Aboriginal Art Regions

Different language groups paint differently. Historically, Aboriginal peoples in Australia communicated in three main ways: storytelling, song, and visual design through painting, drawing and ceremony. There was no written language, so art carried much of what one generation needed to pass to the next.

More than 250 Indigenous languages are spoken across Australia, each with its own dialects tied to a particular place. Art varies along the same lines.

Western art history tends to sort work by style and movement. Aboriginal art works differently. The artist holds cultural knowledge and has the right to paint it. Artists were the record keepers of their communities, and the work was made to keep that knowledge in circulation.

Some symbols carry meanings only senior custodians can read in full. Even so, the paintings show a great deal about daily life, belief and country. Read closely, they describe the landscapes people have lived in for thousands of years and the communities that hold them.

Aboriginal Art From The Kimberley

The Kimberley sits in the remote north-west of Western Australia. Its rock art goes back more than 30,000 years and covers a range of techniques: painting, engraving, and work made with beeswax and native grasses. Most Kimberley artists now paint on canvas, though the ochre palette and pared-back compositions carry over.

Around Derby, the Wandjina are the dominant subject. Artists at Mowanjum paint them in ochre. The Wandjina are creation figures and law figures, and the paintings hold both the creation stories and the more recent history of the region.

Fitzroy Crossing brings together four language groups. The painting there is loose and bright, made in acrylic by both desert and river people. Much of it maps country people were moved off, painted from memory.

Warmun and Kununurra artists work in ochre ground from the iron-rich soils around them. The same pigments appear in the Gwion Gwion rock paintings, which are around 18,000 years old.

Rover Thomas worked across Warmun and Waringarri. He was Wangkajunga and Kukatja, displaced from his desert country as a boy. He oversaw the Krill Krill ceremony paintings, which deal with the history between Aboriginal people and settlers, and his own work reduced country to flat, map-like blocks of ochre.

Central Desert Aboriginal Art

The Central Desert covers much of the centre of the Northern Territory and is largely Warlpiri country. Painting on board and on handmade objects started with the women of the region and took off in the early 1980s, with anthropologists Françoise Dussart and Meredith Morris involved early on. The wider movement began in 1971 at Papunya, to the west. The dot paintings that came out of the Central Desert are now among the best known Aboriginal art in the country.

The paintings are about places. The sites they mark are sacred and also practical: soakages, camps and the routes between them, tied to the movements of ancestral beings and to the people who followed them. Living in the desert meant moving between those places, and the paintings record that.

Water Dreamings come up again and again. In country this dry, water is the subject that matters most, and the Dreamings that carry it are held by particular families and painted by them.

Symbols shift meaning with context. A set of concentric circles might be a fire, a camp or a waterhole, depending on the story the painting belongs to.

Western Desert Aboriginal Art

The Western Desert, sometimes called the Western Cultural Bloc, covers more than 600,000 square kilometres. People have lived across it for thousands of years, and the art centres there now produce some of the most collected work in the country.

The painting movement started at Papunya in the early 1970s. Papunya was a government settlement, and most of the people living there had been brought in from country hundreds of kilometres away. Geoffrey Bardon arrived as a schoolteacher in 1971 and saw men drawing designs in the sand and on temporary surfaces. He supplied board and paint, and the designs moved onto a permanent surface. Art centres followed, and for the Pintupi and others the painting became part of the case for returning to their own country.

The work varies a lot across the region. At Kiwirrkurra and Kintore the palette runs to ochres, and the paintings use lines and circles to set out waterholes, camps and the tracks between them. The motifs are not decoration. They record the travels of ancestral beings and the people who hold those stories.

Further west, Martu artists at Martumili paint the salt lakes that run through their country. The brushwork is loose and the colour is strong, and much of the subject matter comes back to water and where to find it.

Work from the Western Desert is held in major public collections in Australia and overseas.

Aboriginal Art From the APY Lands

The Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands sit in the north-west corner of South Australia. Around twenty communities are spread across them, and together they account for a large share of the Aboriginal art produced in this country.

The area was gazetted as an Aboriginal reserve in 1921. The Presbyterian Church established Ernabella Mission at Pukatja in 1937, and by 1948 a craft room was running there. It became Ernabella Arts, the longest running Aboriginal art centre in Australia, and it still operates.

