Aboriginal Rock Art (Australia)
Types, Characteristics, History & Chronology.
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Aboriginal Rock Art (Australia) |
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Australian Aboriginal Rock ArtContents • Introduction |
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DIFFERENT FORMS OF ARTS |
Aborigines began arriving in Australia from the Asian mainland during the Pleistocene period of the Paleolithic Stone Age, around 50,000-40,0000 BCE. Detailed information about their culture is scarce, but according to some paleo-anthropologists they began practising forms of primitive art almost immediately. So far, the oldest known prehistoric art in Australia (at Ubirr in Arnhem Land, Northern Australia) has been dated to around 30,000 BCE, although prehistoric aboriginal artworks from numerous archeological sites - including UNESCO listed sites at Uluru and Kakadu in the Northern Territory, Kimberley and the Murujuga peninsula in Western Australia - are under investigation using radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating methods. Other, potentially more ancient examples of rock art (cupules) have been discovered in the granite rock shelter of Turtle Rock, Northern Queensland, and in the dark limestone caves of southern Australia. In any event, we can say that ancient art from the Australian continent has significant traits in common with the Stone Age art of the lower Aurignacian period in Europe (around 30,000 BCE), which reached its apogee during the Magdalenian era, in the cave paintings of Altamira (the Sistine Chapel of prehistoric art). That said, Australian Aborigine artists are believed to have continued practising their art into the modern era, making it the oldest unbroken tradition of parietal art in the world. |
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Australian aboriginal art includes works in a diverse range of media. It includes: wood carving, rock engraving, rock carving, various forms of sculpture, sandpainting and, in particular, rock painting. The latter includes at least five different types: (1) X-ray and cross-hatch art from the Arnhem Land and Kakadu regions of Northern Australia - a style of painting in which the insides of animals and humans are depicted, as if X-rayed. (2) Dot-painting from areas in Central and Western Australia - featuring a range of complex patterns, created with dots. (3) Stencil painting from several different locations, typically featuring hand prints. Produced by exactly the same technique as those on paleolithic wall pictures in Europe. (4) Bradshaws (named after the European farmer Joseph Bradshaw) (called Gwion Gwion by local Aborigines) from the Kimberley region of Western Australia. They include 'sash paintings" made with pigments painted onto rock surfaces by feather quills. (5) Body painting, and also face painting, traditional forms of tribal art practised by aboriginal artists throughout Australasia, such as the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land. (6) Various types of painting on leaves, bark and baobab seeds.
Another type of Australian prehistoric art involves megaliths, featuring large and small stone circles, not unlike Stonehenge, associated with ceremonial events. Also, in New South Wales, a number of aboriginal cylindro-conical stone implements (cyclons) have been discovered, dating to 18,000 BCE. (See also: megalithic art.) Finally, Australia is also home to numerous prehistoric cupules - the mysterious cultural phenomenon found throughout the world. For the most famous cupules, see: the Bhimbetka Petroglyphs (c.290,000 BCE). Australian aboriginal drawing encompasses representational art, as well as semi-abstract and wholly abstract art. Characteristic of the Northern Territory are the so-called "X-ray" drawings - a special variety of naturalistic art, or more accurately an intellectual method whereby the artist, when drawing human beings and animals, represents the inner parts of the body because he knows they are there, and is particularly interested in them. The same method occurs in Oceanic art of Melanesia, and the north Australian examples may be due to Melanesian influence. But we find X-ray drawings on the other side of the Pacific also, among the Indians of British Columbia and some of the Eskimo tribes of Alaska. Aboriginal abstract paintings may include a variety of concentric circles, arcs, dots as well as ideomorphs. Knowledge of aboriginal culture is a key factor in understanding whether a work of art is abstract or representational. For instance, a number of round designs about an inch in diameter - which students without such knowledge might have taken for simple motifs of non-objective art - have been ascertained by historians to represent a green plum-like fruit, called nalge. The regular supply of this fruit is maintained by painting representations of it on rocks during the wet season. (See also: Paleolithic Art and Culture.) The meaning of symbols used in Stone Age Aboriginal art may vary with locality and region. A simple circle, for instance, may denote a campfire, tree, waterhole or hill, according to which Aboriginal tribe you belong to. Note also that a good deal of prehistoric imagery in Australia - whether naturalistic or abstract - is based on the aboriginal cultural concept of Dreamtime. In fact, traditional Aboriginal art almost always has a mythological if not spiritual content. History/Chronology of Oldest Known Aboriginal Art Here is a small selection of the oldest art in Australia. It is quite possible that new discoveries will be made of even earlier art dating back to 50,000-60,000 BCE. • Ubirr Aboriginal Rock Art (c.30,000
