Rock-art acts as symbols. There is a sense of permanency about painting or engraving a picture on a wall, it’s fixed in place and becomes part of the landscape. It’s there for a reason. Rock-art doesn’t exist in isolation.
Painting of a Wandjina on pine board, collected by H. Petri in the northwest Kimberley.
Photo: Anthropology Department, copyright Western Australian Museum, E10452
For thousands of years, people around the world have been inscribing pictures on fixed, rocky surfaces.
Rock-art is laden with cultural information that is used to learn more about people’s stories, history, relationships to land, social boundaries, belief systems, and interaction or communication with others.
These images are enduring and visual historical records of people’s symbolic lives and their study helps us bring the human landscape to life. Australia is home to more than 100,000 known and documented rock-art sites, and many more remain unrecorded.
Unlike most other parts of the world, knowledge about rock-art remains strong amongst Indigenous Australian groups: stories about symbolism and meanings are passed down from generation to generation, and in some cases directly from the artists themselves.
Western Australia features some of Australia’s most spectacular rock-art galleries, and few landscapes offering as much tangible evidence of human history as the Pilbara and Kimberley regions. This situation presents archaeologists and rock-art researchers with an extraordinary opportunity to learn more about the rich visual histories associated with rock-art.
University information
CRICOS Code: 00126G
