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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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