Australian
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This clip shows gallery owner Adrian Newstead and Indigenous Australian artists talking about Indigenous art and its meaning and importance. Newstead describes the importance of bringing Indigenous art to a wider audience. Indigenous artists, including Barbara Weir, explain how painting is a means of passing on stories about the Dreamtime to the younger generation. The clip concludes with a shot of an elder artist teaching Indigenous children how to paint.

Educational value points

• The clip illustrates the importance of art to Indigenous Australians. Indigenous art has always played a role in maintaining and affirming identity. Through art, Indigenous artists tell stories about the relationship of people to the land, the past and the present. In recent years, Indigenous artists have produced art inspired by, among many issues, land rights, the Stolen Generations and Australia’s Indigenous history.

• As implied by the clip, contemporary Indigenous Australian art is part of the oldest continuing tradition of painting in the world. The current resurgence of interest in Indigenous art was given a significant boost in the 1970s when Geoff Bardon, a school teacher posted to the Papunya settlement in central Australia, encouraged elders to use Western materials such as acrylic paint to paint traditional designs as a way of expressing themselves spiritually. He felt that the sale of this work could give the artists economic freedom and bring Indigenous art to the attention of the wider community.

• According to Indigenous Australian accounts, spirit beings created the natural environment during the Dreamtime and then remained as part of the land once their work was done. Central to Indigenous Australian cultures is a spiritual link between the people, the land and the spirit beings. The spirit beings gave Indigenous people laws by which to live, as well as sacred rituals and the symbols and designs used in ceremonial body painting.

• As discussed in the clip, art can be used to teach the younger generation about Dreaming. Many Indigenous Australians are taught from childhood the history and spiritual significance of each feature in their country, and learn that the land nurtures them and that they have sacred responsibilities to protect it. Today, Indigenous art is seen as a means to preserve and pass on these stories.

• The clip suggests that an appreciation of Indigenous art can lead to a greater understanding of Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australian art has become popular within Australia and overseas, partly through its commercialisation. Many Indigenous artists believe that this popularity will lead to a greater understanding of Indigenous issues and cultures.

• Artist Barbara Weir is one of the Stolen Generations of Indigenous children. Weir was taken from her family at Utopia in the Northern Territory at the age of nine and fostered to a non-Indigenous family. In the late 1960s she returned to Utopia and relearnt her languages and culture and began painting. Weir is the daughter of Minnie Pwerle and a niece of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, two of the most respected Indigenous painters in Australia. Her work has been exhibited in Australia and overseas to critical acclaim.

• The Indigenous art market has flourished since the 1990s and is now the strongest sector of Australia’s fine arts industry, with around 5,000 artists producing art and craft works worth more than $30 million a year. There are about 44 Indigenous community art centres across central and northern Australia, and scores of specialist Indigenous art galleries in the major cities.

• While some non-Indigenous gallery owners and auction houses have been criticised for profiteering from Indigenous art and accused of exploiting Indigenous artists, gallery director Adrian Newstead, shown in the clip, has been instrumental in founding the Australian Indigenous Art Trade Association (Art.Trade), which works to protect the rights of artists and Indigenous Australian art communities and promotes ethical trade in Indigenous art.

This clip starts approximately 53 minutes into the documentary.

Adrian Newstead, director of the Coo-ee Gallery is being interviewed inside the gallery.
Adrian An old Aboriginal man once said to me, 'Look, don’t go in all those land rights demonstrations. Let the Aborigines go in them and everything. You put Aboriginal art on people’s walls. It’ll play a far more important role in making them realise the value of Aboriginal people and their culture than anything else you can do.’

Barbara Weir, Aboriginal artist, is being interviewed inside the gallery.
Barbara It’s something for my grandchildren to go on about. ‘Cause it might die out, so we have to put it on canvas, ‘cause there mightn’t be any more left one day. People might just die out, so we have to leave something for people to go on.

Montage of a storm brewing in the bush. Outside, the director talks to Aboriginal women seated on the ground. Their words are subtitled in English.
Woman 1 That dreaming not gone from there. It’s still there.
Man In the land?
Woman 1 Yeah, in the land and the painting, that’s all.
Woman 2 And while we teach them, they teach us and we teach the young. With them, we learn.

Women continue to speak over images of the landscape and women and children playing in a river.
Woman 1 When we paint the Dreamtime and thing, our country, that paint, them young generation will know, you know, where we come from and where the Dreamtime is.

An Aborginal woman is sitting outside on the ground painting a picture.
Woman (speaks in native tongue to a watching child). Pompei’s pillar. Blue-tongue lizard. I’ll make him for you, and you can finish him off.