Arts in Australia

(wikipedia)
Updated: 2009-08-28 11:24

Art: Painting and sculpture

Australia has had a significant school of painting since the early days of European settlement and Australians with international reputations include Sir Sidney Nolan, Sir Russell Drysdale, Arthur Boyd, Brett Whiteley, Ian Burn, Pro Hart — not to mention the prized work of many indigenous artists such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Aboriginal holllow log tomb [wikipedia]

Indigenous Australian art (also known as Aboriginal art) is art made by Indigenous Australians, covering works that pre-date European colonization as well as contemporary art by Aboriginal Australians based on traditional culture. These have been studied in recent decades and gained increased international recognition. Aboriginal Art covers a wide medium including painting on leaves, wood carving, rock carving, sculpture, sandpainting and ceremonial clothing, as well as artistic decorations found on weaponry and also tools.

Art is one of the key rituals of Aboriginal culture and was and still is, used to mark territory, record history, and tell stories about the dreamtime. Similar to how Christians have their own story of the creation of the Earth, the Dreamtime is how the Aboriginals believed the world was created.

But the importance of art to traditional Indigenous life is difficult for non-Indigenous people to understand. To quote Howard Morphy (1991): "Art was, and is, a central component of the traditional Yolngu way of life, of significance in the political domain, in the relationships between clans, and in the relations between men and women. Art was and remains an important component of the system of restricted knowledge, and at a more metaphysical level is the major means of recreating ancestral events, ensuring continuity with the ancestral past, and communicating with the spirit world. For example, a rock painting of a Rainbow Serpent is not just a picture of a 'Rainbow Serpent'. It is a manifestation of the Rainbow Serpent - she resides in the painting, and will come out and devour you if you behave inappropriately towards the painting."

To quote Morphy (1991) again: "Paintings as ancestral designs do not simply represent the ancestral beings by encoding stories... As far as the Yolngu are concerned, the designs are an integral part of the ancestral beings themselves... The designs themselves possess or contain the power of the ancestral being."

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