In July 2010 the Australian National Museum will be displaying their recently acquired Canning Stock Route Collection. The collection includes 116 paintings, contemporary cultural objects and documentary material collected by 60 artists who travelled along the Canning Stock Route on a six week return to country trip in 2007.

A dozen richly dotted, desert coloured canvases hang to dry on a makeshift line between trees outside the Wangkatjungka Aboriginal Community. Home to a fluctuating population of about 120 people, Wangkatjungka is a proudly independent community. It lies at the northern end of the Canning Stock Route, 120 kms south east of Fitzroy Crossing, 200 kms south west of Halls Creek.

In the late 1980s, David Wroth, an artist who had majored in printmaking, taught art to well-respected Walmajarri elder, Jimmy Pike in Fremantle, and then Canning Vale, prisons. Jimmy work soon became known around the world, in places as far flung as a mountain village in Calabria, Italy, where he was resident artist for several months, to Germany, London and China. He was invited to hold a solo exhibition in Tokyo and was accompanied to Japan by Wangkatjungka elders who performed dance and song cycles. Jimmy died in 2002.

In 2001, artists from the Wangkatjungka Community were seeking a new outlet for their work. Knowing of David's long partnership with Jimmy Pike, and with recommendation from someone working at the Community, they contacted Japingka Gallery, of which David is a director, and asked if it would be interested in acting as their agent. Since that time a lively and confident relationship has developed, with David facilitating intensive painting workshops with the Wangkatjungka artists two to four times a year. To date, the artists have held approximately twenty solo shows. David says, 'With no Government funded art centre at the Community and a core group of around thirty extraordinarily talented artists, there was a strong need to take this unique work and associated stories to a wider audience.'

Painting is an important means for the Wangkatjungka people to gain financial independence and to preserve and pass on their culture. They continue to paint the sites and waterholes they left behind in the Great Sandy Desert, sites for which they still maintain ritual obligations and custodianship. Their individual paintings depict the intimate relationship that each artist has with the places that are part of their ancestral history and dreaming, while the large collaborative canvases are like rich, mosaic maps that sing the inter-related sites of their desert homelands.