X-Ray Painting and Bark Art

I was wondering how this would work to look at a culture's artwork and use it sort of like we use primary source documents to see what we could learn about that culture. I have never done anything like it before, and wasn't even sure how pedagogically sound it would be. But it seemed like a good idea when my daughter raised it as a suggestion for how to study the Aboriginal people of Australia, and I have been very satisfied with the results.

The last study we did was on what is termed "X-ray painting." Animals and people were painted on various surfaces in amazing detail, but seemingly from the inside out. We started by looking at all the photographs of fossilized fishes at Photovalet. It was a mini-science lesson as the children looked at the impressions these ancient fishes made on the rock. We then looked at this piece of art, painted on bark.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art gave us some information about how the artwork was created.

And Aboriginal Art Online gave us a nice history of bark art.

My children went outside and worked at peeling bark off of logs from our woodpile for their project. We had no idea about how to prepare the bark, but this is what we did:

1. Soaked in bleach and scrubbed the inside surface. (There was mold growing on some of it.)
2. Dried in oven at 200 degrees.
3. Got frustrated that it curled.
4. Re-soaked and laid it out on the counter.
5. Piled things on top of it to flatten it.
6. Put it back in the oven to dry at 200 degrees with a pizza stone on top of it.

You could probably skip steps two through four.

The children then each took their sample I printed off and went off to make their own bark art. I read the next story from Indigenous Australia while they worked. My younger two were more interested in the process.

Bug (2) painted away.

Bear (4) mostly just enjoyed mixing the paint.

And Mouse (8) made a fish and the leg of a dinosaur.

What did my daughter learn about the indigenous peoples of Australia?

1. They were very aware of their environment.

2. Their stories reflect the observation of the relationships between the animals around them.

3. They were very adept at using what was available to them to make beautiful pieces of art which lasted for centuries.

4. The desert sand art uses symbols which look very much like the tracks the various animals/activities make in the sand. The ability to track was probably very important. Many of these pictures also show good hunting grounds and watering holes, demonstrating the importance of this kind of knowledge.

5. The X-Ray painting shows attention to the internal features of the animals that were hunted.

Essentially, my daughter learned that the Aboriginals were hunters/gatherers with a highly developed culture. Their history (their story) was very important to them and preserved through stories and art.

homeschooling, Aborigines, Aboriginal art

Learning history through art

When we study history, we attempt to use primary sources whenever possible. The indigenous peoples of Australia, however, had no record-keeping system like we have today. In fact, they did not even have a written language. They communicated their history and their family relationships through a variety of art forms, including storytelling, rock painting, bark painting, sand painting and body painting. In order to get a glimpse into the lives of indigenous Australians, we decided to begin not by looking at the first impressions of arriving Englishmen, but by looking at their artwork.

Principle: Individuality

Leading Idea: Every culture has its own symbols and ways of sharing its heritage

Scripture: Gen 11:8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

For more on the foundations of art and the general viewpoint I teach from, check this entry.

The most interesting thing to me was the story of the man who first brought Aboriginal art into recognition. I cannot find the link anymore, but he began painting his work on canvas and it was well-received by everyone but the Aboriginals. They thought he was sharing too many of their secrets. Some of these paintings are not shared even with Aboriginal women, let alone outsiders if I remember correctly. He was sharply rebuked. He therefore covered his artwork with dots. This dot art became highly valued and is probably one of the most recognizable features of indigenous Australian art. But what we are paying top dollar to include in our collections is actually a cloaking device!

We perused the offerings at this gallery to get an idea of desert art (note the numbers at the bottom so that you can look at more). We then looked at the descriptions of some of the popular motifs. I printed off a copy of the symbols for each of my children and we went back to the art gallery to see how many symbols we recognized. What do you see in this work?


