David Gulpilil as Jagamarra Jurunba, Mark Weaver as Bellyup, Dougie McCale as George and Cameron Wallaby as Pete in Satellite Boy.
A Satellite Films production Photo by Matt Nettheim SAB
Australia’s first Indigenous superhero can heal like Wolverine and hear the voices of the Dreamtime. Superhero expert Dr Liam Burke sat down with Cleverman cast and crew to talk powers and politics.
A picture of strength: lifelong activist Bonita Mabo OA in front of her portrait as a young woman, which features in her granddaughter Boneta-Marie Mabo’s first solo exhibition.
Josef Ruckli, courtesy of the State Library of Queensland
Boneta-Marie Mabo’s art responds to a colonial past in which Aboriginal women were fetishised as “black velvet”. But it also celebrates strong women, including her activist grandmother Bonita Mabo.
Koori women Treahna Hamm, Vicki Couzens and Lee Darroch wear ‘Biaganga’, traditional possum coats at the Melbourne Museum’s Aboriginal Cultural Centre in Melbourne.
Julian Smith/AAP
Museums are cracking open the temperature-controlled, dehumidified display cases and inviting people in. Working with Aboriginal communities is reawakening cultural connections and ancient art forms.
‘Children who are yet to be born need to know their place in the never-ending story.’
Warangkula family portrait alongside Warangkula Court street sign. Photo: Helen Puckey
Succeeding generations need to know where they are placed in the unfolding grand narrative of Aboriginal art. Those of us who are not Aboriginal need to understand the complex relationship between settler Australians and the people of the land.
Bradshaw rock paintings near King Edward River, Kimberley region of Western Australia.
Wikimedia Commons
Last week Liberal Democrats Senator David Leyonhjelm was widely reported as suggesting that people other than Aboriginal Australians may have occupied the Australian continent in the past. At a doorstop…
Hetti Perkins has curated an exhibition of bark paintings by John Mawurndjul and Gulumbu Yunupingu that is currently on display at Tarrawarra Museum of Art. Who are these artists – and how have their lives shaped their artworks?
It hovers uneasily between being a fine-art exhibition showing the diversity and sheer visual and sociocultural potency of contemporary Australian visual art practice, and an older-style ethnographic survey.
Indigenous artist Dennis Nona is currently serving a jail term for serious crimes. Should the work of the most significant artist to have emerged from the Torres Strait in the last 50 years be removed from gallery walls?
The unfinished Crazy Horse memorial in Custer County, South Dakota.
Bernd00/Wikimedia Commons
More than a century after he died, the Lakota warrior Crazy Horse, who famously fought General Custer in the Battle of Little Bighorn, is thought of as transcendent force – attuned to the universe in a…
Some Indigenous paintings have lasted thousands of years … so what is it about the pigments that make them so long-lasting?
Carolien Coenen/Flickr
Andrew Thorn, International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property
Indigenous Australian practices, honed over thousands of years, weave science with storytelling. In this Indigenous science series, we look at different aspects of First Australians’ traditional life and…
A close up of one of the hand stencils found in the prehistoric caves in Indonesia.
Kinez Riza
Rock art dated to a minimum age of almost 40,000 years has been discovered in the Maros region of southern Sulawesi, Indonesia. This is an incredible result, published in Nature today, because one of the…
Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, Tikipayinga – 3D Tunga, 2012, etching & aquatint, edition of 8, 49.5 (h) x 38.5 (l) x 15 (w) cm.
Image courtesy Northern Editions
Located off the coast of Darwin in the Northern Territory are the alluring Tiwi Islands. The two inhabited islands – Bathurst and Melville Island – are spectacular to encounter with their red pebble shores…
Jasmine Togo Brisby’s work is on display at Deadly Nui Art at the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Kimba Thomson/Blak Dot Gallery
On the wall hang three portraits of contemporary South Pacific Islanders, some with ships and all with duty stamps in the foreground. Skulls of sealed raw sugar glisten on a table. Bitter Sweet is the…
In The Boys Home, artist Zanny Begg worked with boys in juvenile detention. This image is from a project titled Rooms. Photo documentation by Alex Wisser.
The Boys Home
I entered the secretive world of a maximum-security prison for children in Sydney’s Western suburbs for four months earlier this year. My passport into this highly restrictive world was an artist residency…
Artists Dianne Ungukalpi Golding, Eunice Yunurupa Porter, Nancy Jackson, Winnie Woods and Melva Davies at Tjanpi Desert Weavers workshop, Warakurna, April 2011.
Photo Jo Foster, Tjanpi Desert Weavers, NPY Women’s Council
For over a thousand generations Aboriginal people made no distinction between art and craft. Art was, and still is, a way of life and as much about function as it is about beauty and form. Artistic forms…
Major galleries are clamouring to acquire works by Aurukun artists – especially paintings by Mavis Ngallametta. Bush Fire at Ngak-Pungarichan, 2013. Natural ochres and charcoal with acrylic binder on linen, 200x271cm.
Martin Browne Gallery
Over the past three and a half years nearly every major public and private art collection in Australia has acquired large-scale paintings by a north Queensland artist from the Aboriginal community of Aurukun…
The question of how to verify Indigenous rock art lies at the heart of an environmental dispute in the Blue Mountains.
Ashley Wilson
This week, The Australian reported that a hand stencil found in a controversial coal mining development in the Blue Mountains was a “fake”. The story has also been reported by the BBC and was picked up…
We are driving late at night along a highway that crosses the remote Kimberley region of northern Western Australia. We are in an area known as the Fitzroy Valley, about 3,500 kilometres north of Perth…
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne