In his bush ballad Chasing Kangaroos(2012), George Cooley sings, “Let’s go chasing kangaroos, where the painted desert lies, ”inviting us to follow dry gidgee scrub and creek beds where they run. Here, a dust storm brews over the ranges, land is softened and scored by wind and water, and the sun recasts the colours of ochre as afternoon slips into twilight. Cooley’s words don’t offer a roadmap; instead, they draw us into an intimate, first-hand way of knowing and sensing Country. Cooley captures the spectacular landscapes he has traversed throughout his life. It shows a section of the Kaṉku-Breakaways in northern South Australia, known for the dramatic form and colour of its mesas, ridges, escarpments, and floodplains. The Antakirinja Matu-Yankunytjatjara people know the area as umoona (long life), named after the red mulga tree that dominates the otherwise arid landscape, and as tjamuku ngura (Grandfather’s Country). The word kaṉku, meaning ‘shelter,’ reflects its significance as a place of protection and sanctuary. By contrast, the term ‘breakaways’ describes the steep and sloping escarpments and exposed sandstone carved from the tableland through weathering and corrosion. Although Cooley created preparatory sketches of these landscapes in2011, he did not start painting them unƟl2021.Since then, he has worked across varying scales, developing a distinctive approach that registers his accumulated knowledge of the area through a palette knife and thick impasto painting. Through these dense layers of colour and texture, his paintings reveal the dynamic conditions of a desert environment, which, while harsh, is not devoid of life. He says, “One of the significant things that inspires me is that it’s a living landscape. It looks dead, but it’s living. It’s got life. To me, it’s alive in its beauty, and it captures you. It hypnotises you.” The Kaṉku-Breakaways are located at the edge of Coober Pedy, a town named after an anglicisation of the Parnkalla and Kokathawords kupa (ghost)and piti (quarry), adopted after the rush of settlers to mine opal in the area. It is an area that Cooley first saw in1958, after his father, (Bill) Charlie Cooley, a brumby shooter in the Simpson Desert, caught the opal fever and brought his family to the fields. It was here that Cooley camped in the scrub and walked daily into the hills and gullies to hunt, forming an embodied understanding of the terrain that continues to underpin his practice as an artist, musician and storyteller. The Kaṉku-Breakaways hold powerful creation stories, some of which remain restricted, as the area continues to function as a teaching place for young men and a source of red ochre used in ceremonies. Its distinctive features are believed to have originated from the Rainbow Serpent’s activities during the formation of the world when ancestral beings shaped the land.