Understanding Post-War Australian History in 3 Artworks

Australian history as we know it today began when British explorer James Cook disembarked at Botany Bay in 1788. It is a relatively recent history. On the other hand, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders maintain that they’ve been in Australia from time immemorial. Over the years, Australian art has come to incorporate both cultures, Aboriginal and Western.

What we see when we look at the works of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian artists is a shared history of change, violence, meetings, and (hopefully) reconciliation. John Brack, for instance, takes us to 1950s Melbourne, a colonial space shaped by post-war optimism and dominated by typically Western values. Contemporary artist Ben McKeown paints a completely different Melbourne, a multicultural metropolis filtered through the perspective of his Aboriginality. Finally, as we dive into the works of Aboriginal artist Clarise Tunkin, we are taken to Australia’s Red Centre, and to the complexity of modern Aboriginal dot painting.

In The Car (1955), John Brack (1920-1999) paints the prototype of the perfect Australian family (by the standards of the time of course). Husband and wife sit in the front, while their two kids, a boy and a girl, sit in the back. They’re all turned toward us, except the husband who’s busy driving. He’s the perfect family man; with his eyes on the road and his hands firmly placed on the wheel, it tells us that he is a reliable man, someone who will keep his family safe. If Drysdale’s artwork shows us a remote, post-war Australia still recovering from the effects of the Great Depression, John Brack is the voice of post-war Melbourne.

On the other hand, The Car, The Bar (1954), The New House (1953), Men’s Wear (1953), and The Breakfast Table (1958) could have only been conceived and created in a fast-growing, dynamic but mainly white city such as 1950s Melbourne (the White Australia policy, restricting non-white people from immigrating to Australia, would remain in place until 1973).

The 1940s were marked by death and destruction (the 1942 bombing of Darwin, the largest center in Northern Australia, sent shockwaves across the continent, to the point that some even called it “Australia’s Pearl Harbor”). The 1950s, on the other hand, were years of growth, prosperity, materialism, and optimism.

In 1956, Melbourne hosted the Olympic Games, the first in Australia. The city’s first skyscraper had been approved the year before. The Car screams movement and optimism. It is the product of a society on the rise.

Nonetheless, if we take a closer look at the painting, we might notice something haunting and unsettling about the faces of the members of this (apparently) happy family. They’re angular, eery, eyeless, almost inhuman. The woman looks straight at us: she’s laughing, but her face is grotesque, her smile stiff. Is she really laughing? The children in the backseat are not smiling. Is this really a happy family? As great artists do, Bracks invites us to look beyond the façade of optimism that reigned at the time.

Melbourne features in many of Brack’s paintings. What we see when peeping into living rooms and shop windows through his eyes is a colonial city. The traditional owners of the land on which the city was built are never in the picture, as if they never even existed: there is no trace in his works of an Aboriginal Melbourne. The works of Aboriginal Melbourne-based artist Ben McKeown (1976) tell a different story.

McKeown is a descendant of the Wirangu people, the traditional owners of the west coast of South Australia, a region that stretches east to Lake Gairdner and west to the head of the Great Australian Bight. Spring Street End is arguably one of McKeown’s most emblematic works. Now permanently exhibited at the State Library of Victoria, it was woven by hand by a team from the Australian Tapestry Workshop, made up of Milly Formby, Pamela Joyce, Milena Paplinska, and Emma Sulzer.

In McKeown’s tapestry, the urban grid of inner Melbourne becomes a topographical map. The use of the aerial perspective is typical of Aboriginal dot paintings, one of the oldest and unbroken displays of art in the whole world and a storehouse of knowledge for Aborigines (about the land and its resources, as well as human relationships). In looking down at the city’s grid from up above, instead of campsite waterholes, meeting places, waterways, goannas, or emu and kangaroo tracks, we see streets, buildings, and trees. By employing the aerial perspective typical of Aboriginal art, McKeown bridges the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal art and reaffirms the Aboriginal history of Melbourne. Traditional Aboriginal paintings have several layers of meanings that often go unnoticed by non-Aboriginal people: Spring Street End is no different.

Streets and crossroads are framed by small yellow dots, and, as McKeown points out in an interview for State Library Victoria, “ochre yellow is a traditional pigment used for thousands of years by Aboriginal people for decoration and ceremony.” Dots become a visual cue, a coded message underlining the Aboriginal connection to the country. Through the dots, we become aware of a silent presence, that of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunuurong/Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, the owners of the land on which Melbourne was built.

In his works, McKeown has been influenced by the research of Norman Tindale (1900-1993), who in 1974 assigned the Wirangu an area of tribal land of over 56,000 km sq (just over 21,600 miles). It was only in December 2022, however, that native title was finally granted to them, recognizing that more than 5,000 square kilometers (more than 1900 miles) of land from Acraman Creek, south of Smoky Bay, to Port Kenny, encompassing the sacred rocks at Murphy’s Haystacks, has and always will be Aboriginal.

Initially concerned mostly with entomology, during several expeditions throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Tindale recorded an incredible amount of genealogies from Aboriginal communities from all over the continent, including over 50,000 Indigenous peoples, as well as thousands of photographic portraits. Years of field research across remote Australia resulted in Aboriginal tribes of Australia, their terrain, environmental controls, distribution, limits and proper names (1974), one of the first comprehensive attempts made by a non-Aboriginal author to dismantle colonial prejudices regarding Aboriginal alleged backwardness.

