Australian Rock Art: The Giant Wallaroo Site

We found the first paintings in a large, open shelter under a twenty-metre-high block of sandstone . . . a mosaic of figures in rich earth colors of reds, yellows and white, portraying people, kangaroos, emus, fish, snakes, echidnas, and strange anthropomorphs. . . . Quinkins . . . the figures hinted at a great mystery about their creation and meaning.—Percy Trezise, 1993^{1(p ix)}

Paleogenetic evidence² directly links Australian aborigines to the exodus of early modern humans out of Africa 50 000 to 70 000 years ago. Moreover, the fossil record dates the prehistoric settlement of Australia to at least 46 000 years BP (before the present), making it home to the oldest early modern humans outside Africa. When Westerners came to Australia, they found aboriginal peoples living as hunter-gatherers and maintaining, as they had for millennia, rock art shelters that had cultural and spiritual meaning for them.³ The images are engraved, stenciled, or painted on the walls and ceilings of rock shelters and have ancestral meanings that living descendents could describe.

Percy Trezise, Australian bush pilot, painter, and writer, was the first person to systematically record rock art in the Cape York area, especially in the area that has come to be known as Quinkin Country, a designation derived from the name for ancestral spirit people³ (thumbnail). In the 1960s, Trezise mapped rock shelters from the air and then sought them out. His aboriginal friend Dick Roughsey (Goobalathaldin), a member of the Lardil tribe, facilitated contact with local tribal leaders for understanding the meaning of the engravings, stencils, and paintings. The galleries they found are listed on the Australian Heritage Estate and by UNESCO as being among the top-10 rock art sites in the world.

The early inhabitants of Cape York have been traced to at least 34 000 BP.⁴ The beginnings of their art are not known; the earliest dating is around 24 000 BP.^4(p669) Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating has been completed for nondegraded plant fibers in paint and for carbon bearing oxalate salts taken from accretions that formed over the images over millennia.⁴ Early engravings from Paleolithic times are authenticated, but many rock art drawings are of more recent vintage from the past 3000 to 5000 years. The saddest consequence of the settlement of Australia was the loss of meaning of ancient practices that had been conveyed to them in the Dreamtime.

The Dreamtime (Tjukurpa) refers to creation beliefs about ancestral beings who emerged from the stars or arose from the ground onto a flat, featureless earth to create the landscape and to teach the people^1,3 social laws and customs, sacred rituals, and religious beliefs. Then they disappeared into the earth. The landscape is dotted with such powerful spiritual places, story places, where tales from the ancestral Dreamtime were passed on orally for millennia to descendents without a written language. Human kin groups (clans) identify with the animals, plants, and other phenomena as their totems that bind them together into their own“story.” Stories preserve and affirm the life drama that defines the aboriginal people. Wherever we go into the Australian bush we are inside the story of those who reside there.

Rock shelter sites differ in the stories they tell. Some are secular sites, others are initiation sites, and still others are sorcery sites or mortuary sites. They depict ancestors, heroes, totem ancestors and animals, hunting and love magic, and ancestral spirit people.⁵ Among those in the Laura region are the Giant Wallaroo camp (a secular site), Emu Dreaming, and Split Rock (dwelling place for good and evil Quinkin spirits).^5,6

At the Giant Wallaroo site, a large wallaroo is shown in profile (cover). Two dingoes (residents of Australia for fewer than 5000 years BP²) are in pursuit, one painted red ochre and the other white. A large red human hand seems to reach up toward the white dingo. An echidna is shown behind the dingoes. Directly beneath the giant wallaroo stands a white demonic Quinkin person with raised arms. Radiocarbon dating of figures here suggests that most of these drawings were completed in the past 3000 to 4000 years. The dingo pursuit of the kangaroo is still witnessed today (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXUCV5STh9g&NR=1&feature=fvwp).

The Emu Dreaming site is far less elaborate. The motifs are figurative, outlines of human forms, suggestive engraved bird tracks and a nest, pits dug into the rock, and rings and radiating forms. Closer observation suggests that these markings and engravings may signify an initiation site into a clan whose totem is the emu. The engraved tracks resemble those of the emu, and the shape of an enlarged hole suggests an emu nest. Moreover, the profile of an emu is embedded into the rock wall. Adjacent to it is a human form with a hand resembling that of a 3-toed emu foot. The human form seems to merge into the emu. For a clan member, it may have seemed that he was bearing witness at the very place where his ancestral being assumed its totem form. Both emu totem men and emus are believed to be descendants of the emu ancester whose spirit resides in the dreaming place.

The richness of aboriginal heritage is well represented at these sites near Laura. Cultural heritage managers like the local Ang-Gnarra Aboriginal Corporation and funding agencies are active in the management and preservation of rock art for future generations.

Thanks to Stewart and Sue Einfeld for organizing the visit to Laura. Thanks to Steve Trezise, our outback guide and expert informant on rock art and“emu dreaming,” and Matt Trezise for reviewing a draft of the article and providing additional details about the meaning of the art. And thanks to Stewart, Sue, Oliver, and Alex Einfeld for reviewing a draft of the article.