Painting of a raider on horseback (bottom right) with a musket and domestic stock. A ‘rain-animal’ (top right) was likely summoned to wash away the raiders’ tracks.
Courtesy of Sam Challis and Brent Sinclair-Thomson
Indigenous artists have been engraving rock shelters for millennia - long before the Kimberley’s celebrated rock art paintings. Now the rocks’ natural coatings are yielding clues to the engravings’ creation.
Rock paintings from the main gallery at Djulirri in Namunidjbuk clan estate, showing traditional Aboriginal motifs as well as European boats, airplanes, and more.
Photo by Sally K May.
Pictures of boats and ships in rock art at the northwestern tip of Australia show the European incursions from the 1800s — but also the much earlier and lesser known sea trade with southeast Asia.
This Warty Pig is part of a panel dated to more than 45,500 years in age.
Basran Burhan/Griffith University
The ancient cave paintings have only begun to tell us about the lives of the earliest people who lived in Australasia. The art is disappearing just as we are beginning to understand its significance.
December 1972: Billy Miargu, with his daughter Linda on his arm, and his wife Daphnie Baljur. In the background, the newly painted kangaroo.
Photograph by George Chaloupka, now in Parks Australia's Archive at Bowali.
The team from Wits University returned to a well-known ceiling panel in the Maloti-Drakensberg mountains, armed with new knowledge about the beliefs of the San people who made the paintings.
Aotearoa New Zealand is falling behind in world heritage sites. Is it time we lobbied for recognition of our unique cultural history?
Participants in the Wintawari Guruma Rock Art Research Project record rock art near Tom Price in the Pilbara region.
Jo McDonald, CRAR+M Database, Photo reproduced with permission WGAC
A recent cave art discovery in remote Indonesia is changing our understanding of the beginnings of art and the emergence of religious-like thinking in the early human story.
Ranger Trevor Bramwell on the walk up to the Split Rock art galleries in Cape York’s Quinkan Country in 2017.
Rebekah Ison/AAP
The World Heritage Listing for Victoria’s Budj Bim fish traps was ground-breaking. Here are five other Australian Indigenous sites that also deserve greater attention.
The Enderby Island ship image depicting His Majesty’s Cutter Mermaid, which visited the Dampier Archipelago in 1818.
Courtesy: Murujuga Dynamics of the Dreaming ARC Project
An image of a ship on a rock in Western Australia’s Dampier Archipelago depicts HMC Mermaid – the main vessel of Phillip Parker King, an unsung hero of Australian exploration.
Detail of the Connecticut Inscription, with image enhancement.
Centre for Rock Art Research and Management database
Etchings over much earlier Aboriginal engravings show foreign whalers made contact with Australia’s remote northwest long before colonial settlement of the area.
Paintings of human figures from East Kalimantan. NB: The human figures, originally mulberry-coloured, have been digitally traced over to enhance the art.
Pindi Setiawan
Rock art in the Dampier Archipelago and the Burrup Peninsula contains engravings of animals that are now extinct, such as thylacines and a fat-tailed species of kangaroos.
Rock art in central Northumberland, northern England.
New research has cast doubt on the effectiveness of scientific studies monitoring industry impact on rock art in the Burrup Peninsula.
This picture of a reconstruction of a hominin skull is one of a variety of multimedia that can be experienced in the Origins Virtual Reality experience.
Wits University
Murujuga, or the Burrup Peninsula, is home to over a million rock artworks. But as concern grows about the impact of industrial pollution on the art, the WA government continues to play down the area’s heritage value.