19 AM 7946/11
Leigh Oates Passing on Culture 2011
Acrylic & natural ochre on canvas 610 x 910mm $900
This painting represents the passing on of Aboriginal culture to the younger or next generation.

It?s very difficult in this day and age for Aboriginal families to live a traditional life style but we can do our best to teach our
children about Aboriginal culture and heritage,
Mutton birding is a cultural practices still carried on today.
This painting is about a group of teenagers that visited Bruny Island. Bruny Island is off the south east coast of Tasmania
about a fifteen minute ferry trip from Kettering. The group attend the local school and have been on similar visits to other
significant sites in the area. On this particular outing they visited a mutton bird rookery with an old birder from Cape Barren
Island. They got to see how a bird was caught and prepared ready for cooking, and they also got to taste the bird. Another
place they visited was an ochre quarry. Ochre was used for decorating the head, face and body. Some men coated each
lock of their hair with fat and ochre. Bodies were protected from the cold by applying a mixture of fat, ochre and charcoal.
Hand stencils were made on cave walls by blowing a mixture of water and ochre around the hand. Good ochre is only found
in a few places around Tasmania, so it was highly valued amongst Aboriginal people.
Traditionally only women could visit the ochre quarries, sometimes only men, because of the ritual and spiritual significance
of different areas.
This group of young Aboriginal students were lucky enough to visit the ochre quarry to see where ochre came from.

In this painting I have used ochre from that quarry, and the story is about the students and their learning journey on this
cultural excursion.
The corners of the painting represent the quarry itself and the different textures of the ochre. The blue dotted area represents
the water we had to travel over to get to the island, and the yellow line through the blue section represents the beaches on
the island.
The nine rounded white shapes in the centre represent the nine Aboriginal Nations here in Tasmania and they also represent
the teachers, these are the people passing on the information to the next generation. The seven Aboriginal students are
represented by the seven rounded white shapes in the corners. The information passing from the teachers to the students is
represented by the veins flowing from the centre out to the seven students. Once they have the information they will become
the teachers and they can then pass it on.