Australian bark painting.

Traditional Australian bark paintings were created by the native Yolngu people for ceremonial purposes. Panels of bark cut from a stringybark tree were heated over a fire, then flattened and dried before being painted with colour: ochres (red and yellow), river-bed clay or plant pigment (white) and, where available, manganese (black). The paint was applied with brushes twisted from plant fibres. Tree sap was used as a fixative.

The meaning of each painting was revealed to initiates of the clan at a ceremony where they also learned their clan songs, dances, and the sacred-secret designs for bark and body paintings.

Typical bark paintings tend to narrate activities in the Dreamtime--a time before time when Ancestral Beings shaped the world and established separation between the human and natural species and the niches they would occupy in the world. These Beings left streams of spiritual substance in their wake, which imbued the land with its significance and fixed the identities of the people associated with that land. This particular painting, created c. 1970 by Narritjin of the Manggallii group from Northeast Arnhem Land, tells the story of two Dreamtime fishermen who came to the region's shore in a paperbark canoe (top left). There they found a sacred mangrove statue (bottom right) and performed a ceremony in celebration (bottom left). Later one of them died and ascended to the Milky Way (vertical central panels).

--Adapted from text by Dr. David Turner