Aboriginal Rock Art

There are many aboriginal communities living in their ancestral homelands within Kakadu National Park located in the Northern Territory of Australia. In addition to its natural beauty the park is filled with thousands of cave paintings produced by the Aboriginal people over tens of thousands of years. These rock faces have been continuously painted and repainted for tens of thousands of years, the original paintings dating back as much as 40,000 years, and many have continued to be repainted up to contemporary times.

Australian Aboriginal Rock Art on a Rock in Kakadu National Park
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In sites such as Ubirr and Nourlangie there are rocky outcrops that have afforded shelter to Aboriginal inhabitants for thousands of years. In these "caves" there are found many paintings on the rocks, revealing the spiritual culture of these people. In fact, their belief is that many of the art works were painted by spiritual beings, Mimi spirits who were involved in the creation of the world and who brought understanding of life to the people. The paintings contain the spiritual power of these beings and it is the responsibility of the people to maintain them, repairing damage and repainting them to preserve not only their beauty but also their power.

Part of Nourlangie Rock, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory
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Nourlangie is located in an outlying formation of the Arnhem Land Escarpment. Numerous shelters in this large outcrop contain impressive paintings of various creatures indigenous to the region.

Aboriginal Paintings in the X-Ray Style
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Aboriginal Painting of Fish
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Painting of a Kangaroo
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A number of the paintings represent creation ancestors. These drawings are usually in red ochre and show elegant, graceful stick-like figures in action - fighting, running, dancing, leaping and hunting.

Painting of Dancing Figures at Nourlangie Rock
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Many paintings of what are called "Mimi spirits" are located high up on the rock and it is unclear how human beings could have reached the area to paint them. The Aboriginal people claim that their Mimi rock pictures were painted by the Mimi spirits themselves. The Mimi are very thin and fragile and are said to live in the nooks and crannies of the rocky landscape. The Mimi are seen not only as the artists of their self-portraits, but also the Dreaming ancestors who taught people to paint, hunt, dance and compose songs.

The stories connected to these artworks are known only to certain Aboriginal people.

Ubirr is located in the East Alligator region of Kakadu National Park. It consists of a group of rocky outcrops on the edge floodplain where there are several natural shelters contain Aboriginal rock paintings, some of which are many thousands of years old.

East Alligator River Flood Plain, Ubirr
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There are three galleries of art accessible to visitors. At the Northern end of the main gallery can be seen a painting of a Thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, which has been extinct in the area for about 20000 years, and attests to the antiquity of the paintings.

Painting of a Wallaby at Aboriginal Rock Art Site at Ubirr Rock
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Many of the paintings at Ubirr are in the "X-ray" style in which the skeletons of the animals and humans portrayed are drawn inside the outline, like an x-ray. The paintings depicts certain creation ancestors, Mimi spirits, as well as creatures such as fish, turtles and wallabies that are all indigenous to the area.

Painting of Turtle at Ubirr Rock in Kakadu National Park
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The Bradshaw Paintings were discovered by Joseph Bradshaw in 1891, while lost on an expedition in the Kimberley, Western Australia. They are known as Gwion Gwion by the local Aboriginal people.

Legend has it that the paintings were made by birds. The story goes that birds pecked at the rocks until their beaks bled. They then used their tail feathers and their own blood to create the paintings. The paintings now are actually just red coloring in the rock, with no pigments remaining on the surface. As a result, the normal methods of testing the age of the paintings by carbon dating technology are useless.

Aboriginal Painted Figures of Varied Periods, Kimberley, Western Australia
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Some of the paintings originate from a past long ago. How long ago has been debated, with some claiming as much as 50,000 years. In 1996 one of the paintings was dated by using thermoluminescence on an ancient fossilized wasp nest that had covered it. The nest was found to be over 17,000 years old, dating at least some of the paintings to at least that era.

Aboriginal Painting at Kimberly
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Regardless of the actual age of the paintings and how they were created, what is undeniable is that these are incredibly beautiful and sophisticated works of art.

Copyright © Jennifer P. Tanabe, 2009.
This page was created on June 23, 2009 and is the property of jptanabe (Jennifer P. Tanabe) and Squidoo, LLC. Please do not copy my material!