ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN — DOT PAINTING SONGLINE

VISUAL STYLE: Western Desert Aboriginal dot painting — the visual language of country, songline, and dreaming. Maps that are also stories. Patterns that encode knowledge of land and sky accumulated across millennia.

COLOUR PALETTE: Earth and sky — ochre red, desert sand, deep brown, white, black. Occasional blue-green for water. The colours of the Western Desert — pigments from the land itself.

DOT WORK: Every surface built from individual dots — placed with deliberate intention, not random fill. Dots create pattern that simultaneously describes terrain from above and encodes narrative.

CONCENTRIC CIRCLES: The primary compositional element — concentric circles indicate significant sites. Lines connecting circles are paths across country and paths of stories.

COMPOSITION: Read as aerial view and as narrative map simultaneously. The viewer is above the country and inside the story at the same time.

U-SHAPES: Human figures indicated by the U-shape impression a seated person makes in sand. Groups of U-shapes indicate gatherings.

No Western perspective. No representational figure. A visual system that encodes both place and story in every mark.