This video is an interview with Australian Aboriginal artist Rusty Peters.
From The Independent in Britain:
Aboriginal artists are conned into selling works worth thousands for wine and ViagraBy Kathy Marks in Utopia, Northern Territory
Published: 18 June 2007
Greeny Purvis Petyarre is an acclaimed Aboriginal artist whose paintings hang in state galleries and private collections. His work has been exhibited around Australia and in several European countries, including Britain, where it went on show in London last year. Greeny’s larger pieces - intricate evocations of desert plants and wildflowers – sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
Greeny and his wife, Kathleen, also a highly regarded painter, live in a broken-down shack at Utopia, a former cattle station in Australia’s vast central desert. Perhaps the German graziers who ran the station early last century considered themselves in heaven. Nowadays the name of the sprawling, dusty community, 200 miles north-east of Alice Springs, seems like a sick joke.
At Utopia, the playground is ankle-deep in litter, and fuel pumps are locked behind metal grilles, to deter petrol sniffers. Children with permanently runny noses play in the red dirt, circled by mangy dogs fighting over half-eaten bones. Up to 15 people are crammed into each house, with sometimes just one dribbling showerhead for sanitation.
