In the Dreamtime....Aboriginal Art from the Booker-Lowe Gallery

Indigenous people inhabited Australia for at least 40,000 years prior to European exploration. They developed hundreds of languages, as well as complex Creation myths or ?Dreamings,? which defined the actions and relationships of ancestral beings ? both human and animal ? to the land and to one another, and dictated codes of conduct. It was not until the early 1970's that the Aboriginal people, the world's oldest living culture, were encouraged to share their pictorial traditions with the ?outside world? by painting them on canvas. Since the first paintings were created at the remote Papunya settlement deep in the Central Desert, Aboriginal artists have continued to paint their country and their ancestral stories in strikingly contemporary fashion.