Indigenous Australian Art

Indigenous Australian art refers to a tradition in that country’s art that has its roots in the peoples whose culture and civilization date to millennia before the arrival of the first British settlers in the late eighteenth century. These settlers were dispatched by the Crown to establish a royal prison on what was perceived as a vast and uninhabited remote island outpost. But the country was hardly uninhabited. Much like North America as well as Central and South America, Australia had rich and diverse native populations; each tribe had its own language, its own religion, its own culture, and its own art. These cultures were thriving for centuries before the arrival of the Europeans and would face an uncertain future in the face of unstoppable aggressive colonization.

Although indigenous Australians inhabited virtually the entire Australian continent, they were particularly concentrated in what is now known as Western Australia, in the northwest corner of the continent along the Indian Ocean, and along the Torres Strait Island archipelago that bridges the ocean between the Australian continent and the great island of Papua New Guinea. For these indigenous Australians, art was a way to express their ties to the land and more importantly their deep beliefs in (and their dependency on) supernatural entities, usually taking the forms of animals or natural phenomena rather than being humanoid, that created the seasons, carved the mountains and islands, and provided the peoples with food. Their art—expressed in rock paintings, costuming, body painting, and rock carvings—is preserved today as a testimony to peoples whose cultures, much like those of the native people of the Americas, struggled to survive in the face of the transplanted culture of white Europeans and its concerted effort to wipe them out.

In addition, however, indigenous Australian art refers to a movement in contemporary art, largely after World War II, known popularly as the Western Desert Art Movement, in which native Australian artists studied carefully and then sought to recapture the energy and design of the ancient artists as a way to both celebrate Australia’s true national identity and at the same time to preserve that art and its distinctive style even as the tribes themselves began to vanish. This school of art enjoyed immense success with both the critical establishment and with the public, who found in the rich primitive stylings a refreshing and vividly expressive art. This art—realized in a variety of media other than canvas, including glass, ceramics, fabric, and even natural elements such as leaves, sticks, and grasses—suggested the continuing vitality of an artistic tradition that is more than 30,000 years old. By comparison, the art of Egypt, which many Westerners regard as ancient, dates back a mere 6,000 years. Indeed, cultural anthropologists consider the art of indigenous Australia the oldest continuing expression of humanity’s need to record their experiences and their ideas in nonverbal designs—in short, the world’s oldest artistic tradition.

Background

For these cultural anthropologists, the art of the indigenous Australians is a trove of information about the origins of art itself. They help answer one of the most persistent mysteries about humanity: the question of why people turned toward recording their experiences in vivid images on cave walls and in elaborate carvings in shelves of rocks. The process was certainly time-consuming and tedious—and for a people engaged in day-to-day survival by living off the land with little leisure time, the turn toward art is itself a matter of modern debate. For the Indigenous Australians, art was a way to validate their ties to the land and, in turn, the tie to the deities who had gifted them with the land and still controlled its operations.

The original expressions of art, dating back nearly thirty millennia, are drawings found in the caves of Western and Central Australia (most notably Carnarvon Gorge) and in the remote scattered rock islands of the Dampier Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. These earliest paintings were done in a vivid red ochre, a pigment created from the iron oxide that was plentiful in the dirt of the cave floors. Red ochre was used in addition for dyeing animal coats to show respect for the gods and for body art as part of often intense, multiple-day religious rituals. These paintings decorate the ceilings and the walls as well as piles of stones in the caves.

Although estimates suggest there are as many as a million of these drawings scattered throughout central and northwestern Australia, anthropologists have divided these cave drawings into three broad classifications according to their figural representations. Most were simple geometric shapes, almost entirely variations on circles, half circles, and dots, suggesting (given the absence of straight edged figures such as squares or diamonds) the tribal fascination with observable planetary phenomena such as the sun and moon. In addition, these geometric paintings record crudely done animal paw prints (usually a pattern of small circles around a large central circle) as a way to celebrate the abundance of prey for hunting and eating. In addition to these abstract shapes, some paintings recreated silhouettes of actual people or exaggerated parts of people (most often hands), sometimes in vivid action drawings that also involved outlines of the animals and fish they hunted and trapped. There are also a few designs that are far more complex—for instance, outlines of the human body with representations of internal organs or animals with multiple arms and legs or the sun with eccentric and distorted lines, or shapes of skulls with exaggerated eye and nostril sockets—which for anthropologists suggest an expressive relationship with the world, a restless, even scientific, need to examine, define, and observe it. In addition to the cave paintings, which have become known internationally, these Aboriginal artists made more mobile types of paintings, decorating, for instance, shaved tree bark and decorating the sides of coffins hollowed out of logs. In addition to their jewelry and their colorful woven fabrics, these painted artifacts are on display in museums around the world.

