ABSTRACT
In the various languages spoken across Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia there is no separate term for 'art' as we know it. Paintings on rock or bark, carved wooden sculptures, woven mats and baskets, decorated musical instruments, and other forms of creative expression are not divorced from their cultural or natural environments. They are very much extensions of their environment and are related to the many facets of human experience encountered and embellished by their creators. Art objects, therefore, not only record events or reflect the aesthetic preferences of the people that produced them but also express aspects of economics, philosophy, social relations, cosmology, and world-view. Art may even be regarded as a branch of metaphysics in the sense that it serves to explain aspects of being in both the past and the present of traditional Arnhem Landers, and acts as a link between these two temporal states.