After identifying some of the symbols and talking about the artwork, we started our first project. To prepare for this, we covered the bottom of a coffee filter with glue and poured sand on top. This was to form a hard "ground" for the children to paint on. I would have used a paper plate, but we didn't have any. We allowed this to dry overnight on a sheet of plastic wrap to keep it from sticking to the bookshelf.

The children then took their hardened sand and painted their sample of Aboriginal art while I told them some more about the Dreamtime and Aboriginal art. Here is a nice site with more information and the stories I am sharing with my children. Right now, they are just listening to them as stories. When they are older, we will look at them more analytically. For example, I find it very interesting that one of the more important figures in the Dreamtime is Rainbow snake who made the waterning holes.

In this lesson you can also see a little of how I teach multiple age levels. All three children sat near me while we looked at the artwork. All three received a symbol sheet. All three painted. And all three listened to the story I told them. Each understood something on his or her own level. Here is what they produced:

My Picture, Crocodile
Bug, age two

Crocodiles in the River
Bear, age four


Snakes at the Watering Hole
Mouse, age eight

My daughter was able to reason the importance of food and water sources to the Aboriginals from studying their artwork. When you live in such a dry environment, it is important to know where water is likely to be and where the good hunting grounds are so they enter frequently into the artwork. She also saw a little of the importance of storytelling. Later on, I want to do some storytelling with her using these techniques. I'm not sure how to share that as a lesson. Maybe I'll see if I can figure out how to upload a video!

Tomorrow we will be looking at rock art, so stay tuned!

Photo credits: Janet Long Nakamarra, pictured above; Women's Ceremony, the posted example

homeschooling, lessons, principle approach

Coming up next...the Aboriginals

I just realized that it has been a week since we last updated this. We have been studying Australia's geography as we laid out in this entry. The topographical map is interesting. We had a harder time finding a map to copy from than I had anticipated, but finally settled for merging two maps we had found in books. She colored the Great Dividing Range brown (because they were mountains), colored in a couple of lakes, traced out the few major rivers, colored the rainforests green and most of Australia yellow since it is semi-arid.

Suddenly, it became obvious to my daughter just why most of the population is concentrated along the East Coast of Australia.

I have started looking to next week's focus which will be the Aboriginal people of Australia. I am having a difficult time determining just how I want to approach the topic. Just like in our own history, there are some difficult themes coming up. The main text I'm using at the moment is Among Cannibals by Carl Lumholz who spent four years among the Aboriginals in Queensland and wrote about his experiences back in 1889.

I won't be using this directly with my daughter, or if so only certain passages. There is significant author bias that she would need to be able to discern before I would give her a text like this. He makes several comments which are somewhat racist and I do not wish my daughter to determine that groups of people are of less value because of the color of their skin or other such determinations. At the same time, I believe this is the book I read which gives credence to the general philosophy that all cultures are equal.

That is a difficult and somewhat charged discussion to try to get into, and not really something I'm going to get into with an eight year old. Suffice it say that I do not think that the marriage customs of the aboriginals are "equal" to our own:

Near Herbert Vale I had the good fortune to be able to witness a marriage among the blacks. A camp of natives was just at the point of breaking up, when an old man suddenly approached a woman, seized her by the wrist of her left hand and shouted, Yongul ngipa!--that is, This one belongs to me (literally "one I"). She resisted with feet and hands, and cried, but he dragged her off, though she made resistance during the whole time and cried at the top of her voice. For a mile away we could hear her shrieks.

Nor am I about to condone cannibalism.

We are going to look at this in the light of scripture. I haven't read as much on how the aboriginals were treated by the British, but I know it wasn't pleasant. I viewed a re-enactment on a video in a museum in Melbourne that sickened me. Not even so much for what was done back in the 1800s but for what was done in the name of memorializing the event in the 20th century. This should provide a very nice opportunity to take a closer look at how the seeds of local self-government are planted. The British were somewhat appalled by what they saw in the Aboriginals and attempted to "civilize" them...or they would kill them.

