The most incredible art festival in Australia is about to kick off

Art and truth are inseparable in Albert Namatjira's painted country. The red quartzite ranges and ghostly gums bleed into his paper; an ineffable spirit flows through his brush and possesses the picture blooming on paper. These watercolours are not so much impressions as timeless echoes of the ancient palette from which the renowned Aboriginal artist worked. Though he died in 1959, his art is aquiver with life.

"He really places me in the country," says Stephen Williamson, curator of Araluen Art Centre in Alice Springs (Mparntwe). "They're not paintings of country... they are country."

More than 60 Namatjira works are held at Araluen; the heirs to this rich artistic tradition will be exhibited during Desart's annual Desert Mob (September 7 to October 22), a showcase of works from about 30 regional and remote art centres in Central Australia. Curated by Aboriginal writer and curator Hetti Perkins, the festival will incorporate a symposium, marketplace and field trips.

"It's an opportunity to engage with artists and... collectors," Williamson says. "It's a very vibrant event and creates a lot of energy in the town."

That energy is infused with Namatjira's legacy; it has filtered down to contemporary artists as surely as his watercolours have stained the masterworks held at Araluen. One of those works, Heavitree Gap, conjures the view from a nearby ridge after rainfall had electrified the landscape.

"He's set himself up there and just looked at the scene... and he's just captured it as he saw it," Williamson says. "People find it hard to believe that the country can transform to these colours."

The spinifex is subdued today, but the bluffs glow copper as we trace the Arrernte people's creation story through Heavitree Gap, an interstice tunnelled into the MacDonnell Ranges.

"These mountains were formed by ancestral caterpillars moving through the environment," says guide John Stafford of Alice Springs Expeditions. "If you look at these mountain ranges and the gaps that cut the mountain ranges into segments, then you can see quite clearly how that storyline is there."

Namatjira's brush is drenched with this landscape's complexion: red ochre, burnt umber, grasses so pale they've been drained of their rain-quenched intensity.

"A lot of those colours he uses in the landscape, people who're familiar with Albert Namatjira think he's got a fair bit of licence in that. But they come out here and they say, 'Ah, okay, I can see the colours that he's used'," Stafford says.

We stop along a stretch of road outside Alice Springs where a pair of ghost gums once stood. They were burned by arsonists in 2012, but their luminescence survives in Namatjira's paintings. River red gums now frame the ranges, their root collars welling above Roe Creek's parched bed, their boughs blackened in parts where they've severed circulation to conserve water. Budgerigars pass overhead, their song as sweet as it was when the twin gums were still standing.

The road continues through this daubed tableau to Namatijira's birthplace, Hermannsburg, established by Lutheran missionaries in 1877 on the lands of the Western Arrernte people. Here, Namatjira pioneered the "Hermannsburg School" under the guidance of artist and mentor Rex Battarbee; this watercolour movement still prevails. On the outskirts of town stands the house he built in 1944 from the proceeds of his art sales; once weed-shrouded and unkempt, the dwelling has been restored as part of the Hermannsburg Historic Precinct's multimillion-dollar upgrade. It is empty of all but a spray of spinifex flower heads and the ghost of the man who once lived here.

But in Hermannsburg, Namatjira's descendants and disciples have long safeguarded his legacy. At Hermannsburg Potters, palettes flow with watercolour, and clay samples stacked on a countertop unearth the desert's hues: oxblood on the nearby airstrip, shrimp-pink at Pareroultja, terracotta along the sun-baked bed of the Finke River. When the pottery was established 30 years ago, founding member Judith Inkamala drew from this terrain - and from Namatjira's creative bequest.

"I learnt from Albert Namatjira - [he was] painting everywhere, down the creek, in Alice Springs," she says. "I learnt with Albert Namatjira's granddaughter [Gillian Namatjira]. We went to school [together] and after school we went out to look at all the paintings [Namatjira was working on]."

