Word: wondjina
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Australian aborigines wear practically no clothes, grow no crops, live by hunting and berry picking. Their major art consists of rock pictures of spirits called Wondjina. First painted centuries ago, the paintings are "touched" (i.e., repainted) by the natives each season to bring on the rain. But at Munich's Ethnographical Museum last week hung copies of a much older and almost unknown aboriginal art. discovered by the museum director, Andreas Lommel, in the Kimberley district of Northwestern Australia. Smaller, more naturalistic and far more elegant than Wondjina art, they date back at least a thousand years...
Lommel found the ancient pictures in the hills surrounding a vast ranch far out in the bush. In the outback country he found a shifting population of aborigines. The old people led him along circuitous trails to their usual Wondjina pictures, and "touched" them for him (Lommel swears the rain came each time). But forging farther afield himself, Lommel came to other rock drawings the natives themselves had never seen, and knew nothing about...
...hunting and dancing stick men, in northern Australia, were done by Mimis. ("Mimis" are so thin they can hunt only in still weather, and so shy they have never been seen.) For the haloed, mouthless figures painted in caves in the Kimberley district, they have a different explanation: Wondjina (gentle fertility gods) first made them by casting shadows on the rock. Before each rainy season, the aborigines retouch the divine shadows with red and yellow ocher and pipe-clay white. It is sure to bring rain...
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