Papunya

Papunya is a small Indigenous Australian community roughly 240 kilometres (150 mi) northwest of Alice Springs (Mparntwe) in the Northern Territory, Australia.

Papunya is a small Indigenous Australian community roughly 240 kilometres (150 mi) northwest of Alice Springs (Mparntwe) in the Northern Territory, Australia. It is known as an important centre for Contemporary Indigenous Australian art, in particular the style created by the Papunya Tula artists in the 1970s, referred to colloquially as dot painting. Its population in 2016 was 404.

Pintupi and Luritja people were forced off their traditional country in the 1930s and moved into Hermannsburg (Ntaria) and Haasts Bluff, where there were government ration depots. There were often tragic confrontations between these people, with their nomadic hunter-gathering lifestyle, and the cattlemen who were moving into the country and over-using the limited water supplies of the region for their cattle.The Australian Government built a water bore and some basic housing at Papunya in the 1950s to provide room for the increasing populations of people in the already-established Aboriginal communities and reserves.The community grew to over a thousand people in the early 1970s and was plagued by poor living conditions, health problems, and tensions between various tribal and linguistic groups. These festering problems led many people, especially the Pintupi, to move further west closer to their traditional country. After settling in a series of outstations, with little or no support from the government, the new community of Kintore was established about 250 kilometres (160 mi)west of Papunya in the early 1980s.