Aboriginal rock art

Australian Aboriginal rock art is world famous. Australia has one of the oldest and largest open-air rock art sites in the world (on the Burrup Peninsula), and Aboriginal rock art sites can be found almost everywhere in rural, remote and even urban environments.

How were Aboriginal rock engravings created?

Aboriginal rock engravings were cut into sandstone which geologically is a soft sedimentary rock. Aboriginal people first pegged holes along the outline of the figure which they then connected in a second step.

Aboriginal rock art is a 'place'

For non-Indigenous people it is easy to view rock art as an individual piece of art. We admire the beauty and intricacy of it, then walk on to the next piece, just like in a museum.

Most Aboriginal art sites were not intended that way. They form an interconnected grid of sites, or places, which are all part of an overall story which is more than its parts.

A local rock art site might tell a particular creation story which is connected to another rock art site which might be a few hundred metres away. Some sites are a long distance apart yet still connected through the Dreaming stories they tell.

When energy giant Woodside Petroleum moved 170 ancient rock engravings to build a natural gas production plant on the Burrup Peninsula the company received 'intense criticism' from archaeologists. Moving the Aboriginal rock art would destroy their spatial arrangement, a clue to their interpretation: "Where carvings sit in the landscape is vital to understanding how people themselves iteracted with the environment," says archaeologist Ken Mulvaney [3].

You've got to think of [Aboriginal rock art] as the Aboriginal people think of it - as a whole. They see it as a place, they don't see it as individual rock art.—Sue Smalldon, archaeologist [2]

Carvings can tell you many stories. They can tell you what food is in that area, and what you can eat in that land. —Peter Stevens, Kurrama tribe, Western Australia [12]

Process to identify an Aboriginal rock art site

The location of many Aboriginal rock art sites has been lost over time. It needs the knowlege of old stories, traditional owners, elders and many volunteers to find them again.

Once an art site has been found one needs to identify what the artwork is about. The rock art is first photographed and the researcher makes themselves familiar with the area by walking around. They then talk to Aboriginal elders in that area, but also in other places. Sometimes stories are about the same ancestral beings, and Aboriginal people of Central Australia might be able to identify creator beings found on the east coast [1].

Once the individual items of a site are identified it is important to get confirmation. With an understanding of each element, and the background of Australia-wide stories and history, it is then possible to map out the story that belongs to the art site one examines.

The process of identification of an Aboriginal rock art site is tedious and costs a lot of energy (and a significant amount of money). Dedicated archaeologists are able to identify about one site every 10 years [1].

Threats to Australia's rock art

During their spiritual cycle Aboriginal people periodically regrooved their rock engravings which ensured that they survived the thousands of years this rock art is known to be old.

Today regrooving is very rare since in many cases the traditional owners of the rock engravings have passed away and no-one has the authority to renew them.

Pollution

As a consequence Aboriginal rock art is exposed to environmental pollution. The groove depth decreased over the last decades, an effect which is accelerated by the increasing number of cars in Australia. While early explorers in the 1880s measured Indigenous rock engravings to be around one inch (25.4 mm) deep, this figure dropped to 16mm in the 1950s, 8 to 10mm in the 1990s and around 5mm in 2008 [1].

Aboriginal rock engravings lose about half a grain of rock per year. Even if an engraving is not directly exposed to rain, dew and fog settles on the rock and dissolves the 'glue' that holds together the grains.

While in traditional times it was customary to repair and renew art work, National Parks today don't allow Aboriginal people to do this, even though there are many people who could do the work [15].

In a few decades you will not be able to point out rock engravings you can still see today.

The only rock art, the only petroglyphs that you are going to see 100 years from now are those very, very deeply carved. And they of course are a small minority. —Robert Bednarik, epistemologist, in 2008 [2]

Desacration

Some non-Indigenous people tried to preserve Aboriginal rock art in painting the grooves with white paint (see image below). This act compares to desacration because rock engravings usually mark spiritual sites of great significance to Aboriginal people. When an engraving near Bondi Beach in Sydney was regrooved in 1967 the Aboriginal community was divided as to whether this was a rightful act or not.

Intentional destruction

Aboriginal sites are allowed to be 'disturbed' or destroyed by state governments. Between 2005 and 2009 the NSW government approved 541 permits to destroy or disturb Aboriginal heritage sites [5]. Not a single application to do so was rejected in the first 10 months of 2008.

In 2009 a Tasmanian road project worth $164 million Australian dollars threatened to destroy "thousands of stone tools, quarry sites and campsites" and possibly several burial sites [11]. Work began before community consultations were completed.

When the National Parks and Wildlife Act was enacted in 2001, last-minute lobbying by mining and agriculture interests prevented amendments that would have created a stricter protection regime for Aboriginal sites [5].

Development

When companies 'develop' areas they might unintentionally (or 'unintentionally') destroy Aboriginal rock art. Rarely does one read about such cases in the press, so the following story is worth mentioning.

The Burrup Peninsula near Karratha in Western Australia holds what some believe is the largest and oldest open air rock art site in the world. Traditional owners accused cement company Cemex (later trading as Holcim) of having destroyed a 10,000-year-old quarry and two other sites [6] while carrying out rock blasting at Nickol Bay quarry in December 2008.

The damage to the sites has been found to be "significant" enough to warrant legal proceedings [13], but despite the possibility for a court case the company was only fined $280,000 by the federal government in February 2010, and obliged to pay an undisclosed sum of money to Aboriginal communities.

Vandalism

Time is not the only danger Aboriginal rock art is facing. Crude graffiti scratched into rocks bearing thousand-year-old images, construction camps built near sacred sites [2] and tourists (and locals) treading on rock art sites contribute to the decay of sites of priceless Indigenous history.

