Dr Darren Jorgensen is a Senior Lecturer and Art Historian at University of Western Australia. He reflects on the exciting new exhibition from Ali Curung and the history of that region and the Western Desert Art Movement. He talks about the difference between seeing works back in the studio and then as a curated collection on the gallery wall.

Can you describe who you work for and what your role is there?

I work as an art historian at the University of Western Australia. A lot of my work has been focused on documenting and writing about art from the Western Desert.

The Western Desert Art Movement is really where the dot paintings of Australia originated. That's a history that's been going on since the 1970s. Now that contemporary art making is spread right across the country. Somewhere around 50 communities, depending what you count as a Western Desert community, have artists in them who are consistently producing dot painting.

It's quite possible to be able to tell one community style from another and one artist from another. Quite often Western Desert painting gets mixed up into the same bag as one art movement. Really there are lots of smaller movements within that.

You recently visited Ali Curung. Can you tell us about that community?

I travelled through remote communities as part of my work. I'm very lucky to be able to do that because a lot of these places are very difficult to access. At the end of last year, I went to Ali Curung where the current Japingka exhibition comes from. I saw the paintings when they were still at the studio in Ali Curung.

It's a very interesting area up there. It's really off the map and not well known. It's a populous community. There are hundreds of people living there from four different language groups. Part of the reason that no one has ever heard of it is that it was designed to be out of the way. The original people who designed the community wanted to put the Aboriginal people, who had gathered around the Tennant Creek Telegraph Station, somewhere else. Somewhere that wasn't going to be in the way of the mining that was developed around there after the 1930s.

Cattle Country

So the history of that area is really one in which people have been running cattle and running these massive pastoral stations. It's much more fertile than further south in the desert. It's around where the desert starts to become more fertile as you drive north from Alice Springs.

Mining History

There is also a mining history I had no idea about before I really went up to that area. All the roads around there were really built to facilitate the work of these mines. Some are historic mine sites and others have only been going in only recent times. So they are part of the landscape around this area.

Water Underground

Ali Curung is in a community that used to be called Warrabri. They put the community there because it was one of the places that you could get water because it's not like there's an open water source. It's not like there's a water hole, but there's water close to the surface from the underground aquifers.

At the moment, local authorities are proposing to pull out a lot of that water for a local agriculture scheme that may come to nothing. These desert schemes can often struggle with the harsh conditions.

Coming Together

Originally Tennant Creek was about four or five different language groups that all drifted in. Particularly after the Coniston massacre in the 1930s. People got out of the desert and made sure they were close to settlements. Those four language groups are Warlpiri, Kaytetye, Anmatyerre and Warumungu. They've all gathered together so it's a very cosmopolitan place.

In the '50s and '60s they had film screenings every week and people were still living there working on the mines. There's a whole history of Aboriginal people working the mines around there and on the pastoral stations. To me it's quite remarkable that it's just so off the map.