Aboriginal History and Art

When you start looking at Australian Aboriginal artwork, it’s important to remember that Australia is the most isolated of the world’s large continents, and was the last to face intensive colonization by Europeans. This isolation had important consequences for the development of native Australian peoples.

First, the Australian Aboriginals maintained a Stone Age technological level until relatively recent times. Aboriginals lacked such seemingly basic technologies as bows and arrows, but were efficient hunters using their unique boomerangs as well as various types of traps. Second, because the Aboriginals were isolated from the rest of the human race for thousands of years, their artwork followed unique styles in otherwise familiar forms.

It’s generally conceded that the first humans reached Australia about 50,000 years ago, and were isolated from the world not long after. There were never many of them; it’s estimated that there were no more than 700,000 Aboriginals when the British began to colonize Australia in 1788, and probably far fewer. Their widely scattered condition led to a proliferation of art forms among the Aboriginals. Many of their works grace modern Aboriginal art galleries today.

The basic forms of Australian Aboriginal art are familiar because most pre-industrial, pre-contact cultures used the same modes for representational art. The earliest Aboriginal paintings are unique and distinctive, but that is accentuated, not decreased, by their essential humanity. We are drawn to prehistoric Aboriginal artwork because we can see ourselves in it, even though its cultural reference is completely alien to non-Aboriginals.

So what are the forms? What are we looking at, when we start to survey Aboriginal artwork? These are some of the questions that this blog will try to answer. But first, let’s look at the Australian Aboriginals. Where did they come from, and how long have they been in Australia?

The earliest forms of Aboriginal art are still with us: body painting. Body painting was, and sometimes still is, an important part of traditional Aboriginal religious ceremonies. The designs and patterns painted onto participants’ bodies are usually “owned” by their respective clans, and help to identify tribal and family affiliations.

On a more impressive scale, Aboriginal rock paintings are found throughout Australia. These paintings can range from the simple to the complex, and the very abstract to the highly concrete. While the styles change across the continent, certain features remain the same.

Traditional Aboriginal paints are made from rock pigments, such as ochre, and sometimes plant matter. These are mixed with saliva, water, or animal fats, and then brushed on the surface using a variety of tools. Grass brushes, sticks, and fingers are the most common tools, and are used in both rock and body painting, but in stencil painting, the paint is blown by mouth around an object, leaving a clear area and a painted outline. This last method is rarely used on the human body.

From the vantage point of modern civilization, we expect “primitive” cultures to engage in body or rock painting, but the Aboriginals also used tree bark as a canvas. The bark could be peeled off of the tree, flattened, and the relatively flat inside surface was then painted. As with body painting, these Aboriginal paintings are traditionally seen as the property of the artist and his clan; no one else can use a particular artist’s designs.

We’ll talk about other Aboriginal art styles, and go into some greater detail on particular types of Aboriginal artwork, in later posts.