Life is better with art!

The Western Arrernte painter from Ntaria whose watercolours sold out in days and changed what Australia thought Aboriginal art could be

In 1934, a young Western Arrernte man from the Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission attended an exhibition of watercolour paintings by visiting Melbourne artists Rex Battarbee and John Gardner. He had worked cattle stations, made decorated mulga wood plaques, and learned the sacred stories and country of his Arrernte ancestors. The exhibition stopped him. He later described it as the moment he first saw his own country in terms of its visual beauty, colour, light, and atmosphere. He had understood it until then in terms of mythology and survival. His name was Albert Namatjira, born Elea at Ntaria (Hermannsburg) on 28 July 1902. He was 32 years old. He would become the most celebrated Aboriginal artist of the twentieth century.

A painting of Hermannsburg mission by Albert Namatjira and a photograph of one of the buildings

L Albert Namatjira, Hermannsburg Mission, c. 1940    R Hermannsburg Mission buildings, Ntaria, NT

Namatjira requested materials from the mission superintendent, who contacted Battarbee on his behalf. Battarbee sent paints and paper and, when he returned to the area in 1936, offered Namatjira painting lessons in exchange for his skills as a cameleer and guide through the MacDonnell Ranges. The tuition lasted eight weeks. It was the only formal instruction Namatjira would ever receive. His first solo exhibition opened at the Fine Art Society Gallery in Melbourne on 5 December 1938. All 41 works sold within days.

What followed was extraordinary. Exhibitions in Adelaide and Sydney also sold out. The Adelaide Art Gallery purchased a work, making it the first state gallery to acquire a watercolour by an Aboriginal artist. By 1944 Namatjira was included in Who's Who in Australia, the first Aboriginal person ever listed. The book The Art of Albert Namatjira, published the same year, sold twenty thousand copies over the following fifteen years. In 1953 he received the Queen's Coronation Medal. In 1954 he was flown to Canberra to meet Queen Elizabeth II. In 1955 he was elected an honorary member of the Royal Art Society of New South Wales. In 1956 William Dargie's portrait of him won the Archibald Prize.

Images of Albert Namatjira, his painting style, and the landscape he paints

TL Albert Namatjira, Central Australian Landscape, c. 1953    BL Albert Namatjira and Rex Battarbee outside Tmara Mara, c. 1950s    R Classic Central Australian landscape

His paintings depicted the Western MacDonnell Ranges with an attention to light and geological detail that no European painter had brought to Central Australia. The distant ranges, pale river sands, white-trunked ghost gums, and orange rock faces appear again and again, rendered with precise brushwork that was simultaneously Western in technique and Aboriginal in its deep knowledge of specific places. These were not generic outback landscapes. They were Arrernte country, Dreamtime sites and ancestral places that he knew as a custodian, not merely as a painter. Critics who called the work imitation missed this entirely.

None of these honours translated into equal standing before the law. Under the Aboriginals Ordinance, Namatjira could not own land in Alice Springs, where he attempted to build a house for his family. In 1957, when the Northern Territory Welfare Ordinance came into operation, his name was not included among those classified as wards of the state, effectively granting him Australian citizenship. He was then legally entitled to vote, to live where he wished, and to purchase alcohol. The following year, 1958, he was charged with supplying liquor to fellow Arrernte artist Henoch Raberaba. He denied the charge and appealed unsuccessfully through both the Supreme Court and the High Court. He served two months in prison.

Portrait of Albert Namatjira and his image on a postal stamp

L Albert Namatjira stamp, 1968    R William Dargie, Portrait of Albert Namatjira, 1956, Archibald Prize winner

Despondent after his imprisonment, Namatjira suffered a heart attack and was transferred to Alice Springs Hospital. He presented his mentor Battarbee with three final landscapes from his hospital bed, promising more. He died on 8 August 1959 of heart disease complicated by pneumonia, aged 57. He had produced around 2,000 paintings. The public shock at his treatment and death was widespread.

His legacy endures through his descendants, who continue to paint in his tradition and have extended it. His great-grandson Vincent Namatjira won both the Ramsay Prize and the Archibald Prize. You can buy watercolour landscapes by Albert Namatjira's descendants here: watercolour paintings by Albert Namatjira's descendants.

Albert Namatjira painting and an example of his painting style

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References and further reading