Region: Papunya-Northern Territory

Language: Warlpiri

Born: at Pikilyi, west of Yuendumu, 1949

MICHAEL NELSON JAGAMARA grew up in the bush, first seeing white men at Mt Doreen Station. He remembers hiding in the bush in fear.

Michael lived at Haast Bluff for a time with the same family group as Long Jack Phillipus (one of the original Papunya Tula Artists).

Later his parents took him to Yuendumu for an European education at the mission school.

He left school at thirteen, then after initiation, worked buffalo shooting, driving trucks, droving cattle, before coming back to Yuendumu and then to Papunya to settle and marry his current wife Marjorie.

Whilst living at Papunya and working for the council he would walk past the painters camp on his way to work and see the painters working on their canvases.

He became interested in the work these original Papunya Tula artists were producing and he asked the permission of these community elders to become an artist and to paint his dreamings.

His first painting was done with his Uncle Old Jack Juppurrurla. He spent several years learning from the renown-founding artists of the Papunya Tula group Kaapa, Tim Leura, Clifford Possum and Long Jack Philipus.

In the early 1980s he became an artist in his own right with Papunya Tula.

Michael Nelson Jagamara is now one of the most famous and prolific Aboriginal Artists of Australia.

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