In this episode, First Nations guest interviewer Daniel Browning talks to first time author Alec O’Halloran about his biography First Nations artist Mick Tjapaltjari.

O’Halloran had never written a book before, but had bought a painting by the artist and become fascinated by his way of expressing his place and his culture.

Over several years and many visits to Alice Springs and Kintore, he earned the trust of his subject’s widow and community enough to capture a sense of Tjapaltjari’s life as a hunter, a stockman and an artist out in the remote Western Desert.

The lavishly illustrated, self-published biography tells the story of how Tjapaltjari became a leading figure in the Papunya Tula art movement, one of the most significant in Indigenous art. In seeing the project through, O’Halloran kept an important promise.

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