This theme is about broadening your understanding of landscape. Landscape is a shared resource and a common meeting ground between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. But, it is understood in fundamentally different ways.

Fixed and mobile perspectives

In western art landscape is traditionally viewed as a scene from nature, a descriptive and analytical representation of the world from a fixed perspective. In the Australian context landscapes were initially used in voyages of discovery and have subsequently become a symbol of national identity for mainstream Australians.

For Aboriginal people by contrast, landscape is the embodiment of the ancestral heroes and their journeys through the land. Landscape is also connected to place, the sites associated with the ancestral beings and the features of the land they created: a waterhole, a claypan or a range of hills. Each site is associated with particular designs and in turn, individuals inherit these designs as their title to land. Through painting and ceremonial life Aborigines reveal the creative force of the Dreaming and the regenerative powers of the ancestors. In this sense Aboriginal landscapes are mobile, moving through space and time.

A totemic landscape

Morphy writes about Aboriginal paintings as maps of land. For Aborigines the landscape is a sign system encoded with mythological significance through the world of the ancestral beings. The landscape is also a metaphor for social relationships and will reflect individual and group identity through rights to land.

Aboriginal people often refer to the landscape as 'country'. Writing in 1993, Indigenous curator Hetti Perkins and art historian Hannah Fink argue that:

It is simplistic to call some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art 'landscape paintings'. Rather this work is about country which is simultaneously concept and place.

 

 

 

Another interpretation from historian, J. M. Arthur, defines 'country' as:

The tract of land where an Aboriginal person or community belongs, to which they have responsibility, and from which they can draw spiritual strength. J. M. Arthur, Aboriginal English: a Cultural Study, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, p. 119. 1996.

 

 

 

Johnson: Desert art

Vivien Johnson provides an historical, social and political context for the emergence of acrylic 'dot' painting in the Aboriginal communities of the Western Desert.

Whereas paintings in Arnhem Land took the same form as painting in ceremonial life, the development of a contemporary artistic expression in the Western Desert required the transformation of ceremonial ground sculptures and body paintings into works on canvas. In one sense these creative initiatives "came from the Dreaming". In another sense they were a strategic response on the part of Aboriginal elders to the conditions on government settlements like Papunya, established under policies of assimilation, and a bold assertion of their Aboriginality.

Aborigines are fiercely protective of their traditional knowledge. Only those who have inherited the rights to certain designs and participated in ceremonial life are permitted to use designs inherited from the Dreaming. When artists at Papunya transferred designs from sand paintings and body painting onto canvas, a radical new visual language, or iconography, evolved designed to protect 'inside' meanings. Howard Morphy explains the terms 'inside /outside' meanings:

'Inside' is an important metaphysical and logical concept in Aboriginal systems of knowledge.Inside is below the ground, restricted, within the ceremonial ground, underlying, generative, ancestral. Outside is above ground, open, public, surface, produced. The journey from inside to outside is a movement from restricted to less restricted forms: the journey from the outside to the inside is a movement toward deeper understanding. Morphy H. 2000, "Inside landscapes: the Fourth Dimension," in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture , (eds.) S. Kleinert & M. Neale, Melbourne Oxford University Press, pp. 129-136, p. 130.

 

 

 

Lowe: The Ngurrara canvas.

With the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cwlth) major tracts of land have been returned to traditional Aboriginal owners.

In order to prove their title to land Aborigines have used songs, dances and paintings. For example, the Walmajarri and Wangkajunga people from the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia worked collaboratively to produce a painting as proof of their claims to native title.

The Ngurrara canvas can be seen as a "cultural artefact, a political tool, and a major work of art." Lowe, 2001.

Mapping country

Aboriginal paintings are often seen as 'maps of country.' Using the basic geometric elements in Nancy Munn's diagrams (Illustrations 70 and 71, Morphy) try reading the following paintings as 'maps of country':

Illustration 74. Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Yuutjutiyungu, 1979.

Illustrations 83-86. Banapana Maymuru, Djarrakpi Landscape, 1974.

Illustrations 91-92. Rover Thomas, Landscapes at Kalumplwarra, Yalmanta and Ngulalintji, 1984.

Makes notes as you go along and use drawings if necessary.

How do Aboriginal paintings operate as a sign system?

How do they encode representations of country and mythological connections?

How do they encode social relationships and identity?

What problems if any, did you encounter with this activity?