Initiation by Derek Kosbab, 2009

I was reading Thomas Keneally’s Volume 1 Australians: Origins to Eureka. Early in the 600+ page book he describes Captain Arthur Phillip meeting the indigenous Australians who lived in the Botany Bay area. Keneally writes that the coastal Aboriginals removed the eye tooth from young men at initiation ‘an elder sitting on the initiate’s shoulder and hammering away with a stone pounder and chisel.’

I read this passage during the day and during that night I awoke from my sleep with a vivid picture in my mind of the event described above. I crept quietly out of bed, went into the study, put a canvas on the easel, drew first in charcoal a sort of outline, then, immediately painted in the sky. Because acrylic paint dries rapidly I was able to start sketching with paint the two figures and before long I had completed the painting and went back to bed.

It was only when I looked at the painting in the morning that I realised that I had put the initiate where the elder should have been, and vice versa. But, I haven’t bothered to alter the picture that shows the initiate—eye tooth missing and blood dripping onto the ground—sitting on the shoulders of an elder. I particularly like how I have captured the typical Australian blue sky, with the horizon filled with red dust.

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Acrylic on canvas: 760mm x 760mm