom reside at the site. What, in Tiger’s version, begins as a love tale, with the men ‘singing’ the two women from a distance, sees the narrative eventually turn in cynical contrast. The two women, eventually tired of their role as unappreciated daily foragers, plot to deceive the two men of their food. But the men become aware of the deceit and themselves concoct an elaborate revenge for the women. After careful rumination, the men decide to use their metamorphic powers and shape shift into a powerful Wanampi (a dangerous water snake), slip underground and trick the wives into chasing an edible snake. Believing they are in pursuit of a prized food source, the women dig continuously, day after day, eventually creating the tributaries of Piltati. After too long, one sister realises the means of capture and digs a large hole (Piltati) in front of where the imagined snake is heading. When a husband appears from the large hole, in the form of a water serpent, the woman quickly pierces its body with her digging stick. In agony, he rises up and swallows the woman. The Wanampi is badly wounded but chases the other woman and swallows her. They are all returned to Piltati, where they still reside. 

This is no light-hearted fairytale. What happened here is the shaping of a world view, the moulding of the natural environment, and the marking of cultural definition in a spiritual landscape. A story that is at once a sermon on moral behaviour and an imperative to realise the physical world you must traverse for daily survival. 

But this is not all that Tiger incarnates on the canvas, Wati Ngiṉtaka (Perentie Man Creation Line) reveals itself as it passes Piltati, generating another spiritual field of reference for Tiger. He relishes depicting Wati Ngiṉtaka being fervently pursued by a band of lizard men from Walyatinna, their home in the south-east, and from whom Wati Ngiṉtaka has stolen a magic grinding stone. 

It is said that this particular grinding stone produces only the most sumptuous food, while the sound of the grind itself is mesmerising music to one’s ears. Wati Ngiṉtaka cannot resist once he hears the sound of the grinding stone from his home in the west and traverses the vast country to where the lizard people reside. Once there, he first ingratiates himself and then cavalierly takes his opportunity to make away with the stone. A pursued Wati Ngiṉtaka passes Piltati on the return journey to his camp at Aran in the west, near Walytjitjara. The lizard men capture him there and spear him to death before dissecting his body, looking for where he has hidden the magic stone. Only after slicing his tail into pieces do they retrieve it. And that tail still protrudes as petrified rock across the face of the hill at Aran. 

Painting, for Tiger, was always a means of immersing the viewer into both the gravitas of these events and the seismic geological effects referenced as undying proof of the magnitude of what took place. A means for the viewer to watch a master at work, as he pushes and contorts the paint, mimicking the Wanampi moving underground, stretching the earthly parameters of the scene unfolding. He is surely the Wanampi. He is forming the gorge, the creeks and every bit of the surrounding landscape. With the quiet sweep of thick, viscous paint across the canvas, he is conveying the movement and formation of characters and terrain. In each nuanced mark he makes, he follows the twists and turns, the writhing and contorting of the two men, who have taken it upon themselves to transform their immediate environment forever. Tiger traces their emotive, determined and transmogrified journey in each mark, in each layer of painted colour. He studies his own composition only to enhance the vitality of the characters portrayed, and the living landscape they inhabit, and eventually become. He has no desire to search for better ways to place paint, only for differing degrees of personality within the dynamism of relationship – be it biological, spiritual or metaphysical. Tiger purposely mastered the art of merged iconographic meaning. When asked about the visual symbolism of his compositions, he would answer in pointed nouns – Wanampi, Piltati, Wati Kutjara (two men), Wati Ngiṉtaka. The use of more words or diagrammatic schisms to attempt an explanation would be to ruin the very existence of the creative symbiosis involved. 

To be born into this powerful Tjukurpa one must possess a kindred spirit, evidence of one’s claim, proof of divination. Tiger may have come to painting late in his life but he came as a respected Wati (man) who had been raised in the shadows of Piltati. But this is not all of Tiger’s greatness, for he would readily show off his bulbous pointer finger – signifying him as a ‘rainmaker’. And if you were lucky enough to see a double rainbow arcing above Piltati on a warm summer’s day, then anyone would have told you, ‘Those are the Wanampi up there.’ It is as if Tiger had a direct line, literally, metaphorically and even physically, to the characters who performed in the greatest drama the world didn’t see. It’s thanks to his genius in the rendering of a cultural performance in personal expression – that today we now have front row seats.

BRIAN HALLETT, Spinifex Arts Project Manager