Over the land

摘要

Australia, a country of incredible landscapes, has the capacity to upset one's sense of what a landscape is, especially if one listens to the Aboriginal custodians of those landscapes (as shown in figure 1). From Central Australia, where the great monolith Uluru stands majestically shifting its colours in the evening light, to the rainforests of Northern Queensland, to the gorges and plateaux of the Kimberley in the North West, to the snow-capped ridges of the Snowy Mountains; all of these places have starkly different Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal perceptions. These differences' have to do both with the mode of perception and the uses to which it is put. The history of landscape painting by settlers of European origin has been well documented, and it tends to be told as a history of 'coming to terms' with this landscape. There would be, in this story, an increasing sense of 'realism' coupled to a declining tendency to impose a verdant European aesthetic on the sparser eucalypt forest or the ochre-red desert. This, however, is not the story to be pursued here. This article is more interested in the conceptual bases for Aboriginal perceptions of the landscape. These are articulated traditionally, deriving from knowledge which was perhaps 60 000 years in its evolution, the period during which Aboriginal peoples, in their different tribal groupings, were in sole possession of the entirety of the continent. This knowledge continues to be articulated in the contemporary period, as well as changed through contact with settler technologies and market economies. Accordingly, the latest chapter in the history of Australian landscape painting is marked by discontinuity; the eighties saw the development of an Aboriginal painting movement which had no reference to European aesthetic models as it returned to the indigenous conceptual base. It was a huge success, since it was seen as an authentic representation of Australia.