Artist Noli Rictor, possibly the youngest “first contact” Aboriginal person in Australia, has won the nation’s most prestigious award for Indigenous art.

From Tjuntjuntjara in Western Australia, Rictor has won the $100,000 Telstra Art Award for his three-metre-high painting titled Kamanti.

“Winning has made me really happy, really proud … I painted this big painting here,” the Pitjantjatjara man told reporters via a translator, at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin.

He wants to buy a new car with the winnings – the community of Tjuntjuntjara is so remote that it was a 25-hour drive to Alice Springs to catch a flight to Darwin for the awards ceremony on Friday.

Until the age of 21, Noli Rictor lived in Spinifex Country – the Great Victoria Desert – with only his immediate family, but they were found by relatives in 1986.

His family then moved to the settlement of Yakadunya, where other relatives had relocated 30 years earlier, after being displaced by British nuclear testing at Maralinga in the 1950s.

The winning painting shows the Kamanti rockhole in the Spinifex Lands that Rictor drank from as a young man.

It also tells the epic creation story of Wati Kutjara Tjukurpa – father and son water serpents who travelled through the landscape, shaping it as they went.

“Noli’s painting vividly illustrates the country he was born into, reflecting the deep spiritual and cultural heritage that has shaped his life,” the judges said in a statement.

After seeing the impact that painting stories such as these had as evidence for Native Title claims during the 1990s, Rictor took up painting in 2004.

After a long break he returned to his art in 2016 at Tjuntjuntjara, with the Spinifex Arts Project.

The Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards have launched the careers of some of Australia’s most significant Aboriginal artists.

–AAP