Audio programs

Margo Neale is Principal Advisor (Indigenous) to the Director at the National Museum of Australia and a Senior Curator. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the National Museum of Australia's Centre for Historical Research and Adjunct Professor in the History Program through the Australian Centre for Indigenous History. Margo was the former Director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program, responsible for managing the opening of the First Australians gallery in 2001. She is co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, and is currently curating a major international Aboriginal art exhibition in Japan for 2008. She is a recipient of a number of Australian Research Council grants in partnership with the Australian National University.

Vivien Johnson is the curator of the Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert. She is New South Global Professor at the University of New South Wales and has been researching the history of Western Desert art for almost 30 years. Vivien's book Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists will be published by IAD Press (Alice Springs) in 2008.

Christopher Hodges is the Director of Utopia Art Sydney, a contemporary art gallery that exhibits Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. The gallery has represented Papunya Tula Artists in Sydney since 1988, and the Utopia Community from 1988 to 1992, during a period of enormous development and change. Christopher also chairs the Melbourne Art Fair Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the development of the visual arts in Australia, and a member of the Australian Commercial Galleries Association which is dedicated to the ethical representation of artists. He is also an artist who has exhibited in solo and group shows since the late 1970s, and his work is included in public, private and corporate collections.

Vivien Johnson is the curator of the National Museum exhibition. She is New South Global Professor at the University of New South Wales and has been researching the history of Western Desert art for almost 30 years. Vivien's Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists will be published by IAD Press (Alice Springs) in 2008.

John Kean is a producer with Museum Victoria. He was Art Advisor for Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd from 1977 to 1979. In 1989 John curated East to West: Land in Papunya Tula Paintings, at Tandanya, the National Aboriginal Cultural Institute. He was the Thomas Ramsay Science and Humanities Fellow in 2004. As well as producing exhibitions and museum interactives, John has written extensively on Indigenous art and the representation of nature in Australian museums.

Jeremy Long shares his knowledge of the first roadmakers and the impact of those roads on the lives of Indigenous people from the Central and Western Desert. Jeremy is a historian and writer who worked as a field and research officer with the Northern Territory Administration, having extensive contact with the Papunya community in the 1950s and 60s.

Dr Peter Thorley is a Curator in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program at the National Museum of Australia. He has spent much of his career working in Central Australia, including four years as a teacher in an Aboriginal bilingual education program. Peter has since completed a PhD in archaeology, which looked at the long-term relationship between Central Australian culture and climate. He received a Northern Territory History Award for research on the history of inland flooding and has worked as a consultant in heritage protection and native title.