Culture and Art

(if you click on the links or pics, you see more pictures or a larger version)

The most important possession of the Aborigines is the land they live on. They have a special connection with everything that is natural. Aborigines see themselves as a part of nature.

Some families who are related by blood are a clan and every clan has a special part of the land which forms the economic base, here they find their fishing and hunting area.
Some clans form a tribe with about 100-1500 people. The characteristics of a tribe are the same language, their religious rituals, the behavioural instructions and totem area. They have not got a chieftain - a group of the eldest determine what has to be done.
Aborigines used to live in wood and bark huts. They used tree branches, wood and bark. All huts had different names and were made for different purposes. Some were semicircular huts used in the wet season and so e.g. was the behive hut. In the summer leaf shelters and sleeping platforms are used to keep away the mosquitoes.
Some live as nomads. They don’t have a hut, they built low shelters made by branches and if it rains they look for a dry place under a rock.

The Aborigines have many weapons for defence and for hunting food. These weapons include

» a boomerang	for games and to exercise (a boomerang that comes back),
» a boomerang	for hunting large animals, such as kangeroos and emus,
» a fighting boomerang	used in ceremonial dances,
» a spear	for some serious hunting,
» a digging-stick	to loose the soil and dig animals out of their burrows.

In the Aboriginal society it is the women’s job to forage for food such as roots, small animals, grubs, shellfish and seeds to grind into flour. Their men’s job is to hunt for meat, such as kangeroo and other native animals. There are three main tools they use to forage for food: the digging-stick, a basket and carrying dishes. The digging-stick is a hardwood stick, a meter or more in length used to loosen soil and dig animals out of their burrows. They are also used to split roots and branches in half to get the insects and their nests inside. The basket and carrying dishes are used to carry back the food.

Over a long period Aborigines have learned to live in harmony with bush and desert, expressing their physical and spiritual relationship. They deeply respected the environment through rituals combining picture painting, body painting, story-telling and music.

Many years ago Aborigines had painted on walls of caves. This historic art is up to 40.000 years old. They didn’t only paint on cave walls, but also on trees, weapons, didgeridoos and clapping sticks.

Mostly kangeroos, snakes and dingoes were drawn, but also fishes, turtles, lizards and faces and hands. The typical colours are yellow and red made from brown coloured earth, black made from charcoal dust and white made from argillaceous earth.
This is an example of modern art using these colours.

In ceremonial dances their faces and bodies were painted with paint made by grinding up coloured rocks and adding water. They wear some pieces of jewellery made of coral-wood-seeds, animals’ bones and teeth and mussel shells.

The decorated dancers and a group of people with clapping sticks and didgeridoos come together in the ceremonial dances.

These dances are to explain myths and legends, e.g. how animals, birds and insects obtained their origin. These stories have been told for thousands of years, passed on to each generation and so the stories have been changed over the years. So the Dreamtime is a better known period of time now as it was when the world was young.

The Aborigines have the INMA, it is a gazette with rules of life. These are told in form of stories and every story contains a doctrine, e.g. how many people should live in a tribe, why nobody should share his water with anybody else, that they had to burn the hut from a dead member of the tribe, a.s.o. The Aborigines believed that this helped their spirits to return to the spirit center.

Many pictures are painted about these stories. These paintings are made by a lot of coloureddots and help to remember the stories. The Aborigines possess a lot of stories and it takes a long time to learn this extensive INMA.

So it is no wonder that a man needs 23 years before he knows the whole INMA. Then he is a man able to get married. The INMA also gives information about to which woman a man should get married.