Anthropologist Percy Leason thought he was painting the extinction of Victoria’s Indigenous people in the 1930s. He was wrong, but his portraits, part of a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, are surprisingly sympathetic.
A close up from Michael Jensen’s Pintupi and Anmatyerr artists in Men’s Painting Room (circa August 1972).
Michael Jensen
The Men’s Painting Room - a Nissen hut in the government settlement of Papunya - is Australian art’s most important atelier. A new form of creative expression happened here.
Ken Thaiday’s dance machines layer people, animal, land and sea.
Carriageworks
Ken Thaiday Snr, an internationally-acclaimed artist from Erub Island in the Torres Strait, has been awarded a 2017 Red Ochre Award. Thaiday’s work draws on dance, the people and land of the islands to produce elaborate masks and headdresses.
Brenda L. Croft.
shut/mouth/scream (detail) 2016
Courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery
The National Gallery of Australia’s Third National Indigenous Art Triennial presents a passionate well-considered argument for an enduring Aboriginal culture.
Part of Mandy Martin’s painting Cool Burn (2016): in her painting workshops at Djinkarr, Indigenous rangers brought the threats to their land to life on canvas.
Feral cats and pigs, mission grass and climate change - in western Arnhem Land, Indigenous rangers are battling many environmental threats. Through painting and performance, they are also telling ‘healthy country’ stories.
Indigenous games like ‘Honour Water’ can teach Indigenous values and ceremonial practices.
Honour Water/Elizabeth LaPensée
A strengthening movement of Indigenous designers and developers is working to show Indigenous cultures, teachings, languages and ways of knowing through video games.
Detail of Brook Andrew, Sexy and dangerous 1996.
courtesy National Gallery of Victoria
A 20th-century image of an anonymous ‘Aboriginal Chief’ becomes an investigation of power, colonialism and queer sexuality in the hands of Brook Andrew.
A fruit cart depicting a ‘picanniny’ child: such figures were popular at a time when Aboriginal children were being removed from their families.
Author provided
What are we to make of ‘Aboriginalia’: bric-a-brac, tiles, ornaments and artworks - once hugely popular - depicting caricatures of Indigenous people? What if they are collected now in a knowing, ironic way?
The piles of rock where Murujuga’s rock art is found, in close proximity to industry.
Jo MacDonald
Murujuga, or the Burrup Peninsula, is home to over a million rock artworks. But as concern grows about the impact of industrial pollution on the art, the WA government continues to play down the area’s heritage value.
Judy Watson pours ochre and pigment onto unstretched canvases laid on the ground. The puddling and drying created an image of a simple termite mound with a profound connection to country.
Detail of Mungurrawuy Yunipingu (Gumatj), Macassan Prau 1946.
Berndt Collection, Berndt Museum, The University of Western Australia
For centuries, fishing fleets from Sulawesi regularly visited Australia in search of trepang. Their visits were recorded orally and have been depicted in detailed artworks.
The 1,200 year old Umayyad Mosque – also known as the Great Mosque of Aleppo – lost its minaret (on left) in 2013 after continued heavy gunfire between rebels and Syrian government forces.
Reuters
It is important to prosecute militants who destroy antiquities. But ‘everyday’ development - from dams flooding towns to the impact of mining on Indigenous rock art – does vastly more damage to heritage than war.
Richard Ffarington painted idealised versions of Aboriginal people, as in King George Sound, 1840s.
State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia
The first Europeans to arrive in Western Australia were baffled by the strange land they saw. A new exhibition explores the Arcadia artists tried to transpose over native plants and people.
Fifty years after the Maralinga atomic tests, an exhibition grapples with the pain and devastation left behind.
Karen Standke, Road to Maralinga II (detail). Supplied
The Maralinga atomic tests were devastating to life and land in Central Australia. Black Mist Burnt Country brings together dozens of artistic responses in a powerful, but somewhat incoherent memorial.
Rika Hamaguchi from the Bangarra Dance Theatre performs at the culmination of the barrangal dyara exhibition.
Photo Peter Greig/Kaldor Public Art Projects
Jonathan Jones uses Aboriginal shields to create a skeleton of Sydney’s Garden Palace, destroyed by fire in 1882. In song, dance and sculpture, he celebrates what has been lost and rediscovered.
Anita Heiss’ latest work presents unsettling questions for the non-aboriginal reader.
A young Aboriginal woman falls in love with an escaped Japanese POW in 1944. Anita Heiss’ new book entwines romance with questions of enmity and friendship: who is fighting whom?
Lithograph, ‘Burning of the Garden Palace, Sydney’, Gibbs Shallard and Company, Sydney, 1882.
Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney.
Sydney’s Garden Palace, which burned to the ground in 1882, was a monument to empire’s glory. Indigenous artist Jonathan Jones is now working on an epic exhibition that will explore this historical epoch from an Aboriginal perspective.
Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori began painting in her 80s, and over ten years created an extraordinary body of work. Her paintings are more like music and dance – depicting the stories of the Kaiadilt people for the first time.
William Barak’s Ceremony has sold at auction to an unknown buyer.
Supplied
Can you repatriate a painting? Descendants of Aboriginal painter William Barak ran a crowdsourcing campaign to try to buy back the previously unknown artwork Ceremony.
Television is embracing Indigenous people as more than victims in a white story.
Supplied
Too often, TV shows and films present Aboriginal characters as oppressed people. But two new TV series, Cleverman and Songlines on Screen, are a welcome contrast.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne