While gigantic kangaroos as well as mega-koalas still claimed sovereignty over prehistoric Australia, the land’s very first humans arrived. Their effect on the Kimberley region in the wild north-west – echoes through time, making this already mystical place even a lot more magical.
When we’re travelling in Australia, we in some cases like to play a game. We look at an area as well as try to envision what it would have looked like 500 years ago, then what it might’ve looked like 5,000 years before that.
Houses as well as gardens, parks as well as sea walls dissolve, as well as in their place are thickets of trees, broad deserts as well as craggy cliffs down to stony shores. The wilderness of Australia.
It’s often a tough exercise.
But when you’re in the Kimberley – arguably one of the most isolated yet many spectacular places on earth – it’s not difficult at all. things modification slowly in the Kimberley.
Check out our video on Wandjina rock art in the Kimberley:
Click right here to view this video on YouTube.
Of course, 5,000 years back – even 50,000 years back – signs of human habitation were here. In fact, their ancient tradition still remains today. As old as the hills into which they’re carved.
The ancient rock paintings in the Kimberley’s galleries are now as much part of the country as its ember-like red earth, its riotous, rugged coastline as well as the benevolent yet irascible spirit that dwells in every leaf, rock as well as river.
Gwion Gwion art in the Kimberley – paintings of life before time began
Already house to superlatives like Mitchell Falls – Australia’s highest tiered waterfall, Montgomery Reef – the country’s closest onshore reef as well as the third highest tides in the world (behind Alaska as well as Nova Scotia), the Kimberley has been comfortable with its status for millennia.
But the Gwion Gwion rock art – known likewise as ‘the Bradshaws’ after Joesph Bradshaw, who discovered them in 1891 – is possibly the most significant preeminence to us humans.
These paintings, possibly the oldest type of art in the world (and the oldest depictions of humans), are shrouded in mystery.
How old are the Gwion Gwion Bradshaws?
It’s been tough to date them since to use things like radiocarbon dating technology, you requirement traces of biological data – carbon for example. as well as there’s just none left in the ancient pigments painted onto the walls of the Kimberley caves. In fact, the paintings have ended up being the caves.
However, fossils of mud wasp nests, which were built on top of the paintings, do still have organic material to carbon date. The fossils are around 17,500 years old, so the paintings go back at least that far.
But bearing in mind the nests would not have been built (and allowed to remain) while the artists were still in residence, it’s very difficult to understand exactly how fresh the paint was before the wasps moved in.
Other Gwion Gwion art depicts the gigantic type of a Thylacoleo, the large ancestor of the Thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger. The Thylacoleo became extinct around 45,000 years ago, so it would be simple to extrapolate that these paintings are contemporaries of this 130kg ‘dinosaur’.
There are so lots of other theories as well as suggestions about these paintings that pinning down a particular date for these extraordinary works of ancient history – let alone getting scientists to agree – is nearly impossible.
Either way, these artworks are old, lovely as well as extremely important.
How lots of Gwion Gwion as well as Wandjina sites are there?
Spread over an massive area – around 50,000km² – there are actually hundreds of thousands of gallery sites in the Kimberley of both the ancient Gwion Gwion artwork as well as Wandjina images that likewise date back lots of thousands of years.
And scientists believe there are lots of that still haven’t been discovered yet.
The rock art we saw while we were in the Kimberley was from Raft point – a remote, steep bluff of deep red rock that launches from the shores of the Indian Ocean. known by the regional Worrorra people as Umbre, this area is house to one of the a lot more available galleries from the sea.
At the time, we were travelling with national geographic on an expedition ship, as well as to clamber from a Zodiac onto the crunchy sand at Umbre, then scramble up to the caves filled with those legendary paintings was unforgettable.
National geographic expedition leader Steve Egan explained some of the details of the ancient Aboriginal Wandjina paintings above our heads. You can view his lesson on our video here.
It was an entrancing experience as well as one that we will never forget.
It made it all the a lot more painful to discover of news that, in disgraceful acts ostensibly to clear bushland for fire safety, the WA government in 2009 damaged or destroyed over 5,000 of the known 8,742 sites of Bradshaw art with aerial firebombing as well as back burning.
Much of this area was presumed (incorrectly) to have high potential for oil as well as gas reserves.
Incredibly, this is still happening.
In mid-2020, Rio Tinto bombed parts of the Pilbara, a region south of the Kimberley, to broaden an iron ore mine. They utterly destroyed two culturally as well as scientifically significant sacred sites, one of which was dated to be over 46,000 years old.
And this was sanctioned by ministerial consent through outdated Aboriginal heritage laws.
You can read a lot more about the Rio Tinto catastrophe here.
In legal developments, three of Rio Tinto bosses have been fined (but still hold their senior positions) for the damage of one of Australia’s oldest archaeological sites.
The fines relate to bonuses of the three heads of the mining firm amounting to around £4m (AU$7.3m).
The cave site sat above high-grade iron ore estimated at £75m – AU$137m.
We’ve travelled through a great deal of Australia. We’ve seen its high peaks, its deep caverns, its beaches as well as its forests, its cities as well as its vast, ranging deserts.
They all have one thing in common: they all provide you a sense of this extraordinary country – they all feel like home.
But the Kimberley feels a lot more like Australia as well as yet at the same time less like anywhere else on earth.
Perhaps the spirit of the Wandjina – the unique, ghostly forms of cloud as well as rain eidolons discovered in the rock art of the Kimberley – is what gives this place its magic.
And the paintings of the Gwion Gwion as well as Wandjina are a talisman of this fascinating ancient landscape.
If you want to see a lot more about our time with national geographic in the Kimberley, click here.
Leave a Reply