Rock Art Chronology
Rock paintings and rock engravings are found throughout the world, wherever there are suitable shelters and rock formations. They are varied and complex human artefacts and document in detail the ephemeral objects of material culture and modes of human experience, behaviour and relationships.
A study of rock art provides the missing chapters of our prehistory, as the artists through time depicted changes in their physical, social and religious environments. The painted images reflect the shifting experiences, dreams and fears of inestimable generations of Indigenous Australians.
Rock art images are as diverse as the physical environment in which they are located and found throughout Australia. Their major concentrations are in the tropical north, extending from the Pilbara and Kimberley in Western Australia, through to the Victoria River District, Arnhem Land and Groote Eylandt Archipelago in the Northern Territory to Cape York Peninsula in Queensland.
The most complex and extensive body of rock art is found in the Arnhem Land Plateau. The rock paintings of this region represent not only the world's longest continuing art tradition but also the world's longest record of human endeavour.
The chronological sequence of the Arnhem Land Plateau rock art consists of four main periods: the pre-estuarine, estuarine, freshwater and contact. The periods were given names which reflect environmental or other changes, while styles were named after the most obvious aspect of the given group of paintings.
Pre-estuarine Period
If we accept the validity of the most recent dating of occupational remains at the Malakunanya II shelter, this period commences at least 50,000 years ago. Amongst the cultural items recovered from the site's lowest levels were used pieces of haematite that had been used in preparing paint, as well as several types of yellow and red ochre. This period ends as its name suggests with the rise of the sea following the last Ice Age and the development of an estuarine environment 8000 years ago.
During this incredible time span the local groups were subject to a number of dramatic environmental changes caused by rises and fall in sea levels. Throughout its duration the artists depicted human beings, emphasised terrestrial animals and freshwater fish, recorded changes in weapons and implements, documented the mode of dress and decoration of human figures and portrayed aspects of their spiritual life with beings of cosmogony.
They also experimented with depictions of subjects' internal features and at a very early stage developed the x-ray concept of quite complex forms. During this period, the rock art sequence consists of a number of art phases, styles, motifs and techniques of image making.
Estuarine Period
Estuarine period of rock art commences with the first appearance of paintings representing various animal species that colonised the Arnhem Land region as the sea rose to its present level. The key species are the giant perch or barramundi (Lates calcarifer), which became the dominant subject in rock art, along with the mullet (Liza diadema), the fork-tailed catfish (Arius leptaspis) and the saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus).
At the commencement of this period, paintings of the fish species and contemporaneous representations of human figures and other subjects were depicted in a naturalistic manner and in several stylistic forms, to be superimposed by later, large and colourful designs of the complex x-ray convention.
The complex x-ray style, developing from earlier and less elaborate x-ray forms persisted into the ethnographic present. The x-ray art is defined as intellectual realism - as the artist was not only depicting the subject's external form but also what he knew of its internal structures - and there are clear descriptive and decorative phases.
In the descriptive x-ray stylistic convention, the artist depicts the maximum number of internal structures of a given subject within its external form. The animals are portrayed in their most recognisable aspect, generally in profile, with their internal organs and bone structure clearly defined.
In the continuing elaboration of the x-ray convention some artists appear to have lost interest in anatomical details and subdivided their subject for purely decorative purposes, hence the term decorative x-ray. The subject's interior continued, to a greater or lesser degree, to be subdivided into its fundamental parts, but these were then infilled with decorative elements rather than internal organs.
During the estuarine period, beeswax designs, made from the wax of wild bees became an integral part of the region's rock art tradition. They are made by pressing shaped pieces of wax on the rock art surface. The designs vary in complexity, from simple rows of waxen pellets to human figures arranged in detailed compositions.
Freshwater Period
The last major ecological change occurred about 1500 years ago. Following a long period of sediment accumulation over previously saline plains the developing freshwater billabongs, lagoons, seasonally flooded plains and paperbark swamps became a major habitat of water birds, and host to a new, rich floristic biota including a great number of food plants.
Rock paintings of magpie geese and their hunters, each depicted carrying a bundle of specialised 'goose' spears and a goose-wing 'fan', typify this period. Also portrayed are paperbark rafts, which people poled into the wetlands to collect goose eggs in season or to spear fish, and the water lilies they gathered later in the year.
Contact Period
Paintings of the contact period reflect the Aboriginal experience of aliens - Makassans and Europeans - and the consequences of such intrusion and continuing presence on Aboriginal society and lifestyle. Despite the dramatic changes in subject matter, stylistic conventions and painting techniques of the previous styles continued to be used.
The history of European settlement in the north and its far-reaching effects on local populations is reflected in the region's rock art. The earliest images are of boats and ships that sailed along charting the coastline, seeking safe harbours and assessing the worth of the land. These vessels were followed by other craft bringing colonists and their exotic animals, and they, too, are recorded in the rock art.
There are also paintings of early explorers, the construction of the railway line to the Pine Creek goldfields, Darwin wharf in the 1890s, buffalo shooters pursuing their prey, and a portrait of the first missionary who came to the region.
