Oceania

Australia Color Palette

Uluru ochre, eucalyptus blue-green, and Great Barrier Reef coral — earth at one extreme, sea at the other.

The Australian palette is as widely separated as the continent itself: the saturated Uluru ochre + Pilbara red of the Outback against the cool eucalyptus blue-green of the bushland and the high-key coral and turquoise of the Great Barrier Reef. Indigenous Australian art, with its dot-painting tradition rooted in iron-oxide ochres, is the country's longest continuous color tradition (40,000+ years). The supporting palette adds the bleached cream of summer beach sand, the warm pink of summer-evening light over Perth and Sydney, and the deep navy of the southern night sky.