Aboriginal Rock Art and the Telling of History

Authors:

Laura Rademaker, Australian National University, Canberra
Sally K. May, University of Adelaide
Gabriel Maralngurra, Injalak Arts
Joakim Goldhahn, University of Adelaide

Published:

February 2025

Availability:

Available

Format:

Hardback

ISBN:

9781009523318

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Description

The rock art of Australia is among the oldest, most complex, and most fascinating manifestations of human creativity and imagination in the world. Aboriginal people used art to record their experiences, ceremonies, and knowledge by embedding their understanding of the world in the landscape over many generations. Indeed, rock art serves as archives and libraries for Australia's Indigenous people. It is, in effect, its repository of memory. This volume explores Indigenous perspectives on rock art. It challenges the limits and assumptions of traditional, academic ways of understanding and knowing the past by showing how history has literally been painted 'on the rocks'. Each chapter features a biography of an artist or family of artists, together with an artwork created by contemporary artist Gabriel Maralngurra. By bringing together history, archaeology, and Indigenous artistic practice, the book offers new insights into the medium of rock art and demonstrates the limits of academic methods and approaches.

Provides an interdisciplinary approach to the study of rock art
Uses accessible and non-technical language
Offers arguments from historians' perspectives

Product details

Published: February 2025
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 9781009523318
Length: 204 pages
Dimensions: 236 × 158 × 15 mm
Weight: 0.46kg
Availability: Available

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Contents

List of figures
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Note on the text
List of abbreviations
1. Rock beats paper: 'prehistory', rock art and archives
2. Change and tradition in West Arnhem land rock art
3. The counter-archive of First Nations biography
4. Reading the writing on the wall: rock art and the written word
5. Touchstones for memory, bedrocks for history
6. Timelessness and permanence: rock art and time
Conclusions
Afterword
Glossary
Bibliography
Index.

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Authors

Laura Rademaker , Australian National University, Canberra
Laura Rademaker is Australian Research Council DECRA Research Fellow at the Australian National University. A historian of Indigenous Australia, she is a winner of the Australian Historical Association's Hancock Prize and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia's Paul Bourke Award for her interdisciplinary and community-based historical methods.
Sally K. May , University of Adelaide
Sally K. May is Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow in the School of Humanities, University of Adelaide. Her research, which is based on more than twenty years of fieldwork in northern Australia, focuses on relationships between people, landscapes, material culture, and imagery.
Gabriel Maralngurra , Injalak Arts
Gabriel Maralngurra is a renowned Australian Indigenous artist. He also works as a translator, artistic mentor, tour guide, and co-researcher in Aboriginal and colonial history and art from western Arnhem Land. He is one of the founding members of Injalak Arts and is currently its co-manager.
Joakim Goldhahn , University of Adelaide
Joakim Goldhahn, author of Birds in the Bronze Age, is an internationally acclaimed rock art researcher who also works in the fields of Indigenous Archaeology and the European Bronze Age.

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