The first wobbly old painter of the Western Desert might have been Old Tutuma Tjapangati, a boss of the Honey Ant mural at Papunya that kick-started the greater desert painting movement. Vivien Johnson describes his ‘loose, energetic style’, but as the 1970s wore into the 1980s this looseness combined with a heavier hand.2 His dots got larger, their dabbing less precise. Something else happened too. His designs grew more bold than they had been. Next to the controlled geometries of Papunya Tula’s men of the 1980s, Tutuma’s rough expressionism appeared radically unsteady, yet it also held a greater confidence in handling the iconic figures of the desert.3 Here was a total vision that defied the trend to decorative, all-over detailing. In the twenty-first century, this combination of confident vision with a wobbly hand is a major feature of painting from the Australian desert. As lines and dots have grown uneven with the age of its artists, wobbliness has become a sign of the contact generation’s last signatures, the certainty of cultural knowledge combining with an uncertainty of hand. Yet the demand for wobbly paintings by institutions and collectors alike presents a problem for the future of Aboriginal art. After all, we are supposed to be coming into an era of post-Aboriginality, as art from remote Australia mingles with the rest of Australia and the world into a global cosmopolitanism. The fetish for wobbly paint situates Aboriginal art as Outsider Art, as a dying generation of artists figure the doubled primitivism of Aboriginality and ageing. The outsider status of remote and old Aboriginal people in Australian society should not, however, be mirrored in the artworld’s reception of their art... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline