In the early 1980s, spurred on by family painting at Papunya, Balgo people were keen to join the desert painting movement. Anthropologist Ronald Berndt commissioned a suite of paintings in 1981. So did the Catholic missionaries. A local mission cook, Warwick Nieass, supported the artists’ ambitions to build on these commissions with painting workshops in 1982. Yet the paintings created in these early contexts disappeared before they could become an exhibition; before they could become Balgo art. Rediscovered in 2019, after four decades in a shipping container, they have been conserved by Artlab, collected by the South Australian Museum, and are being displayed for the very first time.

The time has come to stitch these pages – flaking and faded and magnificent – back into the unfolding Balgo story. The early paintings are displayed alongside new works by the Balgo artists; bright bookends to the first 40 years of Balgo art.