[lit-ideas] Australian Rock Paintings and Fatwas

At one time it was thought that Australia was colonized by man rather late
in our specie's history, but improvements in dating methods and genetic
analysis have changed that view.  Australia was almost certainly colonized
before Europe.   A man "called Mungo 3 . . . was discovered in 1974. . .
dating methods have pushed the age back to 45,000 years, and human artifacts
from sedimentary layers below Mungo 3 hint at dates as ancient as 60,000
years before present." [Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man, page 64]

 

And so the rock paintings in Northern Australia are considered much more
important than they once were.  As long as they were thought relatively
modern, less than 10,000 years old, then they were interesting in a cultural
sense, but it they are as old as the Mungo man; then they can contribute to
our understanding of early man - man fresh out of Africa - a wave of homo
sapiens that left Africa before the wave that moved into Europe.  

 

Historians, anthropologists and archaeologists recognize the importance of
these rock paintings but these people are annoyingly human.  One of the
pioneers in photographing and bringing order to the study of the earliest
rock paintings (called Bradshaw Paintings) is Grahame Walsh who published
his findings without giving the location of the paintings.  Ian Wilson, 20
years later, wanted to build upon Walsh's work, but Walsh wouldn't
cooperate.  Wilson was qualified, but that made no difference.  There is no
way to protect these rock paintings; so Walsh and people who own much of the
land containing these paintings refuse to let anyone, including scholars,
historians, anthropologists and archaeologists in to view these paintings.

 

Ian Wilson did manage to see Bradshaw paintings in regions not controlled by
Walsh and his admirers and so eventually wrote Lost World of the Kimberley,
Extraordinary glimpses of Australia's Ice Age ancestors, 2006.   Wilson is
sympathetic with the idea of keeping sightseers away from the rock
paintings, but that scholars should be kept away as well appalled him.  His
annoyance is to be found in almost every chapter of his book.  

 

If you are tired of the poor behavior of government personnel such as those
from NASA, you won't find relief in Australia.  The most recent
rock-painting period is the Wandjina which extends to the present time.
Wandjina guardians would touch up these recent rock paintings as they faded,
but with so many people moving to town they became neglected. And in 1987
the well-meaning federal government awarded a $108,000 grant for "retouching
work to be carried out on certain of the more badly eroded examples.  Local
bureaucrats "simply recruited a group of seven unemployed Aboriginal youths
from the south-western Kimberley town of Derby (outside the sphere of the
Wandjinas' traditional descendants), gave them a supply of brushes and tins
of Dulux paint, and told them to go off and get the job done.  There was not
the slightest consultation with those people who had at least some true
claim to being the Wandjinas' traditional guardians.

 

"All too predictably, the result was catastrophic.  In the words of art
specialists Judith Ryan and Kim Akerman: 'Instead of being conserved through
re-touching, the original images were painted over and replaced with new,
acculturated versions.  Eight special places were irrevocably spoilt, for
seemingly altruistic motives.'

 

"And the outrage was felt well beyond the circles of white academics.
Aboriginal elder Billy king . . . was so incensed that he very solemnly
pronounced that the seven youths responsible for this sacrilege would all
die.  According to Lee's Aboriginal associate Ju Ju Wilson, every one of
these young men who had carried out the repainting work is indeed now dead.
For anyone who has developed even a little awareness of the traditional
Aboriginal psyche, stories of this kind are not to be taken lightly."

 

Lawrence

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