Word: deserter
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Hello gorgeous. The words are painted in pink above the kitchen sink of a rundown shed in the middle of Australia's Western Desert. As unlikely as it seems, this is the engine room of one of the world's most extraordinary art movements. Outside in the heat two decades ago, Uta Uta Tjangala painted his magisterial Old Man's Dreaming, which marked the Pintupi people's return to their land from the government settlement of Papunya. They brought with them to Kintore, 500 km west of Alice Springs, a lifetime of dreamings, but also something new: Papunya Tula Artists...
...dogs than you can poke a stick at. "What an amazing combination," notes Peter Toyne, the Northern Territory's Health Minister. "The most remote community in Australia and the international art market working together to do a health initiative." They have gathered for the opening of Australia's first desert dialysis facility, paid for in the main by Aboriginal...
...Back in Papunya, the Pintupi men were famous for their old red truck, which kept breaking down in the desert - "it was to these sometimes desperate, instinctively nomadic people a manifestation of the traveling principle," writes Bardon, who died in May 2003, in a recently published history of the movement (see box, next page). These days their vehicle for survival is the dialysis machine. Because of poverty and poor diet, the Pintupi have one of the highest rates of kidney failure in the country. "Our rates of dialysis are 40 times the national average," says Dr. Paul Rivalland, who started...
...very big battle to make it come true." While a dialysis machine can cost as little as $A40,000 - roughly the price of an off-road vehicle or a good Papunya Tula painting - nursing overheads and the need for water filters make it an expensive item in the desert. But, circulated among a group of well-connected Papunya Tula supporters, from AGNSW curator Hetti Perkins to Tim Kingender, the Aboriginal art specialist at Sotheby's auction house, the idea took hold. In late '98, with "Genesis and Genius" just over a year away from opening, Kingender recalls Toyne phoning...
...hard slog. In charge of steering the project, Paul Rivalland had to convince government and health officials that dialysis at Kintore was possible. The then Federal Health Minister, Michael Wooldridge, was skeptical. "It's something that no one in the world has been able to make work in the desert," he said. Undeterred, Rivalland had his "kidney committee" visit the Royal Perth Hospital's remote dialysis center in Broome, which helps around 50 Aboriginal patients in the bush. "You can do it anywhere," he insists. "Osama bin Laden is on renal dialysis. If he could do it in the caves...