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Art Mania

Name: Art Mania
Brand: Giramondo Publishing
Price: 15.39 AUD
Availability: PreOrder

Geoffrey Bardon and the Painting Men of Papunya

By: Kitty Hauser

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eBook | 1 November 2026

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RRP $17.99

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Available: 1st November 2026

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Art Mania: Geoffrey Bardon and the Painting Men of Papunya is the first biography of the young teacher who, through his involvement with the painting men in the Western Desert in 1971-72, was for a long time said to have set in motion the Aboriginal art movement. Geoffrey Bardon effectively invented the origin story of Aboriginal painting - the pivotal moment in Australian art history - with himself as chronicler, hero and martyr. He did it partly to manage his own disintegrating sense of self after undergoing a catastrophic form of psychiatric treatment called Deep Sleep Therapy, from which he never fully recovered.

Informed by unprecedented archival access, Kitty Hauser's book illuminates Bardon's obsessive nature, and the creative and destructive forces of mania which affected him. It chronicles his intense, brief involvement with the Aboriginal men who were the key protagonists of the painting movement in Central Australia, and examines his complex relationship with his brother James, a figure who profoundly affected Bardon's writing and the story he told about Papunya. Hauser interrogates the limits of the biographical form, through a concern with what cannot be known, or should not be spoken about. Her book brings into sharper, truer focus the context of Geoffrey Bardon's life and work, and what the success of the story he created says about Australia and its white mythology.