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Many Aboriginal people have a skin name. Skin Name is an Aboriginal-English term derived from the English term 'Kin Names'. A skin name is a name given to an Aboriginal person at birth based on the combined skin names of their parents, or given by their community. A skin name is not a surname or last name. Skin names are an important aspect of Aboriginal culture as it governs an individual's right to own certain Dreamings, as well as define their relationships and connections to traditional land and extended family. Western Desert Language Groups Utopian Language Groups Warlpiri Pintupi/Luritja Arrente...

The words ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Indigenous’ are both used in Australia to describe the original inhabitants of the Australian continent. The word ‘Aboriginal’ is the established way to describe the first inhabitants, regularly used in contexts of Aboriginal community, Aboriginal health, Aboriginal art etc. ‘Aboriginal’ is also used as a noun, so a person is an Aboriginal as well as an Aborigine, which seems to be used less often in the media. As the term ‘Aboriginal’ is the established way to describe first inhabitants in Australia, we then extend that to ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ to cover all first inhabitants...

While Aboriginal painting traditions are many thousands of years old, it was not until the 1970s that Indigenous artists began to receive widespread recognition in the West. One of the first, and perhaps most famous, group of Indigenous painters was the Australian Western Desert artists of Papunya Tula. The styles of the Western Desert were developed for painting on the body or ground but once a local schoolteacher, Geoffrey Bardon (1940–2003), introduced paints and canvas to the community, many locals began adapting their styles to take advantage of these new, Western mediums. The result was a flourishing art movement throughout...

Elizabeth Fortescue, Arts Editor, The Daily Telegraph, September 30, 2016 6:49am Street art is changing. No longer produced under cover of dark, only for local councils to fight back with solvents, street art has come in out of the cold. We could even be seeing the beginning of street art as something its artists never foresaw or proposed it to be — an object of corporate desire that enables them to earn a living from their passion. The news from the leading street artists of inner Sydney goes like this. Mulga, as Joel Moore signs his street art, has written...

Today I’d like to look at an artist named Lily Kelly Napangardi who comes from Mount Liebig in the Northern Territory. Lily often paints sandhills but she paints them in a very different way to many other artists. In her paintings you sometimes get the impression of the wind blowing the tops off these sandhills through the line of dots she creates coming off the top of the sandhills. It’s almost a plain-air and aerial view in the same painting.  Lily was one of the first of the famous artists from the Watiyawanu Art Centre at Mount Liebig. She had...