Abstract
It has been argued that laundry blue (whitener) was introduced into western Arnhem Land in the second half of the 1920s by missionaries, where it was used by Aboriginal people in rock art and on a variety of objects. Recent examination of museum collections acquired from the Northern Territory Native Industrial Mission at Kapalga in today’s Kakadu National Park, shows that the introduction of laundry blue into local Aboriginal artistic practices was earlier, around 1900. We discuss two examples of objects painted with laundry blue, a fibre basket and a bark belt, as well as broader ethnographic evidence relating to the significance of the color blue. We argue that the use of laundry blue is not only the result of access to an exotic new color but also has links to existing cultural beliefs.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Australian Museum and, in particular, Rebecca Fisher, Sharni Jones and Patricia Egan for providing access to the Kaparlgoo collections and facilitating our research visit. We are also grateful to Daryl Wesley and Laura Rademaker for discussions relating to laundry blue in western Arnhem Land and to Lindy Allen for sharing her knowledge of blue pigment in the Baldwin Spencer/Paddy Cahill collection at Museums Victoria. We would also like to thank Bill Lennox for his guidance and for providing photographs. Thanks to Murray Garde and Nicholas Evans for their advice on Aboriginal language and colour words. Special thanks to Philip Jones of the South Australian Museum for his feedback on early drafts of this paper. This research was undertaken as part of a research agreement with Parks Australia and we appreciate the ongoing support of Jeffrey Lee, Gabrielle O’Loughlin and Kadeem May. This research was funded by the Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship (FL160100123) to PSCT and Griffith University. JG thanks Rock Art Australia for their support.
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Miller, E., May, S.K., Goldhahn, J. et al. Kaparlgoo Blue: On the Adoption of Laundry Blue Pigment into the Visual Culture of Western Arnhem Land, Australia. Int J Histor Archaeol 26, 316–337 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-021-00603-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-021-00603-w