ABORIGINAL ART AND CULTURE OF AUSTRALIA

Abstract

Australian Aborigine, the original inhabitant of the continent is one of the best known and least understood people in the world. Since the nineteenth century they have been singled out as the world most primitive culture and the living representatives of the ancestors of mankind. Aborigines are therefore probably more familiar to the rest of the world than are the white Australians who immigrated to the continent from Britain and other European countries. In reality, Aboriginal culture, as anthropological work over the last hundred years has revealed, is a complex, subtle and rich way of life. Aboriginal culture is based on taking care of the land and treating with respect. Culture is a celebration of beliefs and usually includes rites of passage from one stage of life to another. Culture is stories and songs. Particularly because their stories and songs informed them about creation, the relationship between mankind and nature were the source of their tribal laws. The tradition of initiation was an expression of Aboriginal culture and was carried out for thousands of years in exactly the way that had been ordered by the ancestors in the Dreamtime. On another level the stories and song were believed to be important for the preservation and conservation of their land and all it contained. This involved singing Song line that had been sung by the ancestors and the concept of taking care. The link between people and the land is very important to Aboriginal artwork. Aboriginal art is secret, personal to the artist and their community. Sometimes the art work is never shown to outsiders. Their art links the past and the present. Aboriginal art is made up of shapes, circles, semicircles, dots, patterns, symbols, symmetrical and asymmetrical patterns. They include pictures of animals and lots of insects with funny names such as ‘Black goanna’, ‘Wild bandicoot’, ‘Dingo’, ‘Emu’, and ‘Blue tongued lizard’. The colors they used are ochre and tan (light brown colours like sand), Russets (a dark red brown), Crimson (a very deep red), blue and yellow.