Free Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay

could pick up almost any of them and you had paint in your hands.
    Abraham found a big flat white stone from beyond the creek. That was to be our palette and canvas, and Tango—who had a water bottle with him—showed me how to pour water on to it then take a stone and rub it vigorously over the water to make it into pigment. The stones had the right combination of clay and color to make painting easy; they were even smoother than my little Italian stone. Is this what they use for the didgeridoos? I wondered. “Yeah,” said Abraham. “We used to,” said Tango. “Now we use acrylics. Ochre needs a vehicle, it’s too far to walk. We had a vehicle before but the engine got buggered.”
    Beswick is the last domain in the area to the south of Arnhemland that is considered culturally “intact.” Its inhabitants still organize initiation ceremonies, with boys going into the bush for four or five months to prepare. “We’ve only got five or six old men left now to teach the young ones,” Tango said. In all the settlements there were problems, he said. “Ganja, petrol-sniffing, all that.” But one of the biggest problems for cultural life was that the old men were dying. “Me, I’m forty-eight years old. If I don’t get anyone to teach me then I’ll fade away, the whole thing will just fade away.” The multicolored stones of Jumped Up Creek were used for both art and ceremonies, Tom said. “But we don’t tell you about ceremony,” he added firmly. “It’s secret.”
    “Secret” is such a vulnerable thing in Aboriginal communities today. The stories have been passed on only with difficulty. Yet they have probably never been so important—not only in the religious sense, but also in the sense of identity. What meaning do stories and paintings about land and country actually have for a sedentary person who rarely sees the places they refer to? Today, when there are so few stories for men like Tom Kelly to pass on, it is important to pay attention to what is left, and to respect the very thin blanket of secrecy that can be spread over them. Things were not in fact so secret sixty years ago, when there were more stories and they were told fairly freely to anthropologists.
    ALICE SPRINGS
    Theodor Strehlow was the son of a missionary; he grew up with Aranda playmates, spoke the language fluently, and kept diaries and accounts of the ceremonies and traditions that he witnessed. His papers and pictures are held in the Museum of Central Australia, just outside the center of Alice Springs and an overnight bus journey from Beswick. To access them I turned away from the dark display cases of stuffed possoms and exotic rock samples, and went through a nondescript door into a triangular room with space for four chairs, a telephone and what looked like a two-way mirror. I felt as if I were in a spy film, or entering the secret headquarters of a cult.
    I sat down in a chair and looked at the telephone for a while, wondering whether I had a good enough reason to dial 11–111 and ask to consult the files in order to learn more about ochre. Then— and as I write this a few months later I’m surprised I did this—I stood up and left the room without even picking up the phone. These were secret documents, so secret that in 1992 they had been confiscated from Strehlow’s widow’s home and put into the safe-keeping of the museum, for whenever the Aboriginal elders or scholars wanted to consult them. It wasn’t right for me even to try to see them, I decided. Whatever I was to find out about red ochre would either be things people told me in full knowledge of why I was asking, or things I found in public libraries, open to anyone. Even if that meant I knew less, it meant I knew it fairly. And, to my surprise, that afternoon I found in the reference section of Alice Springs’s public library some of the information I had been looking for. It was an account—written up in Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia —of a sacred