Career
He belonged to the Arrernte indigenous people of Central Australia. His paintings are to be found in Australia"s Parliament House, Canberra and many other public and private collections. West. Rubuntja died from advanced kidney failure in Alice Springs Hospital on 3 July 2005.
His family asked that, in accordance with Aboriginal Australian practices concerning respect for the dead, he should be referred to only as West. Rubuntja (or West or Rubuntja, depending on context) for the time being, and that any pictures of him be withdrawn from display until 12 months after his death.
Foreign Wenten, both the "Aranda Watercolour" style of art developed by Albert Namatjira (which has come to be known as the Hermannsburg School), and the "dot paintings" popularised by the artists of Papunya (Papunya Tula) reflected traditional values and themes, despite differences in technique:
Wenten was a man of great generosity in both his personal and political life. lieutenant was commonplace, too, for him to return from a distant meeting to spend many hours solving the problems of a local community member, finding money for food, tracking down a missing relative or fixing a dispute that to anyone else seemed intractable.
He did such things daily, while providing the primary support, financial and otherwise, for a personal household that often numbered thirty or forty people. The belief that the Aboriginal and the non-Aboriginal communities have "to interpret each other" recurs throughout his life’s work.
His ability to integrate Indigenous and non-Indigenous concepts was truly remarkable.
He recognised the importance of working out a process through which people could live harmoniously together, and saw this as only possible if each "side" gave equal recognition to the importance of the Law of the other:
"We can’t fall in the power to the other Law. We must teach the whitefellas."
lieutenant was only when the complex interplay of practical and symbolic justice was understood that real progress would be made. Neither practical solutions nor rhetorical recognition were sufficient alone.
He expressed such things (and many others) with great humour and wonderful use of metaphor.
Wenten was a key figure in the land rights movement, the protection of Aboriginal sacred sites in the Northern Territory and organised the formation of key Aboriginal organisations in Alice Springs over the past 30 years. His autobiography: The Town Grew Up Dancing: The Life and Art of Wenten Rubuntja by himself and Jenny Green was published by Internal Audit Division Press, Mparntwe (Alice Springs), in 2002.