Understanding Aboriginal Art: An interview with Beverly Peacock owner of the Kajiti Art Gallery in Fregon

By: Brady Flinchum

An example of some street painting in the
small community of Fregon. Just front the
grafted wall you can see how much color is
used in the aboriginal paintings, even though
this is not traditional at all.

     Since data collection went well I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Beverley Peacock, the owner and operator of the Kajiti Art Gallery in Fregon, SA. I really wanted to know how water, in particular, groundwater influences the aboriginal art in her gallery. Unfortunately, due to the fear of these beautiful art pieces being reproduced I did not have permission to take pictures of anything inside the gallery. Beverly was originally from South Africa and traveled to Australia because her husband helped set up a lot of the infrastructure, such as power and sewage, which allow the communities to stay in one place. Beverly said that when she moved to Fregon in the early to mid 1990's there were no standing buildings, electricity or running water. This really shocked me because that was only about 25 years ago! Essentially, white man had very little influence over the aboriginal culture until the late 1800's early 1900s when a major drought forced them to interact and obtain goods to do a major drought.
     I asked Beverly how the water influences some of the paintings and she simply told me that the artists paint what they know. I guess this is not super shocking, but it is very clear when you walk into the gallery simply by the colors selected. There are a lot of brown earth tones, and dark greens and yellows. These colors are very similar to most of the dirt, boulders and vegetation that we saw when we were out in the field. There are also a lot of paintings that have deep blues, teals and oranges. These colors more than likely stem from the beautiful sunsets and sun rises that we saw on a nightly basis while in the field. The picture in the upper left is the old supermarket that is located next to the art gallery. I am using this image because, although I couldn't take images within the gallery this building can gives you a sense of how brightly colored some of this artwork is, and the variety that is presented. One thing I want to point out is the pools of water that are painted on the ground.  Despite a fairly large rainstorm that came through about 2 weeks before we arrived we did not see any surface water. The desert was green and new grass was growing because of the amount of water.

Image of one of many sunsets we had in
the outback. I just wanted to post this to
show you the array of colors that can be
seen so far away from civilization.

     Beverly said to me that life out here is completely influence by food and water. Water is so important that the aboriginal artists have a symbol for rock holes, which essentially represent locations where water can be found. A common theme to a lot of the paintings was to draw the land that the artist grew up on as if they were looking down over the land from a helicopter. This is interesting because Beverly assured me that most of them have never been in an airplane before. If you can put yourself in that perspective you can start to see these paintings as maps of their land. In almost every painting you will see at least one rock hole, or some kind of blue droplet, probably representing rain. The gallery was filled with hundreds of paintings and almost of them, because they paint what they know, has some kind of influence of water.

I wanted to say thank you to Beverly for letting me talk with you and giving me all of the information.

The aboriginal symbol of rock holes. Image was taken from:
http://www.jintaart.com.au/iconography/water.htmAdd caption