Albert Namatjira Exhibition: Art Gallery of SA, the Adelaide City region of South Australia

Albert Namatjira's landscape paintings have slowly etched their way into the Australian psyche with the distinctive blues and purples of the shadows of Mount Hermannsburg and, of course, the gnarled white trunks of the majestic ghost gums.

Others, like South Australian Sir Hans Heysen, the Victorian watercolourist Rex Battarbee and the famous photographer Harold Cazneaux all explored inland Australia to capture the spirit of the outback. But it was an Arrente aboriginal man named Namatjira who helped make the "red centre" a special place in the minds of so many Australians.

An exhibition of his works is currently showing at the Art Gallery of South Australia and according to Tracey Lock-Weir of the gallery, Albert Namatjira was the most famous Australian artist of his day.

Albert Namatjira received instruction from Rex Battarbee in 1936. They set off into country Albert knew well. According to Tracey, he would keep painting for the rest of his life.

“They spent one month in Palm Valley and a month around the McDonnell Ranges and it was during this time that he received his instruction. And that was really the end of his tuition.”

So after just two months formal instruction he would later produce images that would transform our perceptions of the Australian bush and take us on journeys into terrain we'd previously thought of as barren and lifeless.

On Gallery walls hang many of Albert Namatjira's most notable pieces and a lesser known work, "Illum-baura" or Haasts Bluff in Central Australia. It was obtained by the gallery in 1939 and was the very first work of Albert's or any aboriginal artist to be purchased by a public art institution in Australia.

Nearby there are other images so pivotal to Albert Namatjira - an Arrente custodian of Palm Valley - a responsibility inherited from his mother.

“He kept returning to the region throughout his career and indeed that was one of the criticisms of his work. Some say it tended to be a little repetitive. But there was very much a meaning for that in that as an Arrente man he had to visit these sites and reconnect with his Ancestral Land.”

So from Palm Valley to Redbank Gorge, Albert Namatjira travelled through his land but his fame stretched much further and is epitomised in an Archibald Prize winning portrait by Sir William Dargie.

“It was shortly after this portrait was painted that he became a Citizen of Australia in 1957 which is a kind of absurd concept in itself for us to consider today. But for him it opened up opportunities for him to have access to things in white society such as alcohol. And indeed that was what he did. He purchased alcohol and as an Arrente man he was obligated to share that alcohol with his family. He was actually performing a criminal act and he was charged. And so really it was a terrible tormenting time for him.”

Albert Namatjira's artistic output fell away and he died just two years later. The social realist artist and communist, Noel Counihan, made no bones about how he thought Albert Namatjira had been treated by white society.

The Exhibition "Seeing the Centre" - The Art of Albert Namatjira is on show at the Art Gallery. It ends on May 4, 2003.

The Art of Albert Namatjira
The Art Gallery of SA
North Tce, Adelaide
Exhibition ends May 4, 2003