Embedded Files
Aboriginal Art in Australia
Aboriginal Australians use art as an embodiment of complex social, mythic, and ceremonial meanings. Outsiders often describe Aboriginal art as conceptual instead of perceptual which is a common outsider perspective of painting. According to Langton, there are two subdivisions of Aboriginal art: the urban and the traditional (1994). In traditional Aboriginal art, there is one public text: the story, spirit, and/or animal represented and its representation. In urban Aboriginal art, there are usually two texts: the object and its message (Langton, 1994). This is important to distinguish because there are so many different forms of art from Aboriginal people that are displayed in museums or galleries. These forms of art are often catagorized by nonindigenous people which is why it is important to keep this in mind.
The first known discovery of Australian Aboriginal art by Europeans was seen by Captain Cook in 1773 at Botany Bay. Cook and his crew had described the Aboriginal people as covered in body paint (Thomas, 2011). Body painting was happily displayed by Aboriginal people and they were happy to show this form of art to colonizers (Thomas, 2011). Body painting is well-recognized today by outsiders as an Aboriginal practice in many Aboriginal cultures.
A popular discovery illustrated in the art-history chronicle discusses the discovery of Art in Australia by colonial explorer, George Grey. George Grey found Aboriginal paintings on rock, located on the Kimberly coast of Western Australia during the years 1837-1839 (Thomas, 2011). Grey had interpreted the art as images of Wanjina spirit people. Paintings on cave walls and on rocks were located everywhere around Sydney and were generally drawn by colonizers for educational purposes, but were later photographed due to modern technology(Thomas, 2011). Another account described Aboriginal art found during Matthew Flinder’s expedition on Chasm Island. Flinders had found two paintings on the walls of a cave. He had depicted one of the paintings as representing seafood and the other as a procession of figures and a kangaroo (Thomas, 2011).
Aboriginal Art and Ceremony
A majority of Aboriginal Australian cultures will spend a large proportion of their ceremonies preparing materials for decoration. While ceremonies vary a great deal across aboriginal cultures, men will generally congregate with men and women with women. The Yarnangu will generally create some decorations using fibers. Yurtalpa (vegetable down) is made by pounding the fiber of wild daisies, flour can be added, which creates what is called white down. During this process, songs from the Dreaming involved in this ceremony are sung. Once materials are ready, they are applied according to the ceremony and the positions of the person. Men specified as performers are painted by members of the opposite Kurtungurlu (manager) category. Vegetable down is generally applied using a finger or stick and an adhesive is usually applied prior. When ocher (natural clay pigment) is applied, a fat will generally be smeared prior and traced using a finger that has already been dipped in ocher. At the same time, men will prepare headdresses, shields, and other objects that coincide with their ancestors or spirits (Morphy, 2016). Once decorations and objects have been prepared for the ceremony, men will judge pieces and deem if they are fit for the ceremony. The creation of ceremonial art ties into the idea of an individual’s identity as part of a larger group and as part of the Dreaming (Morphy, 2016).
Significance of Aboriginal Art
Aboriginal art has served to represent so many aspects of Aboriginal culture. Although some Aboriginal art is temporary such as body art or sand paintings that could get weathered away, some Aboriginal art can be found on rock engravings, stone arrangements, and tree cravings that can survive several generations. Most of Aboriginal art is stored in the minds of indigenous people until it has to be expressed whether that is through ceremony or as a farewell to the dead. A significant concept of many indigenous cultures in Australia is the concept of the Dreaming, which can represent so many different things but is essentially everything an indigenous person must know. Many indigenous people will represent concepts of the Dreaming through art. Certain places, spirits, ideas, and traditional meanings can be drawn and memorized so that the present generation can pass it on to the next generation.
Aboriginal art is mainly influenced by the actions of ancestors. Art drawn on the bodies of Aboriginal people for a cermony can represent the way a certain event had occured. An example of this is drawing “the mark left by the tide as it washed over the body of an ancestral being lying dead on the beach” (Myers, 2002). Aboriginal art can also represent abstract things. In many Aboriginal cultures, men are the ones that acquire increased access to secret knowledge as they grow older. Although women have their own secret knowledge, women are denied acces to some general interpretations of designs, dances, and ritual art which is why men and women may have different interpretations of certain painting. Different cultures have different interpretations of art, which is influenced by their group's ancestral history and the concepts and ideas that are most important and influential to their culture (Myers, 2002)).
Aboriginal art in modern day society
During the 1970’s, more Aboriginal people began painting on canvases, which were sold as individual pieces and recognized the painters as individual painters and not as a whole group or as a part of the Dreaming (Morphy, 2016).
