O’Halloran knew it was impossible for Namarari to be out there. The old master of the desert art movement had died in 1998. But he was determined to write Namarari’s biography. Sometimes the artist seemed temptingly within reach. Sometimes he was obscured by a thicket of cultural disconnects such as language.

O’Halloran’s book The Master from Marnpi was self-published this month. For the author, finding Namarari was like joining the countless scattered dots found in so many of his paintings.

It was a job that took four years. Four years of belting along unsealed red roads. Of sitting with dialysis patients in Alice Springs who remembered Namarari but could only speak about him in Pintupi.

Of working with translators and curators, and asking a growing list of questions: who was Namarari? What did he paint and why? What was his life like? What messages are embedded in his paint?

Patient, persistent and painstaking, O’Halloran gradually formed a coherent vision of his subject, starting with a little nomadic boy born circa 1926 at Marnpi rockhole in the Northern Territory’s remote southwest.

Growing up with his family and learning desert survival skills passed down for thousands of years, Namarari imbibed a well of traditional knowledge.

“There were no whitefella and we were all naked,” he once said.

Following the death of his father by spearing — who did it and why is a mystery, O’Halloran says — Namarari and other family members moved to Putarti Spring southwest of Mount Liebig.

He did not meet a white person until 1932 when missionaries and scientists visited Mount Liebig where he was living. O’Halloran traced the archives of the expedition, and found a picture of Namarari aged about nine and all smiles.

Namarari attended school at Hermannsburg Mission until he was 11, then worked in the cattle industry. He married his first wife at Haasts Bluff.

In the early 1970s, having earlier moved to the settlement of Papunya, Namarari was one of about 30 indigenous men who began to paint with the whitefella materials of paint and board, and later canvas.

His first painting is thought to be Sandhills And Clouds, 1971, in the collection of the Museum and Gallery of the Northern Territory.

As a founder of the indigenous-owned company Papunya Tula Artists, Namarari became one of the pioneers of the Western Desert art movement along with artists such as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri. Within a decade, private buyers and public museum curators were captivated by the “dot painters” of the Western Desert.

Namarari was a shareholder in Papunya Tula Artists for nearly 30 years. He did about 100 paintings before Papunya Tula Artists was established, and about 600 afterwards.

Because the company assigned a portion of its funds to develop community facilities, this meant Namarari contributed greatly to a dialysis treatment facility and swimming pool at Kintore, and artists’ studios at Kintore and Kiwirrkura.

The 1990s were important for Namarari. In 1991 he won the National Aboriginal Art Award with Bandicoot Dreaming. In 1994 he won the inaugural Red Ochre Award, the Australia Council’s emeritus award “in recognition of the outstanding contribution to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts and culture”.

“In the extraordinary period 1991 to 1994 he won three awards and Papunya Tula Artists mounted four impressive solo exhibitions in conjunction with Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne and Utopia Art Sydney,” O’Halloran wrote.

There were more paintings by Namarari than by any other artist in the landmark exhibition, Papunya Tula, Genesis and Genius, at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2000.

For John Kean, a curator who worked at Papunya and knew Namarari, the artist is “the most consistently brilliant of the Papunya Tula artists”.

Cara Pinchbeck, senior curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the Art Gallery of NSW, says Namarari was “one of the most significant Aboriginal artists of the late 20th century”.

“He was central to the development and rise of the Papunya Tula Artists movement,” she says.

“The minimalism of his ethereal works of the late 1990s influenced an entire generation of his peers.”

Namarari’s paintings have fetched large sums. Untitled (Rain Dreaming at Nyunmanu), 1994, was bought for $4000 from a Utopia Art exhibition and was sold at auction in 2013 for $219,600. The buyer was the National Gallery of Australia.

Money made no difference to Namarari’s frugal existence. After winning the $50,000 Red Ochre Award, Namarari bought a new Toyota four wheel drive. He didn’t drive, but the car was a wreck within a year, having been used by others for chasing down camels in the bush.

“The $50,000 resource was used but squandered in under a year, though it was in recognition of over 20 years of consistent work by Namarari,” O’Halloran wrote.

Whatever possessed O’Halloran to write a book about Namarari, not even he can really say. But it began in 1998 when he saw Namarari’s work at Utopia Art, in Sydney.

Seeing that renowned curator Hetti Perkins had chosen Namarari for a Sydney Biennale display, and noting that the artist was the subject of a film by Papunya educator Geoffrey Bardon, O’Halloran became more and more interested in Namarari’s story.

“I felt a pull to his paintings, which held me still long enough to allow something from the images to burrow to a deeper place,” he wrote.

O’Halloran found a man who was “shy, considerate, caring and generous”. Namarari emerged as a committed family man, and played an educative role with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. He participated in bilingual teaching programs for school students at Papunya and Kintore, sharing his knowledge and experiences of growing up in the desert.

O’Halloran comes from an education background himself so it’s little wonder he was interested in Namarari’s efforts to promote mutual understanding between indigenous and non-indigenous people.

In the book, O’Halloran reproduced Namarari’s biggest ever painting, Many Dreamings, 1978, overlaid with annotations to indicate the meaning of the motifs the artist used. The annotations were made by John Kean while sitting with the artist.

Kean’s annotations show features including tracks of Tingari men, various types of bush food, and the location of sandhill country.

Namarari’s art “persistently asserted the reality of his affiliation with country and countrymen”.

As he aged and remarried, this time to the artist Elizabeth Marks Nakamarra, Namarari yearned for the solitude of the desert. He “took opportunities to spend time near sites of cultural and nostalgic value”.

Namarari died in Alice Springs and is buried at Kintore, one of the settlements where he lived and painted.

Despite writing the book, O’Halloran would love to know more. “When Namarari was a stockman, one of the white managers armed the Aboriginal men with revolvers and told them to shoot (indigenous) people who speared cattle,” O’Halloran says.

“You think, what did Namarari think about that? Did it happen? What did he think about these people with guns?” For questions like
that, Namarari is still a flickering figure in the desert haze.