For Jimmy Donegan, who won first prize at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Art Awards earlier this month, it was a summer of important firsts. Although he has painted for his whole life, the 70-year-old had never entered a competition before this one, the most prestigious of Australia’s awards for indigenous art. When he left his remote desert home to travel to Darwin and accept his prize, it was the first time he had ever seen the ocean. Donegan related to the Australian Associated Press that the large painting — whose vibrant hues and twisting lines call to mind a colorful, mysterious maze — was based on ancestral stories with spiritual significance.

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While Donegan’s painting recalls the deep traditional roots of indigenous art and the isolated locales of its practitioners, recent developments reveal that this artistic field is far from homogeneous. This year, a category for digital media was introduced into the competition that Donegan entered, reflecting experiments that a younger generation of indigenous artists are undertaking. Along the same lines, the new Web site Storylines, a joint project of the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online and the University of New South Wales, is trying to firmly place indigenous artists within the category of contemporary arts. While they are usually associated with Australia’s sparsely settled northern and central regions, Storylines shows that indigenous artists have a real presence in urban areas.

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New developments on the policy front could also help indigenous artists. After discovering frequent exploitation of this group in 2007, the Australian government has established a voluntary Indigenous Australian Art Commercial Code of Conduct. In a press release this summer, the government expressed its hope that galleries and dealers would sign the code and announced 600,000 Australian dollars ($532,000) in funding to assist in its implementation. In other governmental activity, the Australian Embassy in Israel has also been supportive, sponsoring a show of indigenous artists in Jerusalem and Jaffa that opened this month.

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All this attention comes as no surprise, considering the apparently large amount of creative activity among indigenous peoples in Australia. The Storylines Web site contains approximately 600 artist biographies and analyzes data regarding their age, gender, location, and other features. Supporting the researchers’ focus on urban areas, studies show that Sydney has the largest concentration of indigenous artists, with 79 artists having called it home at one time or another. Reflecting the great diversity of Australian indigenous peoples, the 81 artists in the Queensland region cited a total of 59 different languages as part of their heritage. In terms of training, it may come as a surprise that only a minority of indigenous artists were self-taught or trained by family, while 72 percent have received post-secondary education (a number far ahead of the general indigenous population and even significantly surpassing the general Australian population).

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In addition to helping researchers and the art community understand indigenous artists and their practice better, the Storylines team hopes that the study will lead to greater recognition and more funding opportunities for these creative practitioners. Indigenous artists are represented in Australian museums and galleries, but the same high-profile group of about 25 names usually receives the vast majority of attention. However, that is a phenomenon, that contemporary artists of all stripes may find all too familiar.