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

must have been an impressive sight.
    Then in 1860 the white farmers arrived, along with their sheep and their land registrations—and a series of skirmishes began. To the administrators in Adelaide these were known as the ochre wars, although the origins of the conflict had more to do with what happened on the way to and from the sacred mine than about what was found in it. The Aboriginals were not remotely interested in European notions of land ownership but they were interested in this new, bleating bush tucker. And when they made their yearly expeditions to Bookartoo they took what meat they needed for their journey. The white communities were quick in their reprisals (on the “hanging for a sheep or a lamb” theory), and these were followed by counterreprisals from the Aboriginals. A nineteenth-century settler called Robert Bruce, quoted by Philip Jones of the South Australian Museum in a paper written in 1983, 10 wrote that “a solitary shepherd would have been about as safe [in the Flinders] as an unpopular land agent in Tiperary [sic] during the good ould toimes.”
    In November 1863 the ochre wars became an ochre massacre. Jones noted that, more than a century later, the Aboriginal people in the local area still knew the precise place where scores of Aboriginals were killed by the angry settlers. It is near Beltana, about 540 kilometers north of Adelaide. Throughout the 1860s there was terrible violence from both sides and eventually someone in the South Australian administration suggested a solution. If they couldn’t stop the men going to the mountain, perhaps they could bring the mountain to the men. How about moving the mine? he said, arguing that the black fellas wouldn’t know the difference. And unbelievably, in 1874, this is effectively what the settlers did. But they moved the wrong mine.
    The decision-makers in Adelaide couldn’t persuade any transport company to take the red rocks all the way from Parachilna (it was an almost impossible route for bullock carts then), so instead they removed four tons of ochre from a traditional mine owned by the Kaura people by the coast, and organized for it to be carted up to Lake Eyre—it took weeks, but the roads were at least negotiable. Once they reached their destination, they persuaded the German missionaries to distribute it, in the hope that the resulting glut in supply would mean the ochre collectors would find other things to do.
    It was a wasted effort. All the Kaura red ochre in the world couldn’t dissuade the men of Lake Eyre from making their annual expedition—for three reasons. First it was a kind of pilgrimage. You can probably buy Lourdes water in London, but part of its appeal is the transformation that occurs when you make the journey yourself. The Aborigines had built elaborate ceremonies around collecting the red ochre and bringing it back. Trotting over to the mission to collect a little bag of free rocks rather missed the point. Stories can only be told by being told, and journeys can only be made by being travelled.
    Second, ochre was essential for bartering. Trading happens when one item is seen to be almost equal in value to another. What value did free paint have? It wouldn’t have bought very many precious pearl shells from the Kimberley coast, nor would it have bought much of the pituri tobacco the Diyari people were so keen to buy from other tribes. The recipe for making pituri leaves into a super-narcotic was a secret, kept only by the elders of certain tribes, so swapping ochre for pituri was swapping a secret for a secret and therefore appropriate. If the Lake Eyre tribes were denied sacred ochre then it would mean they were not able to play their part in the complex trading network that Aboriginal tribes depended on.
    Third, the ochre was used for painting ritual designs, and the Kaura red simply wasn’t either good enough or sacred enough: it did not contain the hint of mercury that made the Bookartoo paint so special. In