Today, Inkamala's own work is collectible; it is featured in multiple group exhibitions in Australia and abroad. New works line a shelf; the past blooms upon the pink clay in Namatjira's signature watercolours, memories evoking the souls of people and country. Here families gather around a fire; there children swim in a creek. A figurine of two girls on a see-saw crowns a particularly poignant work.

"I paint my true story," Inkamala says. "After school we went up and play on the swing, see-saw and all. And we walk around to the [still-standing] tannery to see they're making shoes. On Saturdays we go out with family, I go out with my mum - my mum's here, and I'm here. My cousin [is] fishing, my grandmother making damper for dinner, and another one's crushing stone at the back."

Such stories animate this country; music washes over it, too. On the road back to Alice Springs we pass through a primordial landscape that has long pealed with the voices of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women's Choir (CAAWC). Comprising six remote community choirs, the internationally acclaimed group will perform during the Desert Song Festival (held concurrently with Desert Mob and featuring local and international artists). The festival, now in its 10th year, had its beginnings in a motley choir assembled by Melbourne-based choral director Morris Stuart, a regular visitor to the region with his wife, artist Barbara Stuart. As Barbara painted the landscape, Morris sought to find its expression in music.

"I just thought, 'Well, I wonder if people in the town would be interested in joining a choir'?" he says. "The first year we had 40 people in the choir. I taught them African freedom songs."

The synergy between song and setting revealed itself on one of the Stuarts' many road trips through the Northern Territory and Kimberleys.

"Barb and I loved singing in gorges and in rock chasms. We usually thought there was nobody around, but we'd start singing and then we'd stop and we'd hear 'Bravo!'" Stuart says. "We always said it would be great to take a choir out, so we took them out to Trephina Gorge [west of Alice Springs]. We turned up this Sunday afternoon to sing, and there were hundreds of people there."

The local ABC radio broadcast a recording of the performance, and the seeds were thus sown for the Desert Song Festival. Today, Stuart is also the artistic director and conductor of the CAAWC (Barbara's portrait of the choir, One Voice, can be viewed at the John Flynn Memorial Church in Alice Springs). He has led the choir in song abroad and in venues around Australia; but those mighty chasms are the most fitting amphitheatres for the choristers' Indigenous melody. During this year's festival, the languages of Central Australia will wreathe through Ormiston Gorge as sinuously as those ancestral caterpillars; they will reverberate from the soaring crags in a mighty hallelujah.

Song typically spills from the studio at Many Hands Iltja Ntjarra Art Centre in Alice Springs, but I visit on a Friday, when most of the artists have a day off. Their lyricism unfurls nonetheless in the watercolours and etchings hanging in the gallery; the fresh fruits of Namatjira's Hermannsburg School are ripe for the picking. Much like their celebrated forebear, the Arrernte artists working here have found esteem in Australia and beyond: Hubert Pareroultja won the Wynne Prize in 2020; Selma Coulthard is readying herself for an exhibition in Sydney.

"I didn't think I'd come this far," she says. "I'm telling cultural stories, I'm showing the younger generations that stories are so important."

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This narrative is embedded in Coulthard's canvas, upon which a road winds past lilac scarps towards a line of steel-blue hills near Kings Canyon.

"[My father] was the one guiding [the road worker] through all the sacred areas so there was no damage," she says. "That's the gully where people used to come and sit down at the waterholes. Them creeks, they're just dry... but my family, they've always found water along there. Waterholes are quite sacred... That's a resource, water is for life."

And life, so well-nourished by this sacred country, is the source of its singular art.

Desert Mob runs from September 7 to October 22, see desertmob.com. The Desert Song Festival runs from September 8-17, see desertsong.com.au

The Crowne Plaza Alice Springs Lasseters has rooms from around $120, see ihg.com/crowneplaza

Alice Springs Expeditions offers bespoke art tours, see alicespringsexpeditions.com.au; Hermannsburg Potters and Many Hands Iltja Ntjarra Art Centre are open to visitors, see he rmannsburgpotters.com.au and manyhandsart.com.au

The writer was a guest of Tourism NT.

Pictures: Tourism NT; Tourism Australia.