Bark painting
Bark paintings were traditionally produced (especially among the Yolngu peoples) for instructional and ceremonial purposes and were transient objects.
[1] Spencer looked for paintings on the basis of artistic and aesthetic merit, and provided examples to the Museum of Victoria.
[1] From the 1930s through to the 1950s, the main collectors of bark paintings were anthropologists and missionaries, including Norman Tindale at Groote in 1922, W. Lloyd Warner, Charles P. Mountford, Ronald and Catherine Berndt, W. E. H. Stanner, and Karel Kupka.
What appears to the tourist as a series of wavy lines punctuated by dots may actually be telling a complex Dreaming story describing the path of a creator spirit and events that happened along the way.
[4] Non-Indigenous people who, like Howard Morphy,[4] have spent years studying the subject, still have an outsider's view and rely on analogies.
For example, a circle might represent a water hole, a campsite, a mat, a campfire, a nut, or an egg, depending on context.
[12] A sub-style of rarrk, known as x-ray art, shows part of the internal organs of the animals in the painting.
Bark paintings from the Kimberley in Western Australia are very similar to the rock art in that region: mainly, representations of the Wandjina creator-beings associated with wet season thunderstorms.
[1] Bark paintings from Port Keats/Wadeye in the north-west of the Northern Territory, combine figurative imagery (as found in eastern Kimberley and Arnhem Land), and geometric patterns, related to desert art styles.
[1] The Tiwi people of Bathurst and Melville Islands paint colourful crosshatched and dotted non-figurative designs.
Similar designs are also painted on bark baskets (tungas), sculptures carved from ironwood, and various other items of material culture relating to mortuary ceremonies.
[1] Work from Groote Eylandt is distinctive, with figures painted against a black background, and also often depict representations of the boats known as prau used by Makassan trepangers.
[1] According to Wally Caruana, former senior curator of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art collections at the National Gallery of Australia, the imagery in bark paintings is broadly similar across Arnhem Land, with some differences:[3] Central and eastern Arnhem Land designs connect to their body painting and ceremonial designs.
Earth pigments—or ochres—in red, yellow and black are used, also mineral oxides of iron and manganese and white pipeclay, or calcium carbonate.
Ochres may be fixed with a binder such as PVA glue, or previously, with the sap or juice of plants such as orchid bulbs.
