Kimberley Aboriginal Art

The region is also home to one of the world’s great rock art provinces. A kangaroo painted on a shelter ceiling on Balanggarra Country in the north-east Kimberley has been securely dated to about 17,300 years old, the oldest dated rock painting still in place in Australia, and the famous Gwion Gwion figures, elegant human forms in elaborate dress, belong to a later period dated to around 12,000 years. The full dating story is in our main guide.

In the north and west Kimberley, the Worrorra, Ngarinyin and Wunambal peoples share the Wanjina: powerful ancestral beings associated with rain, clouds and the creation of Country, depicted with large dark eyes, haloed heads and no mouths.

Two things follow for anyone engaging with this art. First, contemporary Wanjina paintings, on bark, board and canvas, principally through the Mowanjum community near Derby and its art centre, are made by artists who hold the right to paint them; the imagery belongs to these three peoples specifically.

The east’s story is newer and starts with ceremony. Between 1981 and 1983, painted boards carried in the Gurirr Gurirr, a ceremony that came to Rover Thomas in a dream-cycle following Cyclone Tracy, drew outside attention at Warmun (Turkey Creek), and senior artists, most prominently Rover Thomas and Paddy Jaminji, began painting on portable materials for a wider audience.

What developed became known as the East Kimberley school: natural ochres and bush gum on board and canvas, broad planes of ground colour edged with white dots, Country rendered simultaneously in profile and plan, and subject matter that ranges from Ngarranggarni (Dreaming) to the region’s hard pastoral and massacre history, told plainly.

South of the ranges, around Fitzroy Crossing, Mangkaja Arts represents Walmajarri, Wangkajunga and other artists whose families came out of the Great Sandy Desert within living memory. Their loose, high-colour acrylic painting of desert waterholes (jila) sits stylistically between Kimberley and desert worlds, and the community made art history in 1997 when Ngurrara claimants painted an enormous collaborative canvas as evidence of their Country for their native title claim, one of the most powerful demonstrations anywhere that these paintings are, among other things, maps and title.

For the desert traditions on the other side of that boundary, see Central Desert Art.

East Kimberley work means natural ochre: ground earth pigments bound with gum, applied in matte, granular fields you can often see the texture of. It ages beautifully but should be handled with more care than acrylic; loose pigment can scuff, so professional stretching and framing matter, and works should be kept dry.

Provenance runs through the art centres, Warmun, Waringarri, Mowanjum, Mangkaja, and the galleries that deal with them; the standard rules in our buying guide apply.