Unknown (Western Arnhem Land)

The art of Aboriginal Australia emerges from one of the world’s longest continuing art traditions. Archaeological evidence determines that Aboriginal rock paintings were being made over 50,000 years ago in the Western Arnhem Land escarpment, predating the Paleolithic rock paintings of Altamira and Lascaux in Europe.

This bark painting by an unknown Kunwinjku artist from Oenpelli (Kunbarllanjnja) in Western Arnhem Land reflects its source in the figurative ochre images that stain the rock faces of the Western Arnhem Land escarpment. In common with many other Kunwinjku paintings from the late 1940s, the design is painted as if on rock, directly onto the sheet of bark and without a red-ochre ground. The artist worked swiftly and spontaneously, mainly in white pipe clay and yellow ochre, infilling the body of the fish with loose hatching but not depicting the internal organs or backbone in X-ray. This simple hatching has an iconic function: it varies in order to differentiate the head and fins of the fish from the body and tail. Such solid figure images prefigure the depiction in X-ray of internal organs and backbone and the much later dominance of sophisticated rarrk (cross-hatched) designs associated with the Mardayin ceremony.

The work depicts Dunbuhman, scientifically named Hephaestus fuliginosus and commonly known as a sooty grunt-er or black bream, a species readily identifiable through the artist’s accurate depiction of its most characteristic features rendered as an outline of head, body, tail and both dorsal and tail fins. Such anatomical images are termed mayh (food animals, meat) and reflect intimate knowledge of animals hunted, cut up and eaten. This species of fish, which is considered good eating, belongs to the Dua moiety and is associated with the Kunapipi ceremony, performed to ensure the annual onset of the monsoon.

Judith Ryan