(Place of Ochre) [26 56 S, 117 42 12 E] was one of the most preeminent ochre mines on the continent. First used already some 40,000 years ago, it has been estimated that forty thousand tons of material were excavated over the millennia.vii For thousands of years aboriginal tribes would send out expeditions of people who would walk for two months in some cases to make the thousand‐mile round trip to collect this ochre. They would return loaded down with up to twenty kilos of ochre per person in possum or kangaroo skin bags. Today, if you want to collect any you still have to ask permission from the aboriginal owners and also from the sacred beings who live beneath its ancient chambers.
Fig4
Painting the body with the magic of the earth was above all a way in which a person became linked to the creative forces that shaped the world.viii It was not as we moderns might call it “ornamentation.” Among the Andaman Islanders [11 33 N, 92 14 E], who like the !Kung are the oldest still surviving First Society people in the world, clay‐based paints are perceived as having the quality known as kamakulehlekwe (efficacy) in that they bind and confine smells to its source of emission. Smell? What does that have to do with colour? The spirits of the ancestors do not see, but smell. Red and yellow are particularly important as they make the body hot and induce “smell,” thus making the human recognizable to the spirits who can perceive these “smells.”ix In other words, body paint is not just a visual cue, but conceptually and primarily part of an olfactory‐based system of exchange between the world of the living and the world of the spirits. To better understand the Andaman Islander’s understanding of colour, let me create an analogy. A radar machine sends out waves that produce a dot on the screen when an object is encountered. The spirit world of the ancients is much like that radar machine, searching for contact with the human world. The spirits will want to make