“For a city of its size, Gimuy/Cairns has a healthy number of exhibition spaces, including the venerable Cairns Art Gallery, the Tanks Art Centre and Court House Gallery, all operated by either the town or the Regional Council. There is also NorthSite Contemporary Arts, a gallery, retail and studio-based organisation founded by local artists as Kick Arts in 1993”.

That was the summation by the national Artlink magazine in August in an issue specialising in regional reporting. Oddly, it didn’t mention the only commercial gallery attempting to challenge the government and community bodies, 2024’s Studio 29. Admittedly it’s established by Hyaesil Gilligan primarily as an interior design space. But art gallery maven, Emily Rohr – best known for her Short Street Gallery in Broome, but actually a resident of Cairns – has jumped on the space to bring in non-Queensland art. For the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, for which the FNQ town is best known, only deals in the local State’s product.

In July, Rohr brought in Desert men. Now she’s offering a Desert woman, Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson – who, oddly, is also a frequent local. For, when she’s not down on Luritja Country maintaining her connections with the Papunya township (which she used to manage before becoming its Member in the NT Parliament) and Chairing the important Granites Mine Royalties board, she’s hanging out in her studio outside the national park township of Julatten, inland from Port Douglas, with her partner, former master of Indigenous reporting for The Australian, the novelist Nicolas Rothwell.

Anyone looking at the art on offer in the Studio 29 show will surely see distinct signs of the works that started the whole Aboriginal art acrylic movement in the 1970s. And it’s not surprising, given that Anderson is a descendant of both the late Long Jack Phillipus, the longest surviving artist from 1971, and grand-daughter of Old Bert Tjakamarra, a key elder who may have given the go-ahead to the younger painters in Papunya’s famed Painting Room. White facilitator and art teacher at Papunya, Geoff Bardon described Tjakamarra as “a patriarch who would often burst into wild laughter at my efforts to understand the paintings”.

And that aspect of the non-Indigenous interpretation of Aboriginal paintings will become a key factor in grand-daughter Anderson’s life work as well.

For, as Emily Rohr puts it, “when the rows blew up over who was painting that APY Art Centre Collective rubbish, Alison wanted to show the gravitas side of the art – that it was not just decoration. The culture was still flourishing (also the name of the exhibition) despite everything. She has such respect for the old culture – it’s not just about money for her”. She even gives works titles like, ‘The Ceremony Closes’ and ‘Secrecy : Inner Space’ to hint at the numinousness behind her designs.

Visual memories in my mind seem to associate some of Uta Uta Tjangala’s and Shorty Lungkata’s designs from the 1972 period with a number of Anderson’s new works. Though of course such a strict conformist wouldn’t paint anything to which she didn’t have ritual access.

Remember that after being elected chief executive officer of the Papunya Community Council in 1985 in her 20s, Anderson went on to establish Warumpi Arts there when Papunya Tula Artists headed west with its Pintupi members. In 1999, she was elected as an ATSIC commissioner, serving until ATSIC’s dissolution. Then she contested and won the central desert seat of MacDonnell for the Labor Party in the 2005 Northern Territory election. She soon became the NT Minister for the Arts and Indigenous Affairs.

As such she became heavily embroiled in the contemporary showing of the old Papunya boards, both those in private collections – such as the Wilkersons in the US, touring a show called ‘Icons of the Desert’ – and those importantly held by the Museum & Art Gallery of the NT, the only institution to actually buy the early art coming from the deserts in the 70s. Both the showing and the interpretation of the boards mattered to her, with the famous report, “Minister Anderson was outraged, talking about people with no culture stealing our culture”.

She explained, “And they can tell those anthropologists who like to bleed our knowledge, ‘Hey, you’ve had enough!’. They’re just culture vultures – investigating our sacredness too hard because they’re cultureless themselves. That ‘Icons‘ catalogue is all wrong – Bardon never had the language (for all the misinterpretations in that catalogue). But it made me realise that something needs to be done. In 1971, people like my grandfather knew they had to get something out there to ‘prove’ our culture. But they never really understood that their sacred identity would be shown to the world. And without the sacred, we’re nothing”.

After a considered process of testing the MAGNT boards by what she called “contemporary cultural custodians”, Anderson was pleased to sum up, “There have been dreadful travesties committed before in the name of art, because museums and galleries have been too eager to have their time in the sun. We have gone down a different road, here in the Territory, and reached a good outcome. I urge other galleries and museums to learn from MAGNT, which can now take its place as the repository of the largest and most valuable holding of early desert boards in the world”.

The result was the successful Tjungungutja exhibition in 2017.

Politics long behind her (via a brief mis-step into the Palmer United Party!), Anderson now has time to paint her culture again.

And, given that Emily Rohr is developing relationships with both D’Lan Davidson in Melbourne and internationally, and Ali Yeldham at Sydney’s Arthouse Gallery, there’s a chance that Alison Anderson’s work will be seen outside Cairns, or even Broome, where, anyway, Rohr is finding the town’s fall into the embrace of identity politics is creating a distressing apartheid between black and white. It’s also affecting her special relationship with the Yulparija artists of the Bidyadanga community down the coast from Broome. “What with the government crippling small business and the massive cost of living pressures, I’m just so burnt out”, she admitted.

Flourishing shows untl 20th December.