The historical setting
Bark painting is an Australian Aboriginal art form, involving painting on the interior of a strip of tree bark. While examples of painted bark shelters were found in the south-eastern states (then colonies) of Tasmania, Victoria, and New South Wales in the 19th century, as well as later on bark shelters in northern Australia, it is now typically only found as a continuing form of artistic expression in Arnhem Land and other regions in the Top End of Australia, including parts of the Kimberley region of Western Australia.
History
Painting on the dried bark stripped off trees, using ochres, is an old tradition. The earliest European find was in a bark shelter over a grave in Tasmania around 1800, recorded by French artist Nicolas-Martin Petit, who travelled with Nicolas Baudin to Tasmania between 1800 and 1804. Other painted bark shelters were later found in Victoria and New South Wales. These were drawn with charcoal, and then painted or scratched onto bark which had been blackened by smoke. The earliest surviving bark paintings date from the 19th century, an example of which is a bark etching of a kangaroo hunt now in the British Museum, which was collected near Boort in northern Victoria by the British explorer John Hunter Kerr.
Another example, painted before 1876, is held by the Museum of Victoria. In the Kimberley and Arnhem Land, the paintings on bark shelters were similar in style to those done in rock shelters, which illustrated various stories told to young people when people were confined to the shelters for long periods during the wet season. Bark coffins and belts were painted in northeast Arnhem Land, and painted bark baskets were also used in death rituals on the Tiwi Islands. The modern form of bark paintings began when works were commissioned from Yolngu artists.
Description and interpretation
Bark paintings are based on sacred designs that include abstract patterns and designs (such as cross-hatching in particular colours) that identify a clan, and also often contain elements of the eternal Dreamtime. Sometimes the elements of a story are obvious—such as men or animals—but sometimes the elements are symbolic. What appears to the tourist as a series of wavy lines punctuated by dots may actually be telling a complex Dreaming story describing the path of a creator spirit and events that happened along the way. An uninitiated man or woman is only allowed to paint "outside" stories, the sort of story that might be told to a child. An initiated man can paint an "inside" story, which is restricted knowledge.
Thus, a painting may be displayed in an exhibition, or put up for sale, but the artist, although having the right to paint the story, does not have the right to tell the story to another person. Alternatively, the story behind the painting may be one that may not be told to an uninitiated person. Non-Indigenous people who, like Howard Morphy, have spent years studying the subject, still have an outsider's view and rely on analogies. The Yolngu language and culture has words and concepts that are unfamiliar to non-indigenous cultures, which makes understanding the art form difficult.
Manufacture
Bark paintings from the Kimberley in Western Australia are very similar to the rock art in that region: mainly, representations of the Wandjina creator-beings associated with wet season thunderstorms. These are large faces with rayed headdresses, with not much other body detail. Bark paintings from Port Keats/Wadeye in the north-west of the Northern Territory, combine figurative imagery (as found in eastern Kimberley and Arnhem Land), and geometric patterns, related to desert art styles. The Tiwi people of Bathurst and Melville Islands paint colourful crosshatched and dotted non-figurative designs. Similar designs are also painted on bark baskets (tungas), sculptures carved from ironwood, and various other items of material culture relating to mortuary ceremonies.
Work from Groote Eylandt is distinctive, with figures painted against a black background, and also often depict representations of the boats known as prau used by Makassan trepangers. The material of choice is the bark from stringybark (Eucalyptus tetradonta). The bark must be free of knots and other blemishes. It is best cut from the tree in the wet season when the sap is rising. Two horizontal slices and a single vertical slice are made into the tree, and the bark is carefully peeled off with the aid of a sharpened tool. Only the inner smooth bark is kept and placed in a fire.