Australia – a country, a continent and the world’s largest island: however you describe it, it’s a land of superlatives. Uluru (Ayres Rock) and the Great Barrier Reef are World Heritage icons; wildlife is both weird and wonderful – from duck-billed platypus to kangaroo and koala, and not forgetting the host of others that might sting or eat you.

Then there’s the enviable oceanside lifestyle of its great cities, but there’s also skiing, luscious vineyards, probably the biggest and best beaches in the world, and of course deserts, tropical rainforests and wetlands the size of small countries.

Absolutely amazing, but this is tourist brochure Australia. To most Australians, quintessential Australia is the wild and potentially dangerous Outback. And the masters of this formidable landscape are its indigenous peoples. Australia’s Aboriginal peoples are the world’s oldest continuous culture, estimated to be 40,000–60,000 years old, which puts the few thousand years of Egyptian and Greek civilisations squarely in the nursery.

No one really knows how these first people got there. Most archaeologists think it was via Southeast Asian islands when sea levels were lower, but Aboriginal folklore is clear that their ancestors came from the sea, landing near Broome in Western Australia.

Their ancient hunter-gather lifestyle means that Aboriginals think quite differently about land ownership to Europeans – they would typically say that they belong to the land, rather than that the land belongs to them.

Tragically, this left them wide open to exploitation by landhungry Europeans. Because they didn’t explicitly ‘claim’ ownership of the land and had no documented written culture, British colonists declared Australia to be uninhabited.

To justify themselves, the British decided that Aboriginals were not really people and classified them as part of the country’s flora and fauna, which meant they had no rights and could be hunted and killed.

There were originally 250 Aboriginal languages, of which only 20 remain. Because they are semi-nomadic people they refer to themselves by the language they speak rather than the territory they inhabit – for example, the Warmun people from around Turkey Creek or the Warlayirti people from around Balgo Hills.

Rock paintings

We now know that the absence of a written language is more than compensated for by the oldest art tradition in the world. To the Warmun people of the Kimberleys, art is not simply a form of decoration or selfexpression – it is a library of stories embodying ‘the law’, maps for journeys, environmental and seasonal information, and education for future generations.

The Nourlangie Rock escarpment (a classic image in the film Crocodile Dundee) in Kakadu National Park has been home to the Bininj and Mungguy people who have lived there since time immemorial. Rock shelters have dozens of rock paintings such as those of Namarrkun (Lightning Man).

It is said that Namarrkun comes out of the sky riding on storm clouds. Lightning flashes across his head when his stone axes strike the clouds, which make a thunderous noise. If people disobey the law, Namarrkun will hiss and crackle in annoyance. He can be seen during the premonsoon season blocking the sun as he looks down on his people.

He comes every year to show his power and remind people to obey the law. If people fight with each other or fail to share food, he rumbles a warning and if this goes unheeded he may strike the offender down with his lightning spears.

The bright orange and blue Leichhardt’s grasshoppers are one form of Namarrkun’s children and when they appear, migrating from the north, they are said to be looking for Namarrkun. This is a sign telling people that storms are coming and it’s time to move and seek a more sheltered camp.

This deceptively simple story is one of thousands that have guided people for millennia, enshrining spiritual life, community obligations, law and order, and guidance about the changing seasons.

So, far from being ‘animals’, Australia’s first people had an ancient culture using an iconographic language, too subtle for the early colonists to recognise but which documented the creation and history of the Australian peoples. Their art and stories were not a separate form of literature but an integral part of traditional life, connecting past and present, the people to the land, as well as the spiritual with everyday life – often called the Dreamtime.

Dreamtime stories embody creation beliefs about how ancestral spirit beings formed the land and all the living things that inhabit it. It’s been conveniently misinterpreted as childish supernatural beliefs, but in fact they contain the stored knowledge of millennia just as ancient Middle Eastern and European fables and sagas do.

Dreamtime stories may be narrated, sung, danced or painted, and describe the belief system, religion, the law of the Australian indigenous people and may include heroes, villains, animals, ancestors or spirits.

Early ecologists

In Katherine Gorge, in the Northern Territory, there is a deep river pool and I was told that Bolung the Rainbow Serpent lives there. The Dreamtime story says that Bolung will get angry and bring monsoons and lightning if people fish there or take more fish than they need. A simple story, but ecologists have recently discovered that this is a vital fish breeding ground. So age-old Aboriginals knew this area needed protecting, enshrining this knowledge as folklore and rock art, tens of thousands of years before modern scientists discovered it.

Pictures full of meaning

Few people knew much about Aboriginal culture until the modern form of painting on canvas started to appear in the early 1970s. Modern Aboriginal artwork of dots and circles is a new format but its origins are ancient and full of meaning – directly derived from petroglyphs, rock painting, body painting and sand designs from time immemorial.

Indigenous art has become very collectable in recent years and can be bought from galleries in London or Australia, but it’s also possible to buy directly from the artists in person or on the Internet at bona fide Indigenous Art Centres in Australia.

Buying directly from wellestablished artists on-site is much cheaper and the savings could cover the cost of a trip to Australia with the bonus of meeting the artist, seeing them at work and hearing Dreamtime stories first-hand.

One of the most respected Indigenous Art Centres is at Balgo Hills on the edge of the Great Sandy and Tanami deserts. Established in 1987, these Warlayirti artists have purposebuilt studio space and a gallery for the display and sale of work.

Joey Tjungurrayi (Helicopter) is a very sought after Warlayirti artist and has exhibited all over Australia as well as France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Denmark, the US and the UK. His paintings sell for many thousands of pounds and a popular screen print would fetch £500.

Indigenous art is not easy to interpret and has many levels; without the accompanying Dreamtime story, they appear to the outsider to be just abstract paintings. When important ceremonial pictures are made, artists will rarely share their full significance because it may be sacred and liable to misinterpretation by Europeans. Often only the more superficial elements are publicly shared.

A few hundred miles away at Turkey Creek, the Warmum artists are unusual in the indigenous art world because they still paint using traditional ochre colours (mainly red, yellow, white and black), crushed from local rock and mixed with various binding agents.

Patrick Mung Mung, a Warmum artist, often paints about his younger days, stories he readily shares. His painting of the Gundarringnarriny rocks south of Purnululu (the Bungle Bungles) record his walkabout days and a blowhole where he used to catch fish using rolled Spinifex as a net.