Papunya is a small indigenous community 240 km northwest of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, Australia.

It is now home to a number of displaced Aboriginal people mainly from the Pintupi and Luritja tribes.
Papunya with a population of 299 is on restricted Aboriginal land and requires a permit to enter or travel through. 

In 1971, the Sydney school teacher Geoffrey Bardon provided a group of ranking Aboriginal men with
brushes and acrylic pigments, and encouraged them to paint. The resulting works are the first paintings
ever to systematically transfer Central Australian cultural imagery to a permanent surface.

These earlier works soon became an art movement of international scope and importance, and introduced
the story of this pivotal movement of intersection between Aboriginal culture and traditional Western modes
of understanding art. The artistic movement unleashed at Papunya spread over Central Australia and has
since achieved international acclaim.

The Western Desert Painting Movement has provided the rest of the world with new ways of seeing.