Personal Finance: Sweet dreams of the Aborigines dreams

Interest in Aboriginal art is growing, although many still worry about its provenance. In fact, as John Windsor explains, it is strictly regulated.

Art curator Georgina Martin, aged 26, rode a wild steer for 13 seconds at the Darwin rodeo in Australia, three seconds longer than prize time. But she failed to carry off any artworks by the Kunwinjku Aborigines during her four-week tour this summer of their rocky homeland, Oenpelli, in Arnhem Land, on the north coast.

She had no ready cash and the region's government-appointed art adviser seemed to have other ideas about who should get the distinctive ochre paintings on fibrous paper depicting ancestral spirits and animals of the immemorial Aboriginal Dreamtime.

Instead, Ms Martin has filled the October Gallery in Old Gloucester Street, Bloomsbury, with 39 paintings and carvings supplied by this century's most celebrated promoter of Aboriginal art, Dorothy Bennett, the federal Aboriginal art valuer. Ms Martin worked in her art gallery in Darwin three years ago.

Now aged 83, Mrs Bennett first encountered Aboriginal art - bark paintings - when she was stenographer to an orthopaedic medical expedition that toured Arnhem annually between 1954 and 1960.

It is as well that the art for sale in the October Gallery's exhibition, Keepers of the Mimi Spirit (the Mimi are stick-thin sprites who inhabit Dreamtime) has passed through her experienced hands. After all, what is Aboriginal art?

For most Brits, contemporary Aboriginal paintings and wood carvings are still an enigma. Although dating back 40,000 years, Aboriginal art is the last great tradition of art to be appreciated by the world.

In Melbourne in June, Sotheby's third annual sale of Important Aboriginal Art - including 92 pieces gathered by Mrs Bennett for an American collector - sold 98 per cent by value and established a new world record price of $206,000 (pounds 90,640), for a water dreaming painting of 1972. Whereas in London last week, a particularly bubbly opening at the October Gallery yielded only a smattering of red dots.

The irony is that the Dreamtime paintings by the Kunwinjku of Oenpelli are probably the world's most most rigidly regulated art. The dreaming stories, about ancestral beings who are custodians of the natural law, ritual and correct behaviour in a particular place, can be painted only by sons who have been indoctrinated into them at initiations conducted by their fathers.

"Age grading" initiations begin at the age of five, the dreaming stories are first heard at 18 and painting them is forbidden until the age 25. Initiates are looked up to and old men who have shirked initiation are regarded as still young, lacking in wisdom.

With the Aborigines' consent, all that can be revealed has been revealed in a book, Kunwinjku Art From Injalak 1991- 1992 (Museum Art International, 1994). It is an illustrated catalogue of the latest of five collections commissioned from artists of the highest stature in the region.

The October Gallery has for sale paintings by sons whose fathers' work appears in the book. The ancestral chain of the age-grading system provides their provenance - the copying of another artist's dreamings by a non- initiate is a major transgression. Some Aboriginal peoples permit men without initiated descendants to initiate close relatives or non-related young men of stature. But not the Kunwinjku. The dreamings of an artist without initiate-heirs die with him. There has been some backsliding among minor artist families - but Mrs Bennett has a little list .

As well as paintings by Wesley Nganjmirra, nephew of the famous Bobby, there is a painting by one of Wesley's four sons, Luke, of a Mimi spirit and a wallaby (pounds 750). The wallaby is the Mimis' sacred pet. Hunt them and the Mimis will hunt you and send you mad.

Keepers of the Mimi Spirit, to 4 October at the October Gallery, 24, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1 (0171-242 7367).