"What you have here, the painting depicts the inland of Australia, we call the ‘Red Centre’ on the left and then you come through to the Rainforest, then you come through to the sea. So the three are the Red Centre, the Rainforest and the Sea.
In the desert area of course you have the ochre colours that depict the colours of the earth and the salt pans going through or the dry creek beds. Then you have three women sitting around a camp fire with the digging sticks and the coolamons, the wooden bowls full of their bush tucker they’ve been collecting.
You’ll notice up in the top in the middle of the Red Centre, you have five kangaroos camouflaged in their environment. Now if anyone’s been out to Alice Springs, Uluru around that area of a night time you look up and the stars are so bright you feel like you can reach up and touch them. Now the stars played an important part for our people especially in Central Australia because they were used for navigation like other cultures around the world – the Polynesians, Melanesians, they navigated by the stars over the ocean, our people navigated by the stars over the Red Centre in to the desert areas. We knew where they rose, where they set and the direction they were going, so we used the always. Now at the bottom on the left hand side of the Red Centre you’ve got the two little hands, and hands are depicting a signature that we belong to this land, not ownership of it but belonging to it – it was a different cultural structure.
Now you move from the Red Centre and you go to the right, you’re moving in to the rainforest area, and in the rainforest area you’ll notice that the footprints continue on from the Red Centre from one campsite to the next campsite then following the campsite to protect the earth not to destroy it so we only stayed there for a short period of time and then when things were starting to go down, we moved to another area to let the land regenerate with the food source - the animals and the plants. So that’s the camp sites and the foot prints which we call ‘Song Lines’. In the rainforest, you’ll see camouflaged, is the tree python. He lives in the trees, very quiet but watches what’s going on and so [there is] wisdom and knowledge from the rainforest python and you can see he’s camouflaged there.
Then as you come across, you got the colours of the sand that’s denoting it’s on the beach and you see the life force of the sand. And you know it’s on the beach, it’s not on the river because when you look in to the water, what do you have? Sea Turtles. Sea Turtles have flippers unlike fresh water turtles which have webbed feet with claws so these are sea turtles. Now Sea Turtles, they’re important to our people because every three years they come back to the beaches and the female lays her eggs and we collect those eggs, we never take the whole lot, we only take what we need but leave so many there to regenerate and regrow. Interestingly, the male sea turtles never come back to land; it’s the females that venture back to lay their eggs. What do sea turtles eat? One of their main foods is Jelly fish so you’ll see up the top near the sand areas, the Jelly fish camouflaged that the sea turtles eat. Then you have the life force of the water and the turtles swimming to lay their eggs.
So it’s telling a whole story of the Red Centre, Rainforest and to the ocean, how our people respected the land and knew the land intimately."
- Uncle Colin Jones
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Canvas Prints
- Available in three sizes, artwork is commercially reproduced on a cotton-blend (non-archival) quality canvas using latex inks.- Please note: Canvas prints are not stretched / mounted and are posted out rolled up in cylinder tubes to allow for safe delivery.
- Preview photos are indicative of approximate sizing only.
- All canvas prints are printed with an additional 50mm bleed to accommodate any framing and stretching.
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