A brief history of aboriginal art

Although the earliest native Australian human remains are dated at around 60,000 years old, there is evidence showing human activity in the region as early as 120,000 years ago. Over the course of thos many tens of thousands of years a rich art has flourished amongst those who nature must still see as the truest Australians, and that art has followed the same pattern as many asiatic traditions by favouring oral and sculpted art over the written word.

One of the oldest forms of Aborignal art is rock art – paintings found on rocks and caves and on the sides of mountains. Some of the subject matter of these paintings includes kangaroos, people and even apparently mythological creatures shaped like a cross between humans and birds.

Another form of Aboriginal art is desert art, apparently based on what must surely be a very early form of producing images and stories drawn in the sand. Although the contemporary form of this art is relatively abundant it is perhaps not as significant as the Aboriginal ochre art which has a very strong line of continuity running from the ancient past right into the heart of the present day.

Bark paintings, which are similar in many ways, in contrast to other Aborignal art, are nonetheless very rare and very valuable. The most predominant form of aboriginal art, widely visisble throughout Australia, is the carving, carved onto many media, including rock – today carvings are the most common medium used for aboriginal artistic expression.

Nonetheless what consitutes Aboriginal art stretches further than the domain of art through representation or even abstract art. Artefacts such as boomerangs, wood coolamons and digging sticks are also, whether painted, carved or plain, a rich indicator of the nature of the art and craft of this asiatic culture whose ancient roots have been very severely overlooked and indeed trampled on in recent times, but hopefully not forever.

As late as 1978 the “white Australia” policy had not completely ended, a strict and stupefyingly racist policy which had been firmly meated out by “white Australians” from 1901 to 1950. And so the volume of Aboriginal art is naturally nowhere near the scale it would be if the culture were completely in its element with nothing interfering with its development. In time perhaps it will come to flourish as magnificently as the art of many of its neighbouring cultures in Indo-China.

Art always carries the soul of a people through time, even if they are a people under a yoke – in the end, yokes which can encompass a whole people only truly find themselves broken by the strength of what only art can carry across time.