AustLit

'Bark painting, as practised by Aboriginal artists of Arnhem Land for millennia, is one of the great traditions of world art. Yet it was only recognised as such late in the 20th century. Old Masters: Australia’s Great Bark Artists highlights the work of 40 master painters who have carried one of the oldest continuing traditions of art into the modern era.

'Old Masters features the paintings of Narritjin Maymuru, Yirawala, Mawalan Marika and David Malangi and their contemporaries. These men of high ritual standing were not only artists, but also ceremonial and clan leaders, philosophers, advocates for land rights and human rights, ambassadors and politicians, who recognised the power of art as the most eloquent means to build bridges between Aboriginal and European society.

'The book includes essays by renowned scholars of Aboriginal art, biographies and portraits of the artists, and 122 full-colour plates of the paintings, made between 1948 and 1988, from the National Museum of Australia’s rich and extensive collection.'

'The extraordinary collection of letters has remained unpublished for nearly a century. It sheds vivid light on race relations, social conditions and Aboriginal culture in Central Australia, It also documents a crucial and poorly understood period in the history of anthropology. The book makes an invaluable contribution to the understanding of central Australian Aboriginal society, and to current debates concerning land rights.'  (Publication summary)

This is the story of three men and three frontiers.

In the nineteenth century the centre of the continent was, to white Australians, a vast forbidding emptiness. The completion of the Overland Telegraph Line in the 1870s brought with it a new knowledge of the area, as well as a number of intruders to a landscape familiar to Aboriginal people for thirty millennia. Among the newcomers were a policeman, Ernest Cowle, and a telegraph official, Paddy Byrne, living in frontier settlements hundreds of kilometres from the nearest Europeans.

'From 1894 to 1925, Cowle and Byrne wrote letters to pioneering anthropologist and biologist, Baldwin Spencer, whom they had met during the 1894 Horn Scientific Expedition to central Australia. Neither expected their letters to be read by any person other than Spencer, and both made observations which they would never voice to each other. Yet through their letters, and the Spencer and Gillen books, they became linked to such giants of intellectual history as James Frazer, Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud. And both became figures, however minute, on the frontier of discovery, of new ways of looking at human experience in all its diversity.

'The subjects of their letters were the Aboriginal people, the landscape in which they lived and the unusual flora and fauna of their habitat. These earthy and thoughtful men offered an extended report from the frontier of the relations between white and black Australians, a place then characterised by mutual incomprehension, outbreaks of violence and the vast distance between two seemingly incompatible ways of responding to an extreme environment.

'A moment in time, a place on the edge, two men writing to a third; From the Frontier combines local history, race relations and scientific discovery, and enters a place whose very strangeness tells us much about our past-and our present.'  (Publication summary)