Better Protected: A cropped image of Wunubi Spring, the first artwork protected by the chemical fingerprint. It was painted by West Australian Aborigine artist Freddie Timms.
Credit: Freddie Timms
Anthropologist John Stanton, Director of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology, Perth, which is trialling the technique on some of their collection, said the researchers' approach represented a "well-structured strategy" that used a number of different technologies to address art works at different stages.
Stanton said Indigenous artworks regularly fetched over A$500,000 and some were considered so valuable that they were simply moved from safe to safe within museums and never exhibited.
"Artists are increasingly concerned about interference [with] or misrepresentation of their works," he added.
Stanton said the technology could also be used to ensure that art work loaned to other museums wasn't interfered with or swapped with a forgery.
