Part of the oldest continuous culture in human history, the Australian Aboriginal belief system is encompassed by the term Tjukurrpa, or the Dreaming. This began in a distant time before humans, when ancestral beings traveled over the land, heaving up mountains, carving rivers and valleys, and creating animals and plants. The Dreaming is both past and continuously present, and serves as a code of laws for human interactions with each other and with nature.

A 1971 encounter between a white art teacher from Sydney and a senior Aboriginal lawmen in a government relief camp at Papunya in the Western Desert of Australia sparked an art movement of historic proportions. These paintings all relate to the Dreaming in some way, and encode and honor intensive ecological knowledge of vast swaths of desert terrain, plant and animal life, and weather cycles passed down by oral tradition and ceremony.

Anatjarri Tjakamarra’s Bush Tucker Story depicts food sources and the ceremony enacted to enable them. The seeds of the kulberri plant make up the black dotting against white; loaves of fire-baked flatbread (“damper”) made from crushed kulberri seeds are seen as oval shapes against these fields. These images of nourishment are interspersed with a dividing framework of oval tjurungas (bullroarers) used in men’s ceremony.

Old Walter Tjampitjinpa’s painting celebrates water, both in the form of rainstorms and the life-giving runoff that collects in waterholes known to the initiated. The painting references Kalipinypa, an ancestral site sacred to Old Walter’s kin. The yellow hatching at the corner constitutes lightning from a terrific storm and the mirrored black crescent shaped forms are the rainbow, while the waterhole is shown by the roundel with concentric red and black rings near the top. Wavy black lines communicate the flow of water, while the web of feathery white strokes speak of growth brought on by the rains. (Text from AW, in Art and the Global Climate Struggle, The Herbert F Johnson Museum, Cornell University)