Read Color: A Natural History of the Palette for Free Online Page A

immediately and I found miles of it. I had not quite appreciated how the Top End of Australia is a quarry of ochres—there is so much of it that people use it commercially for colored concrete. On my first morning in Darwin I went for an early morning walk along East Point beach, which is famous locally for its colors. The rocks were like raspberry ripple ice cream, as if some lazy Ancestral Being had been given the job of mixing up the yellow, white, orange and red ingredients into the brown color of proper cliffs but had been distracted by a passing possum and ended up leaving them to dry in unmixed swirls of color. The crimson hematite was splashed like spilt blood over the whiter rocks. When I ground the loose pebbles on the mortar of the rock, and added a drop of seawater, I found I could paint with them—on my skin and on the pale parts of the rock. But unlike my smooth Italian ochre these Australian pigments were gritty and flaked unevenly. You wouldn’t travel miles for this paint, I thought. Although, of course, I realized, I just had.

    To the east I could see Arnhemland being slowly illuminated by the sun. This was the Aboriginal homeland that outsiders can visit only if they are invited. When you look at some maps, it is almost a blank: a place you don’t need to know about unless you have your own map already. As I sat on the stone slabs and watched the sun painting the sky pink, I wondered about the colors of Arnhemland. Where they came from, and where they went to.
    TRADING OCHRE
    There was a time when the whole of Australia was a network of trading posts. 7 From Arnhemland in the north to the tip of southern Australia, from the west coast to the beaches of Queensland, groups would come together for corroborees and would barter prized items with each other. It was partly an important way of getting good tools and useful items; but it was also a way of articulating social networks in (mostly) peaceful ways. If you were accustomed to trading with your neighbors every wet season, then that was when peace treaties could be maintained, and rivalries resolved. People might swap a boomerang (boomerangs didn’t come back in those days) for a spear or an axe for a grinding stone—with a corroboree ritual to celebrate the exchange. And ochre—really good ochre— was one of the most prized items of all.
    Wilga Mia in the Campbell Ranges of Western Australia is one of the most sacred ochre mines in the continent. In 1985, Nicolas Peterson and Ronald Lampert 8 described going there with some of the traditional owners from the Warlpiri tribe. They had to ask permission for entry—not only from the owners but also from the sacred beings who, it was believed, lived beneath its ancient chambers. “Don’t be unpleasant to us,” the men once prayed before they went in with their torches and metal axes, while on another occasion they cajoled the spirit of the mine, saying how they wanted only a small amount. Before the 1940s the ochre had been traded for spears with tribes to the south and for shields and boomerangs with those from the north. 9 And—at least in the 1980s—it was still being mined and traded, although where once it had been collected in bark dishes, by the end of the twentieth century it was placed in plastic buckets.
    Another famous deposit is in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. For possibly thousands of years Aboriginal expeditions headed south into the area from Lake Eyre. In Goods from Another Country , Isabel McBryde writes about Diyari men taking two months to travel the thousand-mile round trip to collect their red gold from the Bookartoo mine at a place called Parachilna. They used to return home with 20 kilos of ochre each, already formed into baked round cakes. These would be carried on their backs in bags made of possum or kangaroo skin, and on their heads they would have huge seed-grinding stones from a nearby stone quarry. There would be seventy or eighty men travelling together: it