Tindale focuses especially on the Aboriginal relationship with the land, stressing their cultural and geographic bond to the country — a bond too many times disrupted by colonial encroachment, which resulted in displacement and alienation on the Aboriginal side. These are precisely the themes McKeown’s works deal with: alienation and belonging, as well as the unique bond Aborigines have to their country and how it has changed since contact.

The 1860s were a crucial decade for the Kulin. Ever since the first contact with European settlers and in 1803, relations between the two groups had been cautious, if not friendly. This precarious balance was soon to be destroyed.  Over the next decades, they were discouraged and prevented from visiting their ancestral lands. From the 1860s, following the 1869 Aboriginal Protection Act, reserves and missions were created across the state of Victoria. The act gave the Board for the Protection of Aborigines the power to determine (and limit) where and how Aborigines and their children were supposed to work and leave.

According to the 1901 census, 46 Aboriginal people were living in Melbourne at the turn of the century. Melbourne had quickly become the city Brack knew: a colonial space, inhabited mainly by white Australians, with pockets of (sometimes significant) Aboriginal cultural resistance.

McKeown has stated that he deliberately decided to focus “on the top end of Spring Street,” because “in many ways it is the heart of Victoria; the place that holds the official history and the memory of tomorrow.” Spring Street End is a reminder of the Aboriginal history of Melbourne. It is also a reminder of Aboriginal strength and resilience, of their survival and their ability to adapt despite years of destruction and dispossession.

Aboriginal dot paintings are like haikus, the traditional Japanese three-line poems: there is more than meets the eye. Each painting has several layers of meaning. Behind what looks like a colorful abstract pattern of lines, dots, and circles lies a story that only the initiated can fully comprehend.

Symbols are employed as narrative elements, as a coded proto-language to communicate practical and cultural knowledge. The range of symbols employed by Aboriginal artists today derives from their ancestors’ hunting and tracking culture. They transcend space and time. Aboriginal dot painter Clarise Tunkin (1993) is part of this shared history. A member of the Pitjantjatjara people, she was born in Alice Springs into a family of artists — her mother is Teresa Baker, her grandmother Kay Baker, and her great-grandfather is the famous Jimmy Baker.

Most of her works are centered around the story of Marlilu, one of the Pitjantjatjara ancestral creation figures. Clarise was taught about her by her mother, who often took her to the rockholes and locations connected to these stories.

In Minyma Marlilu Tjukurrpa, which Tunkin painted with her grandmother Kay Baker, we’re looking at the land of the Pitjantjatjara from an aerial perspective. Traditionally, the circles (or set of concentric circles) represent campsites, fireplaces, or waterholes. Multiple concentric circles connected by wavy lines point to running water, while parallel lines linking various circles together represent people—or ancestral Dreamtime figures—traveling from one place to another.

Such depictions point to the overall purpose of Aboriginal art: to ensure survival in the harsh outback, where water and bush tucker could be hard to find if one didn’t know where to look. However, Aboriginal dot paintings are more than simple geographic maps.

Embedded in Aboriginal painting are the stories and myths of the people who have inhabited these lands from time immemorial. Similarly, the stories of the Dreamtime are more than just stories: they are a storehouse of knowledge about the land and how to manage it, about its waters and rockholes, as well as about human relationships.

The U shape, for instance, indicates a person sitting cross-legged, with the U being the shape left on the sand while sitting. Women are usually shown by juxtaposing the U shape with the objects they might carry (a digging stick, usually, or a coolamon, the traditional Aboriginal bag used to carry bush food or water). Similarly, animals are represented by their tracks. This can be a set of mirror-image shapes for kangaroos, a track with three points for emus, and four E-shaped marks for possums. Some of the symbols Aboriginal painters use today can be found painted or engraved on rock art sites across Australia.

This is the case for Nawarla Gabarnmung, for instance, a rock shelter in south-western Arnhem Land, west of Maningrida, in the Top End of Australia’s Northern Territory: according to carbon dating, the site has been visited by Aboriginal people for more than 45,000 years. The art movement of Aboriginal dot painters is far more diverse than one might think at first glance.

There’s Nada Rawlins (1936), for instance, who paints the story of the five most important waterholes in the country of her ancestors in a style that seems to echo that of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint. There is also Rusty Peters (1935-2020), who blends the traditional elements of Aboriginal art with silhouettes of trees, and Alison Munti Riley (1966), with her powerful series about bush food and the Seven Sisters Dreaming. Then there is Betty Muffler (1944), with her paintings devoid of color.

There’s Linda Syddick Napaltjiarri, with her eerie figures wandering in the desert, a reminder perhaps of the journey she herself undertook as a child with her family as they crossed the Gibson desert, from their traditional Pintupi lands near Lake McKay to Mt Liebig. There’s Rosemary Petyarre (1950), a bush woman and niece of famous Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye, with her paintings of bush medicine leaves. There’s Gabriella Possum Nungurray (1967), the oldest daughter of beloved artist Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, who depicts the Dreamtime stories she inherited from her mother and grandmother. And there’s Daniel Boyd (1982), who paints colonial figures and scenes in the style of dot painting.

This variety of approaches is a testimony to the uniqueness and resilience of Aboriginal culture in modern Australia. With her artworks, Clarise Tunkin reaffirms the beauty of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories, as well as the importance of a parallel art form too often ignored and denied by non-Indigenous Australians.