Vivien Johnson

The Papunya Literature Production Centre (PLPC) was the centre of community life at Papunya in the 1980s. Fuelled by youthful energy and guided by the community's Elders among them pioneers of the Western Desert Art movement the centre produced more than 300 Pintupi-Luritja readers in a little over ten years. These books hold accounts of moments of first contact, Dreaming...

Astronomical auction prices in the late 1990s first drew many people's attention to the phenomenon of the early Papunya boards, the thousand small painted panels created at the remote Northern Territory Aboriginal settlement of Papunya in 1971-72. Western Desert art expert Vivien Johnson looks at the controversies that surrounded the paintings at the time of their creation and what they...