Indigenous Australian art (also known as Australian Aboriginal art) is art made by the Indigenous peoples of Australia and in collaborations between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians. It includes works in a wide range of media including painting on leaves, wood carving, rock carving, sculpture, ceremonial clothing and sandpainting. This article discusses works that pre-date European colonization as well as contemporary Indigenous Australian art by Aboriginal Australians. These have been studied in recent years and have gained increased international recognition.
Read more about Indigenous Australian Art: Aboriginal Art Movements and Cooperatives, Aboriginal Art in International Museums, List of Contemporary Aboriginal Artists, Significant Sites of Aboriginal Rock Art
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“What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground,—and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Beyond the horizon, or even the knowledge, of the cities along the coast, a great, creative impulse is at work—the only thing, after all, that gives this continent meaning and a guarantee of the future. Every Australian ought to climb up here, once in a way, and glimpse the various, manifold life of which he is a part.”
—Vance Palmer (1885–1959)
“In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)