Aboriginal Australian Art: The World's Oldest Living Tradition
Aboriginal Australian art is the oldest continuously practiced art tradition on Earth — stretching back at least 50,000 years, making it contemporaneous with the earliest cave paintings of Europe and predating all other surviving artistic traditions. But what makes it singular is not merely its antiquity. It is the fact that it has never stopped: the traditions of painting, carving, body decoration, and ground marking that were practiced before the last ice age are still being practiced today by communities who understand themselves as the custodians of the same knowledge, the same Songlines, the same relationship to Country that their ancestors maintained. This is not a museum tradition. It is a living transmission — one that survived colonial genocide, forced removal of children, and the suppression of language, and continues to generate new works in old forms as the knowledge moves from elder to student, from grandmother to grandchild, as it has moved for fifty thousand years. ...