The family has been at the center of the history of Latin America since Europeans first confronted the region`s indigenous peoples. Family firms, characteristics of business organization in colonial Latin America, thrived throughout the 19th century because they responded dynamically to changes in the direction and character of the economy. Family affiliation afforded a primary means of mobilizing capital, training reliable personnel, expanding and diversifying the business, and guaranteeing its long-term success. Definition of family membership was flexible, and marriage often was used to recruit and hold new talent. A patriarch or matriarch typically directed the family and its investments. Businessmen sought diversification as soon as financially possible and, ideally, integrated their holdings into complimentary unit.
fantasy of paradise as envisioned by 17th and 18th century artists, has never been stronger.
The Dreamtime, in contrast to other Pacific religions, is a spiritual belief system based on artwork, telling the history of the Aboriginal history, so has been affected differently by colonisation. The use of art as a medium to pass information from one generation to another has created the oldest continuous artwork tradition anywhere in the world, the oldest examples dating to over 40,000 years ago. Aboriginal artwork often represents animals, scenes from the Dreamtime, or aerial views of landscapes, like a map, in dot form. As Aboriginal communities were driven further from the areas they had traditionally inhabited, they were also separated from their masterpieces, and their cultural expression. The Aboriginal people went into self-exile in the central Australian desert, and by 1900 had largely been written out of the story of modern Australia, and certainly out of its art. In the 20th century this would begin to change. The artwork of Albert Namajira, when it was shown in art galleries in large Australian cities, captivated the public. Namatjira had been born in Hermannsburg, a tiny Aboriginal settlement 80 miles from Alice Springs, centred around a Lutheran settlement. Namajira taught himself to paint, producing watercolours of the landscape of the highest quality, some of which are now in the National Gallery of Australia. In 1957, Namatjira became the first Aboriginal person to be granted full Australian citizenship, and as such was entitled to buy alcohol. Naturally, he shared this with his friends and family, for which he was charged with supplying alcohol to indigenous Australians in 1958, and died within a few months of completing his punishment of hard labour. (2) Namatjira’s story epitomises the tragedy of the problems faced by the Aboriginal population as a whole, a race of people persecuted by foreigners in their own country.
Perhaps the best example of Aboriginal art is a piece produced by 43 Aboriginal artists from Arnhemland, who created their own memorial to mark the bicentenary of the arrival of the First Fleet in 1988. The piece consists of 200 intricately carved hollow log coffins, one to represent each year of European settlement. They are monuments to the hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal people who have died since 1788 at the hands of European colonisers.
Aboriginal people remain marginalised politically, socially, and economically, but not artistically. Traditional dot paintings are now some of the most prized art in Australia, with Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s painting ‘Warlugulong’ selling for a record $2.4 million at Sotheby’s in 2007 (14).