BCE) Arnhem Land, Northern Australia. Comparison with Chronology of Stone Age Art in Europe • La
Ferrassie Cave Cupules (c.70,000-40,000 BCE) France The earliest art in Australia is found at Ubirr in Arnhem Land, Northern Australia. Ubirr, situated in the Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory, consists of a group of rock faces on the fringes of the Nadab floodplain. Ubirr's art is commonly divided into three periods: Pre-Estuarine (c.40,000–6,000 BCE), Estuarine (c.6000–500 CE), and Fresh Water (c.500–present) - categories based on the style and iconography of the images. The oldest aboriginal rock painting from the Pre-Estuarine period dates from about 30,000 BCE, and is characterized by the use of red ochre pigments. Among the most distinctive pictures are the stick-like images of the Dynamic Figure tradition - often shown as being involved in hunting and other activities - and the famous the so-called "X-ray" pictures. These rock paintings also include images of extinct animals (like the Thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger) and mysterious living entities with human and other features. There are several accessible galleries of cave painting at Ubirr, including the sacred Rainbow Serpent Gallery, traditionally a women-only site. Bradshaw Rock Paintings (Western Australia) The Bradshaws - a name given to a unique style of rock art found in the Kimberley region of Western Australia by the cattle farmer Joseph Bradshaw in 1891 - are part of a huge expanse of prehistoric aboriginal art, estimated to encompass more than 100,000 sites spread over 50,000 square kilometres of the Kimberley. Known to be at least 17,000 years old, the Bradshaw rock paintings are assumed to have been created by indigenous Australian artists. However, Grahame Walsh - a leading Bradshaw scholar - claims that the Bradshaws were painted by people who predated the main aboriginal culture. Known for their brightly coloured imagery, a large number of the ancient rock paintings have been colonized by a black fungus (Chaetothyriales) whose presence makes the art extremely difficult to date with any precision.
Murujuga Peninsula (Western Australia) Murujuga (Burrup) Peninsula, situated in the Pilbara area of Western Australia next to the Dampier Archipelago, is home to an estimated 1 million prehistoric rock engravings and is said to be the world's largest collection of petroglyphs - some of which date back 10,000 years to the Paleolithic era of the Stone Age. Its collection of standing stones, for instance, is the largest in Australasia. Despite its enormous archeological and anthropological significance, the area's preservation appears to be under threat from the presence of large deposits of off-shore natural gas. In 2002 the International Federation of Rock Art Organizations (IFRAO) began a campaign to preserve what remains of the area. These meticulously drawn images of people, animals and ideomorphs - carved in the sandstone around Sydney, New South Wales - are characterized by their "simple figurative" style, an iconographical style which dates back to the end of the Mesolithic era, about 5,000 BCE. Thousands of these rock carvings are known to exist in the Sydney region, although many finds are kept secret to protect the sites, many of which are seen as sacred by Australian aborigines. Since aboriginal settlement of the Blue Mountains dates back much earlier, to about 20,000 BCE, earlier sites of this parietal art may yet be discovered in the Sydney area. Although indigenous Australian artworks can be seen in some of the world's best art museums, only a tiny number of venues are dedicated exclusively to this form of art. They include: The Museum for Australian Aboriginal Art at Neuchatel, Switzerland; the Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art at Utrecht, The Netherlands; and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, USA. More Recent Australian Painting • For information about the first migrant painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, see: Australian Colonial Art (c.1780-1880). • Read about Australian Impressionism and its style of plein-air landscape painting - commonly known as the Heidelberg School. For artists, see: Tom Roberts (1856-1931); Arthur Streeton (1867-1943); Charles Conder (1868-1909) and Fred McCubbin (1855-1917). • For Australian Modern Painting (1900-60) with its modernist handling of the aboriginal environment, see: Russell Drysdale (1912-81) and Sidney Nolan (1917-92). |
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