But it is the cave drawings that most define indigenous Australian art, drawings that are still vivid today—as such they represent humanity’s original aesthetic aspirations, they are the very origins of all art. Indeed, in 1981, UNESCO designated the Kakuda National Park, in northwestern Australia, as one of its World Heritage Sites, citing not only its rich biodiverse ecosystem but as well its elaborate network of decorated caves, a designation that indicates the importance of these cave drawings to humanity itself.

Topic Today

More than any other figure, master watercolorist Albert Namatjira (1902–59) is responsible for the renaissance in interest worldwide in the indigenous art of Australia. The story of Namatjira, however, is largely tragic. Born on a government mission reservation set aside for native people (akin to Native American reservations in the United States), Namatjira showed a remarkable proclivity for sketching and painting from a young age. Although he was academically trained in Western schools of artistic theory, when he began to paint professionally he turned to the vast lands of the Aboriginal peoples, capturing their sweep and bleak majesty. He was particularly intrigued by the play of light in such landscapes, how sunlight transfigured the trees, the mountains, and even the flat stretches of bushlands. His paintings were at once stark and deeply passionate. They found an international audience and introduced the art world to the primitive world of the indigenous Australians. Namatjira became an international art figure; however, Australian law still regarded Aboriginal peoples as second-class citizens. Namatjira, despite his wealth, could not, for instance, own land or start his own business (he wanted to be a rancher). It required a special act of the Canberra government in 1957 to grant Namatjira citizenship. But when he attempted to purchase alcohol and share it with his friends, he was arrested, as providing alcohol to natives was against Australian law. He served two months in prison; when he was released, he was a bitter and broken man and died soon after.

But his art had created an international fascination with the natural world of the indigenous Australian cultures. The reality, of course, was that the surviving Aboriginal peoples had long invested their time and their energy in producing artworks, such as jewelry (necklaces and bracelets), stone and wood carvings, and decorated woven fabrics that they in turn sold to tourists visiting the government lands. The income was meager, but the artwork, all original work done painstakingly by hand, worked to capture the ancient systems of animal and natural iconography and maintained the interest in vivid colors and bold geometric figures. More to the point, the artisans themselves were proud and regarded their work as the last lingering expression of a culture that was all but extinguished. Although the work was sold cheaply, its worth was much greater than the price would suggest. Raised within the traditions and cultures of the indigenous people, the artists regarded their work as essential to the integrity of their own people.

The Australian government recognized indigenous people as full citizens of the country in 1967. By the mid-1970s, the government moved to organize these indigenous artisans and their works as a way to maintain their cultural input as part of Australia’s national heritage. By 1980 the government had set up more than a hundred art centers across the country that specialized in indigenous art, not only selling the works for a better price than they had previously commanded, but also providing sleek new galleries to display these artworks and to explain their cultural import.

But there is no more seminal expression of indigenous Australian art than the Western Desert Art Movement that since the mid-1950s has supported the expression of native artists and has been cited as Australia’s most important contribution to art history itself. The movement was centered in those areas in central and northwestern Australia where the remaining indigenous peoples still lived, areas under centuries of white government control that had rendered these places little more than glorified prison camps; the conditions were poor, the schools underfunded, utilities nonexistent, the homes dilapidated. The Papunya community in northwestern Australia made particularly significant contributions to the movement.

This movement was distinctive because, unlike participants in other back-to-nature art movements in the postmodern art worlds of the United States and Europe, these artists were not paying homage to the native culture, were not painstakingly imitating this culture, but were actually born a part of it. Government and university programs reached out to indigenous artists and provided funding and studios as a way to support them. The works themselves were distinctive—they were simple, often an intriguing pattern of abstract shapes; the landscapes were dreamlike, full of swirling lines that captured the feeling of the earth’s energy; perspective was deliberately skewed to capture the sense of wonder; the colors, simple but deep-set earth tones for the most part, were applied in rough and often brusque strokes to capture the raw energy of primitive art. The artists, among them Uta Uta Tjangala (1926–90), Onatjar Tjakamarr (1938–92), and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri (1920–74), became international sensations, their works selected for displays in national galleries all over the world and, in turn, becoming the international face of contemporary indigenous Australian art.

Bibliography

Caruana, Wally. Aboriginal Art. 3rd ed. New York: Thames, 2013. Print.

Cubillo, Franchesca, and Wally Caruana. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art: Collection Highlights. Canberra: Natl. Gallery of Australia, 2011. Print.

"Facts about Aboriginal Art." Japingka Gallery. Japingka Gallery, 2014. Web. 18 Aug. 2016.

McLean, Ian. Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art. London: Reaktion, 2016. Print.

Mercer, Phil. "Australia’s Indigenous Art: ‘An Economic Colossus.’" BBC News. BBC, 2 May 2013. Web. 18 Aug. 2016.

Neale, Margo, and Sylvia Kleinert. The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.

"Papunya Tula Art Movement of the Western Desert." Australia.gov.au. Australian Government, 30 Sept. 2009. Web. 18 Aug. 2016.