When Rachel Perkins scouted locations for her extraordinary series First Australians she had to abandon Bull Cave due to graffiti.

"For instance, Bull Cave in Camden, down in Dharawal country. We went to film there because that was where the First Fleet's cattle escaped and they wandered down south and they went into Dharawal country and the Dharawal people painted this extraordinary image of this massive bull on the cave wall. It is one of the first pieces of contact art, a really important site. We went down there to film and of course, someone has spray painted across it in red letters: 'This is bullshit' and painted a big penis across it, so of course we can't film there." [4]

Other sites damaged by vandals include Red Hand Cave in the Blue Mountains (which now has been completely covered by perspex and bars), Bunjil Cave in Garriwerd, the Grampians (now protected by a metal cage) and rock engravings in Darkinjung National Park which were destroyed by someone unloading wet cement onto it [4].

Theft

Theft is another problem. In a particularly bad example, vandals removed at least one rock face with power tools from the Burrup Peninsula, Australia's largest and oldest rock art site [2].

The Koori Mail reported in April 2009 about reports that Aboriginal artefacts were sold on eBay [7].

It is no wonder that some Aboriginal rock art sites are no longer listed or signposted. Australia needs to hide its most ancient art from its own people.

Stalling protective legislation

In 2009 if you had damaged Aboriginal rock art you could have gone away with it if you "didn't know or didn't intend to damage or remove Aboriginal artefacts or heritage sites" [7].

But this was only possible because legislation intended to protect rock art still hadn't been put in place. In 2001 the government moved to amend the National Parks and Wildlife Act to make it an offence to disturb Aboriginal artefacts or sites. The law wasn't enacted due to "certain lobby groups" intervening (which most probably were miners or pastoralists).

The National Parks and Wildlife Amendment Bill 2010 passed through the Legislative Assembly in April 2010 and was awaiting debate in May 2010 [14].

If the amendments were enacted offenders cannot claim lack of intent anymore and a person or company would be liable for the damages caused.

Of the handful of prosecutions that have even come before the courts in the last five years [2004-2009], the median penalty imposed is for $450—less than 10 per cent of the maximum. —Ian Cohen, Greens MLC [7]

Feral animals

Aboriginal rock art which covers the lower areas is prone to feral animals destroying it. Wild buffalo in the Northern Territory rub their bodies against rocks to get rid of parasites, destroying Aboriginal art at the same time.

Camel caravans have been blamed for extensive damage to sacred Aboriginal sites in arid regions of Australia. (Australia has the largest population of wild camels in the world, estimated to have topped one million in 2009, and exports them to the middle east.)

Buffalo came here and rubbed themselves against the rocks because nobody cared about the land, and the paintings were disappearing. —Romeo Lane, Indigenous ranger, Northern Territory [10]

Hand stencils

Hand stencils are thousands of years old and very common in southern and eastern Australia. Aboriginal people put ochre into their mouth and blew it across their hand which rested on a rock surface. The ochre chemically reacted with and sunk into the surface of the rock just like ink does into paper. As these stencils were commonly made on rock walls of shelters they were protected against weathering.

Stencils reach their greatest art form in the Carnavorn Ranges in central Queensland where dozens of hand stencils were combined to produce complex patterns [8].

Some stencils were left to mark a nation's territory or a hierarchy of importance. The higher up a hand stencil on the rock and the more of the wrist and arm appeared the more important the person. Children's stencils are usually found at the bottom of stencil arrangements.

Hand stencils dating back 2,500 years have also been found on the walls of Argentina's Cueva de las Manos (Cave of the Hands) in Patagonia, in France, Spain, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia's Gua Ham cave, in the Handprint Cave of Belize and Elands Bay Cave in South Africa [9]. Handprints and stencils span all continents and began appearing on rock walls around the world at least 30,000 years ago [9].

Interestingly you still find modern hand stencils these days—on city walls and in company logos.

The organisation Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTaR) also uses a hand to promote their goals. View a photo gallery of their Sea of Hands campaign.

Fact Experiments have shown that right-handed people tend to make stencils of their left hands, because they use their right hands to hold the pigment tube or to help purse their lips to spray on the pigment. [9]

Related articles

Out of respect for Aboriginal culture I use Indigenous sources as much as possible.
[1] Les Bursill, Aboriginal archaeologist, personal communication [2] 'Australia's resource boom endangers Burrup art: experts', National Indigenous Times, 7/8/2008 p.8 [3] 'Garret urged to protect endangered cave art', SMH 13/9/2008 [4] 2Deadly 2006 ATSILIRN Conference, keynote address by Rachel Perkins [5] 'Site protection a success: NSW govt', NIT, 16/4/2009 [6] 'Fears for rock art sparks action call', Koori Mail 452 p.16 [7] 'Govt under pressure on heritage', Koori Mail 448 p.27 [8] 'Stencil Art', Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, vol II p.1028 [9] 'Hand Stencils Through Time', National Geographic News, 26/6/2009, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/photogalleries/cave-art-handprints-missions-pictures/ [10] 'Sign on the dotted line saves spectacular rock art', SMH 25/6/2009 [11] 'Tassie bypass protest arrests', Koori Mail 465 p.12 [12] 'Karijini Mirlimirli', Noel Olive, Fremantle Arts Centre Press 1997 p.77 [13] 'Company fined over rock art damage', SMH 13/2/2010 [14] www.environment.nsw.gov.au/legislation/NPWamendmentBill2009.htm, accessed 12/5/2010 [15] 'Black science in documentary', Koori Mail 482 p.41