What did you set out to achieve?

I set out to achieve his ambition. As simple as that. This book comes from John as a young man, an art school graduate, going up in 1977 to Papunya Tula to do a specific job. His role was to sketch schematically the design of early paintings for their certificates of authenticity. John was doing that work in a remote place, with the pictures slowly going out into the world.

There were a lot of paintings, but not as many buyers as there are these days. He found and developed an understanding at a very high level of the elements of each artwork. He also became acquainted with the approach, the styles and the influence of each of the thirty active painters up there who worked on canvas with acrylic paints.

John has this unbound drive to make a book of substance. This was infectious. So many books about Papunya Tula's art tell a story about how the movement developed. They usually have heroic figures in the forefront, and they are typically white men. What John does is flip this narrative. He sheds light on a whole host of extra players, but central to his thesis are four heroic men from that place who form something astonishing.

John focuses on these four men he knew and developed a great relationship with by engaging with their art and lives. In the background of all that is a fifth figure, Albert Namatjira. He is the forebear of the work these artists were making in the 1970s.

He shows how they took that astonishing imagination and grounding of Namatjira into their own making and describes the other elements they brought to their work. One of them is cowboy culture, another is comics, and there is a range of other modernist elements in there that position their work in a longer artistic frame. He uses Picasso, Braque, and Roy Lichtenstein to show what's happening in some paintings.

What were the challenges?

I don't think John would mind me saying this, but this is his first book. It's his grand opus. He has been storing this material and knowledge for a long time. He feels a deep obligation to the community and has done so since 1977 through a number of generations. The challenges were trying to reign in some of the material and trying to find an endpoint to what he knows because it's tough to start a project like this with both text and image and a lot of reference material in footnotes at the back end of the book, to stop and start, to keep adding. When someone is as immersed as John, things can naturally occur and get complicated.

For instance, a new painting was found at the end of our production period. It was put up for sale in Melbourne. It was a significant finding. It had been sitting in a suburban house for 50 years. It was extraordinary. It sold for a huge amount of money and hadn’t been part of this book because it hadn't been discovered. John pleaded to include it. All of those changes make significant differences in production.

I worked, as did John, the editor, and Peter Long, an incredible designer in Melbourne, through the Christmas and New Year breaks to get to print deadlines.

The challenge is the materials. They're the joys, pleasures, and challenges. John had lived it for a long time but probably had yet to realise the implications of making changes so late in the piece.

How did the information-gathering process work? 

John has travelled back to those lands regularly over all of the years since 1977. He has the language and relationships;  he stayed on the case and is a trusted part of that community.