Follow us now

Simply Multicultural Follow Our Blog

Indigenous Australian Art

Art speaks a language of its own: the language of love, history and cultural evolution.  Take the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, for instance. Chauvet is known to contain one of the oldest cave paintings in the world. Considered to be a significant pre-historic site, Chauvet yielded a plethora of information about the life of the people who lived some 30,000 years ago. Isn’t it interesting then, that just by studying these paintings, experts can understand the culture of an ancient people with some modicum of accuracy.  The art of a community, a people, then, speaks their language. This is especially evident among some living indigenous communities such as the Australian Aboriginals.   

Indigenous Australian Art

Indigenous Australian art, also known as Australian Aboriginal art, pre-dates European colonization. It includes a wide range of art expressed through rock paintings, bark paintings, rock engravings, stone arrangements, weaving, iconography and symbols, to name a few. Advanced carbon and thermo-luminescence dating of sites found in Australia indicate that Aboriginal presence has been strong on the continent for over 40,000 years.

Aboriginal culture is marked by a theme of ‘unity with nature’. In the traditional Aboriginal belief system, nature, landscape, animals, the environment and communal sharing are inter-connected.

The Dreaming

Aboriginal culture, and by extension its art, music and storytelling, is infused by the Dreaming. This concept is the essence of the community and its people. The Dreaming is a common term within the animist creation narrative of indigenous Australians for a personal, or group creation. Though it has no equal or quantifiable meaning in English, the Aboriginal people understand Dreaming as the “timeless time” of formative creating and a continuous creation. The Dreaming and Dreamtime helped and still helps the Aboriginal community understand and explain life, as well as the creation of the world. The Dreaming is extremely vital to the community because it determines their value system, their belief and also influences the community’s relationship to the world around them.

In fact, Dreaming is such a strongly held value in the community that a few Aboriginal tribes have used it to argue their title over traditional tribal land before the High Court of Australia. In short, Dreaming is the soul of the Aboriginal community. When they apply it to art, it expresses their existence as a whole.

 Art and Aboriginal people

Like all forms of art, Aboriginal art represents and symbolizes their world, their beliefs, and their Dreaming as a people. Unlike most forms of art, the term encompasses everything from dancing, singing, body decorations, sand drawings etc. For the Aboriginal person, art does not solely mean painting or drawing. It is not an activity that is separate from their normal routine in life.  Aboriginal people believe that everyone is an artist, and there is no notion of an artist being a special person with special and unique skills. However, as the Aboriginal community continues to adapt to modern Western culture, this idea too is changing.

Aboriginal Art Forms

Aboriginal art forms vary among the tribes and even among people within a tribe. This is because art, symbolizes the Dreaming, and just as each person’s dreaming is different; the art too is very varied. Colours were procured from ochre mining pits and tribes established methods to trade in this pigment. They also used pigments made from clay, wood ash or animal blood.

There were and still are considerable variations in the symbolic representation of rock art and paintings. However, certain symbols within the Aboriginal modern art movement are expressed in the same way across regions, for example circles within circles, blue or black colours used to depict water etc.

Aerial landscape art, a genre of art from ancient times, is also very important to the movement. In short, aerial landscape art is a maplike, a bird’s-eye-view of the desert. While earlier rock, sand and body painting were used to depict this form of art, modern day Aboriginal artists use the canvas. When viewing Aboriginal art or icons, the meaning should be derived after taking into consideration the entire painting, the artist’s origins, the story behind and the style of the painting as well as the type of colours used.

 Aboriginal art is unique in that the people are pouring their language, their culture, values and belief system into it. This kind of art is not meant to be viewed in isolation like an impressionist painting. Aboriginal art is as large and continuous as the landscape itself; it is a precious fragment of the Dreaming. 

Article written on behalf of Global Kids Oz by Annie Besant