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He built bridges between the business community and human rights groups

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He built bridges between the business community and human rights groups. He didn't stay up at night worrying about whether the movement was adrift. He just got things done.As the chief Asia advocate for Human Rights Watch from 1990, he helped get writers, doctors, journalists and other troublemakers out of prison. Michael Jendrzejczyk, human-rights campaigner: born New Britain, Connecticut 1 February 1950; Advocacy Director, Asia Division, Human Rights Watch 1990-2003; married 1971 Janet Buczkowski; died Washington, DC 1 May 2003.

With typical modesty he described himself only as being a man "in the right place at the right time". The pattern established by Bardon at Papunya was rapidly taken up by other Aboriginal settlements across Australia, as the art movement spread and prospered.After leaving Papunya Bardon kept in close touch with the community and his many friends there. He left Papunya after barely two years, but he had helped facilitate a great change – giving the long-marginalised Aboriginals a new voice and a new cultural confidence with which to engage not only white Australians but also the world. The work, often characterised as "dot-and-circle painting" on account of its two most familiar motifs, while apparently abstract, was crammed with meaning. Its visual power was undeniable and very soon attracted the interest of the wider art world.

Over the next two years they created almost 1,000 pictures with acrylic paint on board or canvas, and sold them through an artist's co-operative organised by Bardon. It was taken up by some of the community elders who worked as yardmen at the school. They were excited by the work – and by the realisation that, even removed from their ancestral sites in the desert, they still recorded and revealed their spiritual world.They – and other members of the community – asked Bardon to provide them with more materials. Bardon worked hard to learn the principal language of the settlement, and to gain the trust both of his pupils and their parents.

He shocked many of his white co-workers by engaging closely with the Aboriginal community. He went hunting with them, invited them to his flat and ate his meals in the settlement canteen. He showed an interest in Aboriginal culture and beliefs, in the creation stories of the Dreamtime, and the motifs used to record these during ceremonies.When he initiated an art project to paint a mural of "the honey-ant dreaming" story on the side of the schoolhouse (providing the paints and brushes himself), the task proved too much for the children. It was a job that no one else wanted.Papunya was, in Bardon's words, "a problem place": a government "assimilation" centre where some 1,400 Aboriginals, from several different tribal groups, were gathered, having been forced from their traditional lands – and traditional ways of life Morale, along with everything else, was low.

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