“While living a traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the arid Western Desert of central Australia, Lungkarta and his extended family group relied upon his knowledge of available water sources to survive. The location of reliable waterholes, soakage waters and claypans within the vast geography they occupied was also recorded in songs, ceremonies and ancestral stories passed between generations. When Lungkarta settled at the newly established community of Papunya, he recounted his knowledge of places in his paintings.

The pre-eminent scholar Fred Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University, spent time living with Lungkarta during 1973-1974. Lungkarta was a close friend of Myers, and Myers credits him with having changed his life. During his fieldwork, Lungkarta was Myers’ primary informant, the result of their work together appearing in the seminal publication Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among the Western Desert Aborigines (University of California Press, 1991).”  (Vanessa Merlino and Luke Scholes, 60 over 50: 60 Paintings from 50 Years of Australian First Nations Art, 2023, p. 42)

“Working with a brilliant simplification of motifs for hills, creeks, waterholes and Water Men at a fireplaces, Shorty here uses a refined dot patterning and raw linear treatment to create a timeless image of a Water Dreaming site in his Pintupi homeland.” (Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, 2004, p. 200)