Wherever you find early civilisation, you will find ochre. It’s the oxide of the Earth’s most abundant element, iron, and, in its various forms, it can create different pigments. Aboriginal Australians have used yellow ochre for at least 40,000 years, although red ochre is the most widely used, especially among the indigenous people of the land that Christopher Columbus mistakenly identified in 1492 as the “East Indies”.
Tribes there used it to paint their bodies red, symbolic of power, earth, blood, and passion. It was this practice that led European settlers to start referring to those people as “Red Indians” and that was a name that persisted until the mid-to-late twentieth century, when it began to be rightly and widely recognised as a racial epithet.
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