Christianity, on the other hand, teaches that change comes from within. I am hoping to find at least some examples of missions evangelizing in this manner, but I'm guessing it will look much like our own history with a mixture of motives behind many of them. Christianity was widely accepted by the native people of Australia, and today approximately two thirds consider themselves Christians. I think this continues to be a relevant issue in Australia today as there has historically been a debate about how to best support Aboriginals (through assimilation or through supporting their native cultures on the various lands, I'm guessing something like our reservations). Of course, religion isn't a part of this debate, but how do you "assimilate" a culture?

These are some interesting topics to explore with older children, perhaps, but we will be taking a look at some of them, scaled down to the understanding of an eight year old.

Note: There is some debate about the term "Aboriginal." I'm not exactly one for political correctness, but I'm also not one for offending groups of people. It is a British term which was applied to the native peoples of Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea. There are a number of terms which the Aboriginal themselves prefer, many of them providing a sense of identity with their own unique communities.

Related Tags: homeschooling, Australia, Aborigine

Individuality and the Emu

For this lesson, we started with one of my children's favorite songs, Old Man Emu by John Williamson, a popular folk artist:
At the end, Williamson sings,

Well there is a moral to this ditty - Oom ba da little da da da
Thrush can sing but he ain't pretty - Oom ba da little da da
Duck can swim, but he can't sing, nor can the eagle on the wing
Emu can't fly, but I'm telling you, he can run the pants off a kangaroo.

My daughter reasoned that the moral of the song is that each animal has its own unique gifts. She recognized that this is related to God's principle of individuality in that we are each a unique creation in Him. We have different talents, strengths and weaknesses. Likewise, God gave each of the animals different means of protecting themselves, communicating and finding sustenance. The emu may not be able to fly, but he is an incredibly fast bird, topping speeds of 30 miles an hour.

In scripture, we find this principle applied directly to His church:

Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.--1 Corinthians 12:4-6

To learn more about the unique characteristics of the emu, my daughter read a brief informational text about emus. To record the information she learned, she made a wanted poster about the emu in Williamson's song. I got the template for the wanted poster at Education World. Scroll down to "Icebreakers" and one of the choices is "Wanted Poster." This will open in a Word document and you can modify the text to fit the questions you want your child to answer. I also gave each of my children a coloring sheet to color.


We will be studying more about the animals of Australia using simple nonfiction texts and this wanted poster, but I probably won't post on each one unless we find something truly unique. It is a fairly basic format that can be used with anything and is a nice precursor to the more formal research paper that she is not ready for, yet.

Australia, emu, homeschooling, home school

Our study: A Vision and an Outline

My educational philosophy states that I am educating my children for liberty. Thus liberty is a frequent underlying theme in all of our studies, and an important historic principle according to the biblical principle approach.

The Principle of Individuality, emphasizing uniqueness and diversity, has a natural connection to Australia. As an island continent, it remained separated from the "known" world for many centuries. There is great diversity of life found nowhere else on earth, interesting land forms and a unique culture. The Australia of today is influenced by all of these factors as well as its English heritage.

This English heritage is very interesting to look at in connection with thoughts on liberty. Australia's government is born out of some of the same traditions as our own with one marked difference: we were a nation of religious dissidents while they were a nation of convicts. There is a long period in Australia's history that is wrought with violence, class struggle and yearnings for a degree of liberty from British rule which represented oppression much more vividly than it did here. I am reminded of an Australian folk song highlighting this aspect of its history:

You beat your drum
You drink your rum
You threaten' me with hangin'

Such was the life of a convict living in a penal colony. Being a penal colony, however, one thing was noticeably absent from Australia: education. While America quickly became one of the most literate nations of the world given its people's desire to educate children in the scriptures, little attention was given at all to the education of Australians.

After all, they were only convicts.

