This painting illustrates the concept of manliness and relates it to the sweet potato. The vertical lines are spears, the group of circles running across the centre of the canvas are campsites, and the various tiny circles scattered throughout the image represent tufts of grass and sweet potato tubers. Painted in 1975 it is a large, early and important work from the initial period of Papunya …

Provenance

Painted at Papunya in 1975; Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs; Aboriginal Arts, The Rocks, Sydney; The Estate of Graeme Galt; Private collection, Sydney

Literature

For a painting of the same size and on a similar scale, see Buderigars in the sandhills, 1975, in the collection of the National Museum of Australia, in Vivien Johnson (ed.), Papunya painting, Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2007, p.61