Vintage Aboriginal-Inspired Australian Art Dish 🥃 Hand-Painted Kangaroos Dot Painting Pottery

Who Painted These Kangaroos? 🦘 Three Kangaroos on a Painted Sun

Size: about 4" across ~ just as pictured: light wear to the paint, the colors still bright.

I love this little dish. Someone sat down with a fine brush and a lot of patience and built the whole scene out of dots: a glowing orange disc for a sun, a small yellow sun up top with a couple of black birds winging across it, and a run of black grass strokes along the bottom. Across that warm ground leap three kangaroos, painted in the "X-ray" manner — solid dark bodies with pale cross-hatched markings worked over the chest and belly, the old way of showing the life inside an animal rather than just its outline. A cobalt-blue band circles the scene in tidy rows of white dots, and the black rim carries clusters of ochre-yellow dots gathered into little dotted sunbursts. Turn it over and the underside is a plain, calm cobalt blue with a proper foot ring — no signature, no stamp, nothing. It's unsigned, and it's hand-painted in the Aboriginal-inspired style.

🎨 Two Old Traditions, Borrowed With Real Skill

The dotting on this dish traces back to Papunya, a community in Australia's Northern Territory. In the early 1970s, Geoffrey Bardon, a schoolteacher posted there, encouraged the schoolchildren to paint a mural, and when the elders saw it they painted their own - the Honey Ant Dreaming — designs that had lived for generations in sand and on skin, now up on a wall. That became the Papunya Tula movement, and between 1973 and 1975 the painters started "dotting and over-dotting" their work, partly to cover the sacred parts of what they were showing. That habit of dotting is where this dish's whole border comes from. One of the men who painted that Honey Ant mural on the school wall, Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, went all the way to New York in 1988 for the opening of the Dreamings show at the Asia Society — the exhibition that brought Aboriginal painting to the international art world — and made a sand painting there as part of it with Michael Nelson Jagamarra. These days the dots turn up on everything from gallery canvases to vases, T-shirts and fridge magnets, and on little painted dishes like this one.

The kangaroos borrow the second tradition: "X-ray" painting, which shows an animal's skeleton and organs right through its skin. It's one of the oldest art styles anywhere — the earliest X-ray paintings, in the rock art of western Arnhem Land, have been dated to at least five or six thousand years old. And the tradition behind it goes back further still. Aboriginal art is the oldest unbroken art tradition in the world, and I love that the oldest rock painting anyone has dated in Australia is a kangaroo — a two-meter roo on the ceiling of a rock shelter above the Drysdale River in the Kimberley, on Balanggarra Country, dated to around 17,300 years ago from the mud wasp nests built underneath and on top of the paint. Whoever painted this little dish was working in the shadow of both of those traditions, sacred dotting and ancient X-ray animals alike, even on a small souvenir piece like this one.

Kangaroos were always going to be the stars of a piece like this. The kangaroo went onto Australia's coat of arms in 1908, holding up the shield with the emu, and the story goes the two were picked because neither one can easily walk backwards, so the country would only ever move forward. From 1938 until the last one was struck in 1964, a kangaroo hopped across the back of the Australian penny, and in 1944 Qantas borrowed that penny kangaroo and painted it under the cockpit of its first Liberator for its Kangaroo Service across the Indian Ocean — the kangaroo has flown with the airline ever since. And since 1984 a whole mob of five of them, Stuart Devlin's design, has been on the one-dollar coin.

✅ One of One

This dish is a one-of-one — the piece in the photos is the exact one that ships. No two hand-painted dishes like this ever come out quite the same, and this is the only one I have.