Contemporary Aboriginal Art: A Guide to the Ancient Culture of Australia
Cultural Studies Regional History Aboriginal Art Australian Indigenous Studies Art Market & Collecting Ethnography & Anthropology Non-Fiction Reference
First published in 2001, Susan McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art: A Guide to the Ancient Culture of Australia is still the go-to paperback for collectors, travellers and students who want a single, authoritative volume that bridges millennia of Indigenous tradition with the dynamic painting movement that exploded onto the world art market in the late twentieth century. McCulloch—a respected arts journalist and long-time gallerist—walks readers through the Dreaming stories, regional styles and community-owned art centres that underpin today’s multimillion-dollar Aboriginal art industry, making complex kinship systems, iconography and land-rights issues approachable without ever dumbing them down.
What makes this copy especially appealing is its condition: a clean, tightly-bound paperback with no pen marks, dog-eared corners or underlining—just light exterior scuffing that hints at careful shelf life rather than classroom wear. Because later reprints trimmed page count and swapped colour plates for black-and-white, the 2001 first edition remains the most comprehensive colour reference in portable form; every major desert community, bark-painting clan and urban art collective is mapped, illustrated and contextualised so you can identify an artist, region or symbol at a glance.
Whether you’re a curator building a library, a traveller planning a gallery crawl through Alice Springs or Darwin, or a collector who wants to verify provenance before purchasing a Rover Thomas or Emily Kngwarreye canvas, this guide delivers the market history, price benchmarks and community contacts that online snippets can’t match. Secure this lightly-loved copy now and you’ll have the same fast-reference tool trusted by auction specialists and Aboriginal-owned art centres alike—without the collector-level price tag attached to hardcover or signed editions.
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