Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay Read Free Book Online

1882, a journalist called T. A. Masey wrote that: “the natives would not use [the Kaura ochre]. It did not give them that much-coveted shiny appearance that filled them with delight and admiration when contemplating their noble selves, and that also made them the envy of rival tribes.” 11 For Masey this was probably an expression of a primitive urge for glittery things, but there are other explanations. The sense that light is a manifestation of the glory of the sacred—that the numinous is held within the luminous—is common to almost every faith. Perhaps by painting themselves with a color that gleamed, the Aboriginals were not only symbolizing the sacred; they were embodying it.
    “Oh yeah, pituri ,” said Roqué Lee. “Tastes like shit but works like ten cups of coffee at once.” I met Roqué (who pronounces his name “Rocky”) at the Aboriginal Art Gallery in Darwin: he used to be a ranger at Kakadu National Park, but for the past five years he’d mostly been demonstrating didgeridoos. His father is Chinese-Australian and his mother is Aboriginal. “I’ve got three cultures,” he said happily. “You can see it in my cooking. I do cha-siu snake, long-neck turtle stuffed with ginger and stir-fry magpie goose.” He lives in Darwin during the week but likes going hunting on weekends. “It’s magpie goose season soon,” he said. “We build a blind on the edge of a swamp, and then make a bundle of spears. When the geese come over we just throw the spears in the air. No need to aim.” He often mixes white kaolin clay with seagull eggs, and uses it to paint stripes on his face while he’s hunting. “Just to let Mother Nature know we’re there.” They don’t do that for magpie geese, though: “They’re so fat, we don’t need luck.” But they always paint the ends of the spears with white paint. For luck? “No.” He grinned. “So we can find them more easily later.”
    He showed me around the gallery. Like many Darwin art shops, it has divided its paintings into two sections—the huge abstract paintings from the Central Desert, mostly in acrylic paints, with plastic as a binder rather than oil, 12 and the paintings from the Northern Territory. The former I knew I would find farther south together with—I hoped—the stories of their bright colors. The latter are still mostly in natural ochres as they were when the explorer and ethnologist Sir Baldwin Spencer began to collect them from Arnhemland tribes in around 1912, although today the black, white, red and yellow earths are now more often bound with synthetic glues. The new binders are easier to obtain, and they last longer than orchid juice or seagull egg.
    The northern Aboriginal paintings were originally painted on the cut bark of the stringybark tree (which is more like paper than string) although they are now mainly on canvas—partly for ecological reasons and partly because that is what the buyers want, and because many paintings today tend to be created with the buyers in mind, rather than because they needed to be painted for their own sake. They are covered with patterns made up of diagonal stripes and cross-hatching. The latter technique was apparently brought in by Macassan traders (from the island of Sulawesi which is now part of Indonesia) several hundred years before white settlers arrived on the continent. It is a reminder that Aboriginal culture has never been isolated, but instead has been influenced by (and perhaps has influenced) outside forces from Indonesia, Polynesia, China and elsewhere. It also, curiously, works as an optical illusion, the finely drawn parallel lines creating a shimmer in a similar way to paintings by British twentieth-century artist Bridget Reilly. Howard Morphy, in his book Aboriginal Art , suggested this “quiver”—which looks as if it had been painted with a shaking hand—was deliberate, and a way of making the painting shimmer and appear to move. 13
    The northern paintings tend to be highly