Pintupi

The Pintupi are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Western Desert, whose country lies around Lake Mackay and Lake Macdonald on the border between Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Living in one of the most remote parts of the continent, they were among the last Aboriginal people to leave a fully traditional desert life, and their painters later helped launch the Western Desert art movement.

Norman Tindale estimated Pintupi lands at roughly 20,000 square kilometres, taking in Lake Mackay, Lake Macdonald, Mount Russell and the Ehrenberg and Kintore ranges. In this dry sandhill and spinifex country, small family groups moved between known waterholes, hunting and gathering according to season. They speak a form of the Western Desert Language, which belongs to the Pama–Nyungan family.

Like the neighbouring Warlpiri, the Pintupi have an intricate kinship system of eight "skin" groups, with different prefixes for men's and women's skin names. Places and their Dreaming stories are named using the skin names of the people who own them or of the ancestral beings who travelled through them, so the landscape itself records both law and family relationships.

Between the 1940s and the 1980s, Pintupi people moved, or were moved, east to government settlements such as Haasts Bluff and Papunya. In the 1960s the federal government cleared parts of the desert ahead of Blue Streak missile tests, and officials brought in groups still living traditionally. Assimilation policy at the time aimed to resettle desert people and discouraged their language and culture. Conditions at Papunya were poor: between 1962 and 1966, 129 people, close to one in six residents, died of illnesses that could have been treated. The Pintupi formed the largest language group there, living alongside Warlpiri, Arrernte, Anmatyerre and Luritja speakers.

Some Pintupi stayed in the desert much longer. In October 1984 a family of nine walked in near Kiwirrkurra and joined relatives they had been separated from for about twenty years; the press called them "the last nomads".

In 1971, a schoolteacher at Papunya encouraged children to paint a mural in the style of ceremonial sand and body designs, and senior men soon took over the work. From this came Papunya Tula Artists, a cooperative formed in 1972 and owned by Aboriginal people. Its painters came from the desert groups living at Papunya, the Pintupi among them. The works, often called dot painting, are generally regarded as the beginning of contemporary Indigenous Australian art. Because some early paintings showed designs restricted to ceremony, artists soon began to conceal or omit sacred elements in work made for sale.

After the Aboriginal Land Rights Act of 1976, many Pintupi left Papunya to return west, part of what is called the outstation movement. They founded Kintore (Walungurru) in the Northern Territory and Kiwirrkurra and Jupiter Well (Puntutjarrpa) in Western Australia. Children raised at the settlements developed a new variety, Pintupi-Luritja, which most Pintupi speak today. Compared with many Aboriginal languages it is in good health, and local schools teach it.

Our maps draw Pintupi country in 1600, 1650, 1700, 1715, 1783, 1800 and 1815, between the Martu to the west, the Warlpiri to the north-east and the Pitjantjatjara to the south. The outline is approximate, and Pintupi life in this desert long predates the first of those years. See also Australia.