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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Etchings over much earlier Aboriginal engravings show foreign whalers made contact with Australia’s remote northwest long before colonial settlement of the area.
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.
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.