The art centres across the Lands represent more than 400 artists. They include Tjala Arts, Mimili Maku Arts, Iwantja Arts, Ninuku Arts, Tjungu Palya and Kaltjiti Arts. The painting is high in colour and the subject is Country and the stories attached to it.

Most of it is acrylic on canvas or linen. Dotting sits alongside broad brushwork, and plenty of artists use both in the one painting.

The subject throughout is Tjukurpa, the law and creation stories of the Anangu.

Arnhem Land Aboriginal Art

Arnhem Land takes in the top end of the Northern Territory, east of Darwin. It was declared an Aboriginal reserve in 1931 and remains one of the largest in the country.

The country runs from stone escarpment to tropical coast, with a wet season and a dry season. Bark was a building material before it was a painting surface. Wet season shelters were made from it, and the designs went on later. Bark painting is still central to the art made in Arnhem Land.

North-east Arnhem Land is Yolngu country. Ceremony, language and clan design remain in daily use. Yolngu people traded with Macassan fishermen from Sulawesi for generations before Europeans arrived, and that contact shows up in songs, language and painting.

The technique the region is known for is rarrk, fine cross-hatching in ochre. It goes onto bark and onto larrakitj, the hollow memorial poles. The pigments are collected from particular sites, and clan designs govern what can be painted and by whom.

Arnhem Land is also known for its weaving. Pandanus is stripped, dyed with bush plants and roots, and woven into mats, baskets and fish traps. The forms and the patterns carry meaning in the same way the paintings do.

Aboriginal Art From the Tiwi Islands

The Tiwi Islands lie about 100 kilometres north of Darwin. Tiwi people mark three seasons: smoke for the dry, the cicada's song for the turn toward the rain, and storms for the wet. All three turn up in the art.

The best known Tiwi form is the pukumani pole, carved from ironwood and painted in ochre with hard-edged geometric designs. The poles are made for funeral ceremony and set around the grave. Tiwi bark painting uses the same ochres and the same geometry, and takes up creation stories and ancestral figures.

Tiwi artists were among the first to take up printmaking, working in linocut and screenprint on paper and fabric. Tiwi women also weave baskets and mats from natural fibres and bush dyes.

Far North Queensland Aboriginal Art

Far North Queensland holds one of the largest bodies of rock art anywhere, with sites going back more than 40,000 years. Most of it is in the south-east of Cape York and around Laura, on Guugu Yimithirr, Kuku Yalanji and Kuku Thaypan country. The sites carry engravings, hand stencils and painted figures.

The rainforest shield is the form most associated with the region. Cut from the buttress roots of fig trees and painted in ochre, the shields were carried in duels and at large gatherings. The designs identified the owner and drew on what was around them: fish, tools, game, weather.

Carving continues in the region, most visibly in the camp dog sculptures made from milkwood. Camp dogs have lived alongside people for a long time, and the carvings are made in part so the dogs might reach a dreaming state.

Torres Strait Islander Art

The Torres Strait sits between the tip of Cape York and Papua New Guinea and takes in more than 274 islands. Torres Strait Islanders are a separate people from mainland Aboriginal Australians, with their own languages and their own art. The Strait has been a trade route for a long time.

The subject matter is the sea, the sky and the tides. Much of the culture is carried in song and dance, and much of the visual work is printmaking. The prints deal with daily life, creation stories, and the traders who came through the islands.

The form found nowhere else is the turtle shell mask. Plates of shell are heated, shaped and lashed together. The masks were made for funeral ceremony, and artists still make them today.

Pilbara Aboriginal Art

The Pilbara covers a large stretch of arid country in the north of Western Australia. Painting was taken up slowly there. Where the Western Desert movement moved quickly, senior people in the Pilbara were wary that putting cultural knowledge on canvas would give too much away.

The country reads as dry and empty from the outside. It is not. There is water in it if you know where to look, and the weather runs in a cycle people have tracked for generations. The creation stories follow the same pattern: rain, then seed, then flower.

Pilbara painting deals with that country and with what has happened to it. Iron ore mining now drives the regional economy, and it turns up in the work.

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