Works of this kind were made very often by western desert artists in the first decades of the painting movement: stylised depictions of country, said to show both natural features and the tracks of creative ancestors. And this is indeed a true “surface” interpretation of such pieces, rhythmic and formal as they are. They were made for a purpose. One of the first desert art-works seen by outside eyes was just such an image, incised on the back of a mulga-wood woomera, or spear-thrower, given to the anthropologist Donald Thomson in 1963 by nomad Pintupi men. The emblems were a guide to sand-dune country waterholes. In this painting, as in its traditional forebears, the network of circles represents the true location of desert water points.