Australian Indigenous Art Of The Alligator Rivers Region Northern Territory N.T
Ethnography Young Adult Non-Fiction Indigenous Art Australian Aboriginal Studies Art History Cultural Anthropology Non-Fiction Textbook
Australian Aboriginal Art by Robert Edwards is the definitive 1979 paperback introduction to the world’s oldest continuous art tradition. Across 202 heavily-illustrated pages, Edwards—then Curator of Anthropology at the South Australian Museum—takes readers deep into the rock galleries, bark shelters and ochre-painted bodies of the Alligator Rivers region of the Northern Territory. Every photograph and field sketch is anchored by first-hand cultural context, making the book a compact university-level text that still speaks to curious teenagers and adult travellers alike.
What makes this copy collectible is its scarce, region-specific focus: instead of surveying the entire continent, Edwards concentrates on one cultural heartland, showing how local clans use art to map creation stories, clan estates and seasonal cycles. Readers learn to recognise the X-ray style of Rainbow Serpents, the meaning of dotted cross-hatching, and why certain ochre colours can only be collected by specific family lines. The result is a pocket-sized cultural passport that turns every future visit to Kakadu or Arnhem Land into a living gallery.
Because the 1979 print run was small and most copies went straight into Australian high-school libraries, clean ex-library copies are now prized by art historians and travel collectors. This paperback carries the usual institutional marks—date-slip ghost, withdrawn stamp, clipped front free end-paper—but the interior pages remain bright and the cover art (a classic bark painting of the Rainbow Serpent) is still vibrant. For anyone hunting a readable, information-dense reference on Indigenous Australian art that fits in a day-pack, this is the edition that started it all.
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