Judith Ryan: Of paint and possession 1.

Aboriginal art has moved to the forefront
of contemporary art practice in Australia

Arnhem Land - x-ray images

Aboriginal artists have transformed the way we see the land and the history of art in this country. Their rise to a position of acceptance, even prominence, within the mainstream has been gradual, starting in Arnhem Land in the 1870s, when Paul Foelsche, a member of the Northern Territory police force, collected bark paintings from around Port Essington, in the Cobourg Peninsula, the first works on bark of any great number to enter museum collections.

When we paint - whether it is on our bodies for ceremony or on bark or canvas for the market - we are not just painting for fun or profit We are painting as we have always done to demonstrate our continuing link with our country and the rights and responsibilities we have to it Furthermore, we paint to show the rest of the world that we own this country and that the land owns us.
Galarrwuy Yunupingu in Windows on the Dreaming: Aboriginal Paintings in the Australian National Gallery

In 1912, the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer commissioned Gagadju and Kunwinjku artists from the escarpment country to paint images similar to those found on rock and bark shelters in Arnhem Land, in exchange for sticks of tobacco, setting the pattern for a form of representation - x-ray images of food sources and spirit beings -which became characteristic of Kunwinjku art for most of the 20th century.

Arnhem Land bears the scars of European intrusion, protectionism and control, although it has suffered less disruption to languages, law and rights in land than southern coastal parts of indigenous Australia. After the Aboriginals Ordinance of 1918, whites needed a permit to enter Arnhem Land, although this proved difficult to police, especially among traders, pastoralists and zealous Christian missionaries. The area was already infiltrated with missions when it was proclaimed an Aboriginal Reserve in 1931, in part established to contain pastoralists' violence against the indigenous population.

In the early 1960s, Yolngu of Yirrkala, facing the loss of their land to bauxite miners in the Gave peninsula, used the language of art to assert their authority and to show that Christian and Yolngu belief were not incompatible. Following the Elcho Island Adjustment Movement of 1957, when clan leaders erected a spectacular display of mardayin (their most secret objects) outside the church at Galiwin'ku, Yalngu leaders produced the Yirrkala Church Panels of 1962-63, juxtaposing clan designs of the two moieties of the area, Dhuwa and Yirritja.

These great tableaus, which were hung on either side of the altar, laid down the sacred designs that constitute charters to their lands established before time. The artists forged a tangible symbol of the strength of their religion and cultural law, equivalent to the Ten Commandments or the Koran, showing that Yolngu art, politics and cultural law are inseparable and inviolable.

Only days after the Yirrkala Church Panels were unveiled, a large area of Yolngu country was excised from the Arnhem Land Reserve, without one Yolngu voice being heard. In 1963, Yolngu sent a bilingual bark petition to the federal government demanding that their rights in land be protected and recognised.

The barks were bordered by absolute symbols of Yolngu political power, designs belonging to clans whose lands were most immediately threatened by mining, which represent title deeds to clan estates and ceremonial places, according to Yolngu law. They introduced a wild card into the official system of negotiation, which stood outside the terminology of legal parliamentary discourse and established that Yolngu had not been consulted and did not consent to the destruction of their land - their identity - where ancestral beings left reservoirs of spiritual power and their spirits reside.

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