We will continue to share our studies more or less in the same format as we have been. We will try to provide some interesting information, thoughts from our discussion and plenty of links so you can learn more. The following is an outline of what we roughly have planned for the summer. This will get extended as we progress, and I will continue to update the links to individual posts regularly (although not necessarily after every posting). We will be studying three days per week, and will generally look at some children's literature on the fourth day. I may include some thoughts and reflections on other days.

Alongside the documents, we will also be utilizing a number of Australian folk songs, well-known poems, and other products of Australian culture to illustrate historic principles and to provide a glimpse of what Australians think of their own history.

Feel free to ask any questions or provide any resources you know of. We certainly are not experts!

Unfortunately, I don't know how to make a simple outline look nice in this thing, so here is my best alternative:

I. Introduction
Studying History: scriptural premise, research practice
Australian Geography: procedure

II. Before the colonists
The People
The Landscape

III. Rumors of a Southland
Early tales of "australis incognito"
The first explorers: Captain James Cook

IV. Australia as a penal colony

V. Toward liberty (significant events shaping the history and character of Australia)

Australian Geography

Today's lesson was just a continuation from yesterday. We are still working on the idea of research and "searching out the land" as it applies to Australia. The focus, however, was on geography. To set the mood, we listened to this little spin off of a famous Johnny Cash song by George Mack. FYI: "humping my bluey" means about the same as "waltzing Matilda" or "toting my pack" as Johnny Cash begins. It refers to wandering and hitchhiking.



We began our map study which is probably going to be the most in depth map study we have ever done. We are beginning with a basic topographical map. You can make one by printing off a blackline master of Australia, or by tracing the outline of a map out of an atlas. We will then trace the outlines onto a transparency and label the map. A second transparency will show the major resources of Australia so that when we lay them all on top of each other, we will get a good idea about the relationships between the environment and land usage.

As we come across places during our study, we will add them to the appropriate map.

The Map Standard (summary from the Noah Plan History and Geography Curriculum Guide):

1. Labeling with block letters.
2. Blue caterpillar lines for all shore lines.
3. Green pencil for plains.
4. Brown pencil for mountains.
5. Yellow pencil for deserts.
6. Ice masses left white.
7. Bordering continents, countries, states colored with contrasting colors. Outline only to leave room for labels.

This is the same procedure we use every time we study a place, whether it is for history, literature or some other subject when relevant.

Researching general information

Continuing yesterday's idea of research, we looked at another bible verse where a little research proved important. We read Numbers 13 and talked about why people were sent into Canaan, and why they were scared. We copied a portion of verse 2 since that related directly to our lesson for today:

Send thou men, that they may search the land of Ca'naan, . . .
Numbers 13:2

We certainly are not researching information about Australia for a military campaign. The Christian Church is not commanded to take territory or conquer in this way. We are to advance the Kingdom, however, through discipleship and ministry outreach efforts. Like the Israelites, missionaries begin by learning more about the people they will be serving. Sometimes they may become fearful. Other times, they may choose to depend on God like Joshua. As we minister to the nations, however, we need to remember that the goal is to preach Christ, not American Christianity. That is why it is vitally important to know about the areas we are trying to reach and the needs of their communities.

To learn a little about how to research, I typed up several general questions. Today at the library, my daughter will look for some books that she thinks might answer the questions. We will read more about Australia and learn a little about the country today before delving into its history. From her knowledge of books, she has been able to determine that we will need to look at nonfiction books whose purpose is to inform.

Specifically, we will be using the books' text structure to try to find information quickly. Here they are:

1. How many people live in Australia?
2. How big is Australia?
3. Who is the prime minister of Australia?
4. What is the national capital of Australia?
5. What is Australia's national anthem?
6. How many aboriginals live in Australia?
7. What sports are played in Australia?
8. What form of government does Australia have?

The internet could also be used to find this information quickly. However, we are learning about researching in the library.

This short video gives some general information about Australia. The segment on Melbourne is very short, but I have been to all the places mentioned in it!



homeschooling, Australia, history, home school