Papunya Tula, or Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd, is an artist cooperative formed in 1972 that is owned and operated by Aboriginal people from the Western Desert of Australia. The group is known for its innovative work with the Western Desert Art Movement, popularly referred to as "dot painting". Credited with bringing Aboriginal art to world attention, its artists inspired many other Australian Aboriginal artists and styles. The company operates today out of Alice Springs and is widely regarded as the premier purveyor of Aboriginal art in Central Australia.
In the late 1960s, the Australian government moved several different groups living in the Western Desert region to Papunya, 240 km northwest of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, to remove them from cattle lands and assimilate them into western culture. These displaced groups were primarily Pintupi, Luritja, Walpiri, Arrernte, and Anmatyerre peoples.
Papunya is a small Indigenous Australian community roughly 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 groups. At the 2006 census, Papunya had a population of 299. Papunya is on restricted Aboriginal land and requires a permit to enter or travel through.
The predominant religion at Papunya is Lutheranism, with 258 members or 86.3% of the population, based on the 2006 census. It is the closest town to the Australian continental pole of inaccessibility. Warumpi Band[a] were an Australian country and Aboriginal rock group which formed in Papunya.
Pintupi and Luritja people were forced off their traditional country in the 1930s and moved into Hermannsburg and Haasts Bluff where there were government ration depots. There were often tragic confrontations between these people, with their nomadic hunter-gathering lifestyle, and the cattlemen who were moving into the country and over-using the limited water supplies of the region for their cattle.