More modern-day Australian Aboriginal painting involves painting while sitting on the ground and the usage of acrylics. The first step of painting will generally involve painting on a background color which is generally a black or red ocher. Much of what is painted involves the formation of concentric circles, meanders, connecting lines, etc….The final step of this process involves placing dots. This whole process is very sacred and very strategic (Morphy, 2016).
Another form of Australian Aboriginal art involves painting on tree bark. Aboriginal Australians in Arnhem land commonly use tree bark for art. The bark is generally reaped from a tree and prepared by smoothing. Brushes are made from the bark strings and natural pigments are made by crushing up fruit, charcoal, or natural elements. Different Aboriginal tribes have different customs, traditions, and beliefs but some tribes will paint concepts that connect to another tribe near them. Many of the things that are painted pertain to spiritual beliefs, surrounding environments (maps of the environment), and concepts understood by a certain tribe such as the snake spirit. The idea of using bark for art was very interesting and novice to me, so I chose to investigate this topic further (Morphy, 2016).
Author Fred R. Myers brings up several reasons why Aboriginal people might express themselves artistically. Some of the reasons include that many Aboriginal cultures feel a necessity to fill in an empty space and “respond to a medium”. He also brings up that Aboriginal cultures would paint to fulfill a “kinesthetic delight” and to produce “visual brilliance”. He brings up that some cultures such as the Yolngu culture would paint bark as “generative and organizational components of the artistic system” but also use images as representations for many different things (Morphy, 2016).
Indigenous art has recently been of much interest in Australia, especially in museums and galleries. A popular form of indigenous art in museums and galleries is bark paintings. About 100 barks had been displayed and exhibited at the Museum at the University of Sydney in 1973. Much of Aboriginal art painted on bark had been geographically motivated and influenced by the surroundings of indigenous people (Geissler, 2021). Aboriginal art generally represents several things such as the land, people, spirits, and concepts (video).
Aboriginal Art Integrated into Law
During 1963 bark had been used by the Yolgnu people in Arnhem Land as a formal document requesting that the mining company Nablco not use 300 square kilometres of their land to extract bauxite. The Nabalco mining company had began working on mining even with this documentation sent to the government. This document was called the bark petition and the Yolgnu essentially brought up the lack of consultation in regard to the mining and the impacts of mining their land. The underlying goal of the bark petition was to recognize indigenous people’s rights in the constitution (Broome, 2019:227).This was the first time that bark painting had been combined with formal documentation to help indigenous people. The combination of a traditional and sacred art by indigenous people had been used to attempt to reform Australia’s laws, indicating the significance of indigenous art practices. Unfortunately, no agreement was provided, their land independence was taken away, and their land continued to be mined against their wishes. Although there was no immediate legal change in terms of recognizing Aboriginal people’s rights, the bark petition did pave the way for the 1967 referendum, which recognized indigenous people as citizens for the first time (Bähr, 2013).
Works Cited
Bähr, E. (2013). Political Iconography in Indigenous Art.
Broome,. R. (2019). Aboriginal Australians A history since 1788: fifth edition. Crowns Nest, Australia. Allen and Unwin. IBSN 978 1 76052 821 8
Geissler, M. (2021). The Making of Indigenous Australian Contemporary Art: Arnhem Land Bark Painting, 1970-1990. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Langton, M. (1994). Aboriginal art and film: The politics of representation. Race & class, 35(4), 89-106.
Morphy, H. (2016). Encoding the Dreaming- A theoretical framework for the analysis of representational processes in Australian Aboriginal art. Australian Archeology. Vol. 49. 1. Pg. (13-22). https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.1999.11681648
Myers, F. R. (2002). Painting culture: the making of an aboriginal high art. Duke University Press.
Thomas, D. (2011). Aboriginal art: who was interested?. Journal of Art Historiography, (4), 1.
Video:
Dreamings Links to an external site.
Photography links:
“Garma Festival 2017 in Pictures.” Garma Festival 2017 - ABC News, 7 Aug. 2017, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-05/2017-garma-festival/8777828.
White Wolf. “Dreamtime:Traditional Australian Aboriginal Fire Dance.” White Wolf, http://www.whitewolfpack.com/2013/08/traditional-australian-aboriginal-dance.html.
Linklater, Scott. “The Amazing Story of Aboriginal Art.” Artlandish Aboriginal Art, 22 Sept. 2022, https://www.aboriginal-art-australia.com/aboriginal-art-library/the-story-of-aboriginal-art/.
ABC News. “Find out More: Yirrkala Bark Petitions.” ABC News, ABC News, 10 July 2013, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-10/yirrkala-bark-petitions-50-years-on/4809610.
Page updated
Report abuse