Word: pintupi
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...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, the movement begun by Geoffrey Bardon in 1971, which is today a multi-million-dollar...
...Most of the town's 300 people are a red-dirt block away at the Pintupi Homelands Health Service, checking out their art movement's latest venture. Papunya Tula - a name suggested to Bardon by artist Charlie Tararu - is Pintupi for "honey ant meeting place," and on Nov. 11, a meeting place it is. A plane has descended on Kintore, and Pintupi elders mix with health officials, fine-art specialists and more camp 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...
...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...
...just as the bush mechanics got their red truck home, so too have the Pintupi managed to steer their own solution to kidney disease. Why dislocate family and culture by uprooting to Alice Springs, the late pastor and Pintupi elder Smithy Zimran asked his friend Peter Toyne, when a dialysis machine could be brought to Kintore? "It's a really simple thing to say," said Toyne at the opening. "It's been a 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...