Art: RAINY-DAY PICTURES

THE swarthy aborigines of Australia are an odd, intelligent lot whose dress (occasional paint and feathers) affords maximum ornamentation with minimum constriction, whose arsenal includes the fabled boomerang and whose mythology is more complicated than Carl Jung? On Sale in the U.S. last week was a handsome book published by the New York Graphic Society and UNESCO (Australia-Aboriginal Paintings; $15) which showed that aboriginal art, too, has surprising qualities.

During Austrailia’s Stone Age, which Captain Cook doomed in 1770, the aborigines painted on cliffs and in caves. Today their descendants explain that ancient rock pictures of hunting and dancing stick men, in northern Australia, were done by Mimis. (“Mimis” are so thin they can hunt only in still weather, and so shy they have never been seen.) For the haloed, mouthless figures painted in caves in the Kimberley district, they have a different explanation: Wondjina (gentle fertility gods) first made them by casting shadows on the rock. Before each rainy season, the aborigines retouch the divine shadows with red and yellow ocher and pipe-clay white. It is sure to bring rain.

When the rains come the aborigines retire into their bark huts, and while away the wet by painting on bark. The pictures (opposite) may look abstract, but aboriginal art is never “nonobjective” in the modern sense: to paint without painting something would strike an aborigine as uncivlized. His subject matter ranges from the constellations through crabs and kangaroos to “Night People,” i.e. ghosts

The paintings serve a multitude of purposes: some are simply decoration, others help educate the children and a tew are used in magic rites. Ants and the damp soon destroy them all. The works reproduced in UNESCO’s book were new when collected on a 1948 expedition, are probably the most ancient bark paintings remaining in existence