Balgo: Creating Country, is a landmark publication in Aboriginal art, Australian history, and art historical scholarship.

The book tells the story of the Balgo art movement, one of the most vibrant, colourful and influential schools of Western Desert painting. But to tell that story, it also tells another, the story of Balgo itself. A tiny community on the fringes of the desert, created by missionaries, and now governed by Aboriginal people. A tiny community through which the transformation of life for Aboriginal people in the 20th Century is laid bare. A place where art emerged as a response to that history.

Balgo: Creating Country shows the birth of a painting movement in the context of thousands of years of cultural practice, breaking down the category of Aboriginal art and rebuilding it, dot by dot, into something resembling the language of a new Australian Art.

Author: John Carty
Hardback
404 pages
28.4 x 23.4 cm