THE ART OF THE BARK PAINTER
No one really knows how bark painting began. Early records are scant, but when European man first came to Australia, and started its written history, bark paintings were found in many parts of the continent. In 1807, the artist who accompanied the French explorers Peron and Freycinet showed sheets of decorated bark in his sketch of a Tasmanian burial place. Several other early accounts of the island colony also mention painting on bark. Half a century and more lately, barks were still to be seen in Victoria, New South Wales, and particularly the northerly regions of Australia.
There is a belief among some Aborigines, and some anthropologists as well, that bark painting began on the inner sides of wet weather shelters when tribesmen whiled away the enforced idlenes of rainy days by decorating their seasonal homes.
The first designs could have been simple hand stencils, formed by blowing a thin solution of coloured clay around a hand held against the bark walls; or brush-painted designs may have existed from the beginning. The shelters, made of long strips of bark slung smooth side in over a basic frame of saplings, so that they almost reached the ground, certainly afforded a ready starting point for the medium.
Yet even the earliest accounts tell of bark paintings being used as separate entities, with specific roles in ceremonial and ritual. Large sheets of bark, covered with elaborate designs, were arrayed on poles in the important Bora initiation ceremonies of the tribes in the south-eastern regions of the continent. Even now, bark paintings with ritual significance figure in the sacred ceremonies of the tribes of northern Australia and the nearby coastal islands, which are the only people still painting barks.
The only other relatively untouched tribal region is that of the arid Centre with its dearth of suitable materials has no tradition in the medium at all. However they ultimately began, and whatever their former distribution and significance, bark paintings are playing an increasingly important role in the modern Aboriginal culture of Arnhem Land.
With encouragement from the Government and missions eager to develop a cash economy among the Aborigines, there has been a boom in their production. Assured markets in the cities and in the rising tourist trade have brought in their wake a certain amount of mass production in some areas, and a parallel loss in fidelity to traditional modes and artistry. At the same time, with bark painting once more a live and flourishing art form, there have been definite advances in refinement of technique and conception by a number of artists.
Museums still hold some of the barks known to have been painted in the latter half of the last century. The first considerable collection was made by that outstanding pioneer of Australian ethnology, Sir Baldwin Spencer, at Oenpelli in 1 91 2. Since then there has been a gathering momentum of interest in the art, both as an art in itself and as an expression of the social, ethical, religious and economic life of the Aborigines. For many years the spear and the boomerang have symbolised the Aboriginal to the people of the world. Now, more and more, it is the bark painting which is taking over this role. Superficially, the paintings form striking souvenirs. At a deeper level, they are the distillation of the lore of centuries.
