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people “Red Indians” because of the way they painted themselves with ochre (as a shield against evil, symbolizing the good elements of the world, 3 or as a protection against the cold in winter and insects in summer 4 ), while in Swaziland’s Bomvu Ridge (Bomvu means “red” in Zulu), archaeologists have discovered mines that were used at least forty thousand years ago to excavate red and yellow pigments for body painting. 5 The word “ochre” comes from the Greek meaning “pale yellow,” but somewhere along the way the word shifted to suggest something more robust—something redder or browner or earthier. Now it can be used loosely to refer to almost any natural earthy pigment, although it most accurately describes earth that contains a measure of hematite, or iron ore.
    There are big ochre mines in the Luberon in southern France and even more famous deposits in Siena in Tuscany: I like to think of my little stub of paint being brought from that area by Neolithic merchants, busily trading paint-stones for furs from the mountains. Cennino Cennini wrote of finding ochre in Tuscany when he was a boy walking with his father. “And upon reaching a little valley, a very wild steep place, scraping the steep with a spade, I beheld seams of many kinds of color,” he wrote. He found yellow, red, blue and white earth, “and these colors showed up in this earth just the way a wrinkle shows in the face of a man or a woman.”
    I knew there would be stories to be uncovered in many ochre places—from Siena to Newfoundland to Japan. But for my travels in search of this first colored paint I wanted to go to Australia—because there I would find the longest continuous painting tradition in the world. If I had been charmed by my five-thousand-year-old ochre, how much more charmed would I be in Australia where cave painters used this paint more than forty thousand years ago? But I also knew that in the very center of Australia I would find the story of how that ancient painting tradition was transformed to become one of the most exciting new art movements in recent years.
    Before I left for Australia I called an anthropologist friend in Sydney, who has worked with Aboriginal communities for many years. At the end of our phone conversation I looked at the notes I had scribbled. Here they are:
It’ll take time. Lots.
Ochre is still traded, even now.
Red is Men’s Business. Be careful.
    I had absentmindedly underlined the last point several times. It seemed that the most common paint on earth was also sometimes the most secret. Finding out about ochre was going to be a little more complicated than I had thought.
    SYDNEY
    Hetty Perkins, one of the Aboriginal curators at the Gallery of New South Wales, described the secrecy of indigenous traditions most vividly, as we drank coffee in the gallery garden after the opening of a major retrospective of Aboriginal art that she had organized. 6 “This is a blanket,” she said, putting her hand on a piece of white paper in my notebook, “and this is Australia,” she continued, touching the wooden table. “You lift the paper, and it’s all underneath . . . Many paintings are like the blanket . . . we don’t understand the full extent of the meanings, but we know that they mean country.” I was intrigued to know whether she had peeked underneath—at the table, so to speak. “It’s not my privilege,” she said. “That’s why I’m careful. It’s not my place to ask anyone what anything means. That will come later on.”
    So, effectively—I summarized for myself that evening—I was going to look for a pigment that in one of its incarnations I wasn’t allowed to see, and which was used to paint secrets I wasn’t allowed to know. And I respected that secrecy. But what then, under those rather rigorous conditions, would I find in the north and then the center of Australia to help me understand the appeal of ochre?
    DARWIN
    What I discovered was ochre itself. I found it