Harry Tjutjuna – “I Am the Spider Man”

“I am the Spider Man,” declared Harry Tjutjuna, a senior Pitjantjatjara Law man, ngangkari (traditional healer) and one of the most distinctive painters of the APY Lands.

He was speaking of Wati Wanka (Spider Man), a powerful ancestral being who created the Country around Tjutjuna’s birthplace and whose healing powers he possessed. To understand why Tjutjuna said he was the Spider Man, rather than simply a man who painted Spider Man, we must understand the relationship between ancestral beings, spiritual conception and human identity.

In The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen recorded that, among Arrernte people, a child was understood to originate from an ancestral spirit associated with a particular place. The spirit entered the mother, giving the child an ancestral identity determined by its place of spiritual conception. In their account, sexual intercourse could prepare the mother to receive the spirit-child, but the ancestral spirit, rather than the human father, determined this aspect of the child’s identity.

The place of conception was therefore fundamental. Spencer and Gillen described how a child could be conceived near a Witchetty Grub ancestral centre, subsequently born in Emu Country, yet remain spiritually a Witchetty Grub person. The ancestral being was not merely an animal to which the individual felt attached. It was part of who that person was.

These ancestral powers also remained active in the world. Spencer and Gillen documented ceremonies in which sacred designs were painted, ancestral songs sung and ritual actions performed to increase the numbers of animals and plants or bring rain. Art was not simply a representation of ancestral power. Under the proper ceremonial conditions, it was a means of exercising that power and making things happen.

Although Spencer and Gillen were describing Arrernte traditions rather than Tjutjuna’s own Pitjantjatjara conception, their research helps explain the extraordinary depth of his declaration. Among Pitjantjatjara people, such relationships between ancestral beings, people and Country are understood through Tjukurpa, which encompasses creation, Law, ceremony and inherited responsibilities.

When Harry Tjutjuna painted Wati Wanka, he was painting a spiritual self-portrait. Spider Man was not simply an ancestral being whose story he illustrated. Tjutjuna declared that he was Spider Man, a healer whose powers came from the ancestral being responsible for creating his Country.

Harry Tjutjuna Biography

Harry Tjutjuna was born around 1930 at Walytjatjara, near Mount Davies in the remote desert Country north-east of Pipalyatjara, close to the borders of South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

He grew up speaking Pitjantjatjara, acquiring knowledge of the ancestral places, ceremonies and responsibilities associated with his family’s Country.

As a young man, he moved to Pukatja (Ernabella), where a Presbyterian mission had been established in 1937. He attended the mission school before undertaking various forms of manual labour.

Tjutjuna sank water bores, erected fences, maintained gardens and cared for animals. He also worked for many years as a stockman, mustering cattle across the region.

He eventually returned west with his large family, living around Irrunytju (Wingellina) in Western Australia and Pipalyatjara in South Australia.

Irrunytju later became an important centre of contemporary Aboriginal painting, particularly through artists such as Tommy Watson, whose remarkable fields of colour expressed the ancestral Country of the western desert.

For Tjutjuna, however, life was principally concerned with maintaining his ceremonial responsibilities.

Becoming an Artist

Tjutjuna’s sustained career as an acrylic painter began at Ernabella Arts in 2005, but recent research suggests that his experiments with the medium started considerably earlier.

In 2026, anthropologist Dr Diana James reported that Tjutjuna and Jimmy Yanyatjari Donegan were producing acrylic paintings on boards around Docker River and Blackstone as early as 1972.

According to James, the men sold their paintings directly to Alice Springs dealer Pat Hogan. She identifies an early Ngintaka painting by Tjutjuna and reports that examples of these works entered the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

This places Tjutjuna among the early Pitjantjatjara men experimenting with acrylic painting during the formative years of the Western Desert art movement.

The widespread emergence of APY Lands acrylic painting came much later.

During the 1970s, senior Anangu had objected to the public display of restricted ceremonial imagery by some Papunya painters. Consequently, many artists at Ernabella concentrated on batik and designs that avoided revealing ancestral Law.

By the early 2000s, senior custodians increasingly regarded appropriate public paintings of Tjukurpa as a way of preserving and transmitting knowledge.

Tjutjuna became part of this development in 2005. In 2008, he moved permanently to Pipalyatjara and continued painting through Ninuku Arts, based at nearby Kalka.

His confidence, humour and distinctive imagery quickly established him as one of the art centre’s leading painters.

Harry Tjutjuna Painting Style

Tjutjuna developed an extraordinarily individual style that moved freely between recognisable ancestral figures and fields of apparently abstract markings.

His Spider Man paintings frequently feature a central oval body with enormous radiating limbs, decorated with thick, irregular stripes. Repeated circles, spots and overlapping forms surround the figure.

He used intense reds, oranges and yellows alongside black, white, pink, purple and blue. His brushwork was energetic and often deliberately uneven.

Unlike the carefully ordered dotting associated with some Pintupi painters, Tjutjuna’s marks were frequently large, irregular and loosely arranged. His compositions have an immediate vitality, with ancestral beings appearing to move across the surface.

Curator Bruce Johnson McLean, writing for the Queensland Art Gallery in 2014, challenged the suggestion that Tjutjuna’s paintings were not particularly traditional.

He recognised affinities between these apparently unconventional images and the older figurative painting traditions preserved in Anangu rock shelters.

Tjutjuna’s paintings were therefore innovative in appearance without being detached from their ancestral foundations.

Wati Nyiru and The Seven Sisters

Tjutjuna frequently painted Wati Nyiru, the ancestral Magician who pursues the Seven Sisters.

The Seven Sisters dreaming extends across large areas of Aboriginal Australia, connecting ancestral journeys, places and ceremonial knowledge.

Tjutjuna’s paintings often emphasise Wati Nyiru’s pursuit of the women, with recognisable human forms embedded within fields of circular markings.

His Wati Nyiru Munu Wati Wangka (2011) brings together the Seven Sisters and Spider Man narratives.

Other APY artists, including Wingu Tingima and Tjungkara Ken, also painted the Seven Sisters Tjukurpa, interpreting the ancestral journeys through their own relationships with Country.

Wati Ngintaka – Perentie Lizard Man

Another important ancestral subject was Wati Ngintaka, the Perentie Lizard Man.

Tjutjuna painted this narrative in both his early experiments with acrylic painting and his later professional career.

His Wati Ngintaka Tjukurpa (2008), held by the National Gallery of Victoria, demonstrates his bold figurative approach to ancestral beings.