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

figurative—showing, for example, the lightning-man Namarrkon, with his halo of electricity and axes stuck in his limbs (as humans stick them into logs), ready to be flung at humans who disobey the law; or the Luma Luma, who couldn’t keep his hands off women, and was killed by the angry men (but not until he had told them his best stories). Others show the animal totems—fish or wallabies or turtles or crocodiles—placed around depictions of the humans and ancestors whose stories they share. When I first saw one of the turtle pictures I thought the diagonal lines around it were simply decoration. But then I spent one long night watching giant turtle eggs being laid on a desert island not far from Darwin—for a research project run by the University of the Northern Territory. And when I watched the mother green-back returning slowly into the ocean after laying eggs on the beach she had been born on forty years earlier, I realized the painting was an uncannily accurate picture of the tracks she made with her flippers.
    Traditional Aboriginal life only makes sense in the context of the time when the Ancestors first arose out of the original mud or sea or sky and brought the first sunrise with them. In English it is articulated as the “Dreaming” or “Dreamtime”—a dream in the sense that it is not set in the past, but in a kind of parallel present universe, rather like the one we operate in while we are asleep. In Aboriginal lore, the Dreaming is the reason for everything that has ever existed and ever will exist. And its stories are told in layers, depending on how ready, or authorized, the listener is to understand them. It is said that your personal Dreaming depends on where your mother was when she first felt you in the womb. The Ancestors who live in that place have given you “anima”—they have animated you—and when you grow up their stories and songs will be in your trust, and you in theirs.
    There is very little that is gentle about the Dreaming; in fact a lot of it is very raunchy. Its stories often involve ancestral animals and people being killed or punished, or they include details of them moving through the land along paths that have become sacred tracks, finding food and allies and enemies. They are epic stories containing (as all the best epics do) universal truths. They are about the law of the land, but they are also the land itself, and only certain people are authorized to know them. So a story or song about, say, the Wawilak sisters—who set out on a journey at the beginning of time, and were swallowed by the Rainbow Serpent when one of them bled into his waterhole—works on several levels. It acts as a reminder of spiritual truths, as a warning to behave according to certain social rules, and as a map. It might—if you have been authorized to decode it—tell you to turn toward the east at this hill to find water, or to stop at that camp to find grubs, and it acts almost as a key to the country, a way of finding your way through it safely even if you have never been there before. And similarly the material—ochre—with which these stories are passed on in rituals or on caves is not only from the land. It is the land.
    Red ochre has dreaming stories—there are probably as many stories as there are tribes, but most of them seem to hinge on the spilling of blood. Parachilna was said in some stories to be the blood of an ancestral emu, and by others to be the blood of the Marindi dog, which was tricked and killed by a lizard hanging at its throat. Wilga Mia was, according to Warlpiri legend, made by a man who stole it from a deposit of congealed blood. And another story of red ochre from the Calgoorlie area 14 tells the tale of Kirkin, a man with sun-bleached hair, whose beauty dazzled everyone—especially himself.
    At sunrise every morning this matinee idol of the Ancestral Age would stand on a high boulder, comb his golden hair and enjoy all the adulation and attention. But one person