This book is an investigation of the way the Aboriginal art phenomenon has been entangled with Australian society’s negotiation of Indigenous people’s status within the nation. Through critical reflection on Aboriginal art’s idiosyncrasies as a fine arts movement, its vexed relationship with money, and its mediation of the politics of identity and recognition, this study illuminates the mutability of Aboriginal art’s meanings in different settings. It reveals that this mutability is a consequence of the fact that a range of governmental, activist and civil society projects have appropriated the art’s vitality and metonymic power in national public culture, and that Aboriginal art is as much a phenomenon of visual and commercial culture as it is an art movement. Throughout these examinations, Fisher traces the utopian and dystopian currents of thought that have crystallised around the Aboriginal art movement and which manifest the ethical conundrums that underpin the settler state condition.

A very comprehensive look at Aboriginal art from traditional to contemporary art. Lively discussion and beautiful presentation.

DIVThe history of the Australian Aboriginal painting movement from its local origins to its career in the international art market./div

Dark Emu puts forward an argument for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians. The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing - behaviors inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag. Gerritsen and Gammage in their latest books support this premise but Pascoe takes this further and challenges the hunter-gatherer tag as a convenient lie. Almost all the evidence comes from the records and diaries of the Australian explorers, impeccable sources.

Bad Aboriginal Art is the extraordinary account of Eric Michael's period of residence and work with the Warlpiri Aborigines of western Central Australia, where he studied the impact of television on remote Aboriginal communities.

This book explores the complexities of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in contemporary Australia. It unpacks the continuation of a pervasive colonial consciousness within settler-colonial settings, but also provokes readers to confront their own habits of thought and action. Through presenting a reflexive narrative that draws on the author’s encounters with Indigenous artists and their artwork, knowledge, stories, and lived experiences, this provocative and insightful work encourages readers to consider what decolonising means to them. It presents a compelling and relevant argument that calls for a reorientation of dominant discourses fixed within Eurocentric frameworks, whilst also addressing the deep complexities and challenges of living within intercultural settler-colonial settings where different views and perspectives clash and complement one another.

"This publication accompanies the exhibition Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 5 through September 18, 2016."

Yolngu art as a communication system encoding meaning as form; relation of art to the systems of clan organisation and restricted (secret) knowledge; contact history and social contexts of art production; iconography of clan paintings; response to the art market; social organisation rights to land and law; marriage and kinship; rights to paintings; knowledge system - structure, inclusiveness, power, secrecy; role of paintings in ceremonies - burial rituals; range of meanings associated with paintings - examples used in ceremonies associated with the Wawilak Sisters and ancestral shark images; graphic components of painting - figurative and geometric, clan designs; chronological change - the Donald Thomson Collection, past and contemporary categories of painting, commercial art; iconographic analysis of Manggalili clan paintings; relation of events in painting to Yolngu cosmology - creative powers , life and death, male and female dualities.

This guide is ideal for travellers who want to understand Australia's 50,000-year-old cultural tradition. More than 60 Indigenous people have contributed to this guide, together with some of Lonely Planet's most experienced guidebook researchers. Includes an introduction to Indigenous languages.