Very, Very Old Australian and Aboriginal Rock Art | Sea Life, Islands and Oceania

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ABORIGINAL ROCK ART THAT IS THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD

X-ray style of Aboriginal art

Rock art, including painted and carved forms, have been part of Aboriginal culture for tens of thousands of years. There is a lot of it scattered around Australia. Although its style is quite different some say it is comparable to art found at the famous cave sites at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. According to the Australian Museum: It is probable that rock art was part of the culture of the first Australians. Its exact purpose is unknown but it is likely that from the earliest times rock art would have formed part of religious ritual activity, as is common in modern hunter-gatherer societies.”[Source: Fran Dorey, Australian Museum, September 12, 2021]

According to The Smithsonian: Rock art has been a central part of Aboriginal spiritual and educational practices for thousands of years — and still is today. Important artwork is often found in spiritually significant locations. Much of the art tells stories, which can be interpreted at different levels for children and for initiated adults. [Source: Livia Gershon, Smithsonian magazine, October 5, 2020]

The oldest reliably dated rock art scenes in Australia are found in Arnhem Land in nrothern Australia and consist of animals sketched in charcoal that has been radiocarbon dated to about 30,000 B.C. As many as 100,000 rock art sites are scattered across Australia. Paul S.C. Taçon, chair of rock art research at Griffith University, wrote in The Conversation that Australians are “spoiled with rock art.” Referencing one style, “What if the Maliwawa Figures were in France?” he asked, “Surely, they would be the subject of national pride with different levels of government working together to ensure their protection and researchers endeavoring to better understand and protect them. We must not allow Australia’s abundance of rock art to lead to a national ambivalence towards its appreciation and protection.”

Books: Chaloupka, George Journey in Time: The World's Longest Continuing Art Tradition: The 50,000 Year Story of the Australian Aboriginal Rock Art of Arnhem Land. Chatswood, N.S.W.: Reed, 1993; Layton, Robert Australian Rock Art: A New Synthesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Ocher, an Important Part of Ancient Australian and Aboriginal Art

pieces of red ocher

Ocher, an iron oxide found in a range of colors from yellow to red and brown, is a common and important material used ancient Aboriginal and Australiam art. Red ocher (also spelled ochre) is particularly important in many desert cultures due to the belief that it represents the blood of ancestral beings and can provide protection and strength. Ocher has traditionally been made into a paint by grinding it into a powder and mixing it with a fluid, such as water, blood or saliva.

Mineral pigments, such as ocher, are also very important archaeologically. They provide the oldest evidence for human arrival in Australia. Used pigments have been found in the earliest occupation levels of many sites, with some pieces dated at about 50,000 years old. This suggests that art was practised by the first people that arrived in Australia. Natural pigments were probably used for a range of purposes including burials, cave painting, decoration of objects and body art. Such usage still occurs today.

Hematite "crayons" dated with a new technique called optically simulated luminescence (which determines when sediments were last exposed to sunlight) are estimated to be between 53,000 and 60,000 years old. Researchers from the Australian National University in Canberra told National Geographic, "It's high-grade hematite. Ancient people ground it into red ocher powder. That means they had an interest in either coloring their bodies for ceremonies, painting clan designs on themselves, or putting art on walls or designs on their boomerangs."

Early Australian and Aboriginal Art Styles

Matt Stirn wrote in Archaeology Magazine: Researchers have identified several main periods, including the Large Naturalistic Animals Style, which dates from about 16,000 to 11,000 B.C., and the Dynamic Style, which dates to between 11,000 and 8000 B.C. and is characterized by scenes of people using tools and interacting with the natural world. Animal painting show subjects in motion. Some of this is very old, dated to 12,000 years ago or older.

Aboriginal rock art depicting a large mammal, maybe marsupial lion, attacking a hunter

Around 4000 B.C., Arnhem Land’s artists introduced floral motifs into their work, creating what is known as the Yam Style. Two thousand years ago, humans began to appear in different shapes than they had before, in the Simple Figures Style. Slightly later, artists started to display an intimate knowledge of anatomy and created what scholars have termed X-ray paintings, which depict the internal organs and skeletons of both humans and animals. This style has persisted into the modern day.

The “X-ray” tradition in Aboriginal art is thought to have developed around 2000 B.C. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: As its name implies, the X-ray style depicts animals or human figures in which the internal organs and bone structures are clearly visible. X-ray art includes sacred images of ancestral supernatural beings as well as secular works depicting fish and animals that were important food sources. In many instances, the paintings show fish and game species from the local area. Through the creation of X-ray art, Aboriginal painters express their ongoing relationships with the natural and supernatural worlds.

Australia — Home of the World’s Oldest Art?

One candidate for the world's oldest art is some mysterious cuplike designs and circular coin-like impression made on great orange boulders in a rock formations at the Jinmium site on the coast of Northern Territory in Australia. The impressions have been found on numerous boulders. In almost every case they have the same depth and the same 1.2-inch diameter width. One boulder has 3,500 markings. Scientists theorize the boulders may have marked important food sources or provided directions. Aboriginals in the area believe the markings represent ancestral being that turned to stone.

Richard Fullagar, an anthropologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, dated the impressions and markings using the latest dating methods to be 75,000 years old, an astonishing date. The famous paleolithic cave paintings in France and Spain, by contrast, are 25,000 years old. Using the thermolumiscence dating method, David Price of the School of Geosciences at the University of Woolonggong, has dated artifacts and ocher found in a rock shelter at Jinmium at 116,000 years old. Price dated a hand tool to be 176,000 years old — an even more astounding date that is hard to believe and would throw off many theories if it turns out to be true. Many of these very old dates are disputed or have been debunked.

Jinmium cuplike designs

Murujuga, also known by the modern name Burrup Peninsula, in northwestern Australia, is home to potentially the world’s oldest and most endangered petroglyphs. Some of the more than one million images are more than 40,000 years old. [Source: National Geographic]

The oldest rock paintings in Australia confirmed by carbon dating are 20,000 years old. An image of pregnancy drawn with ocher on a rock has been dated to be 35,000 years old using other dating methods. Some believe that other rock paintings may be 35,000 or 40,000 years old. A 30,000 year old piece of chiseled ocher was found at Lake Mungo.

An image of a pair birds found in Arnhem Land in northern Australia has been dated as being older than 40,000 years old because that is when the bird species in the image is thought to have gone extinct. Some have asserted it is Australia's oldest painting. The bird in question looks like an emu but is thought to be the megafauna bird genyornis, which has large, thick toes and shorter legs than an emu.

Australia's Oldest Intact Rock Painting — 17,300 Year Old — Is of a Kangaroo

A two-meter-long life-size painting of a kangaroo, complete with anatomically correct genetalia, found in Western Australia’s Kimberley region has been identified as Australia’s oldest intact rock painting. By radiocarbon dating mud wasp nests, under the paint, a University of Melbourne team determined the was 17,500 to 17,100 years old. “This makes the painting Australia’s oldest known in-situ painting,” said Postdoctoral Researcher Dr Damien Finch, who pioneered the the new dating technique, which had never been sued before. “This is a significant find as through these initial estimates, we can understand something of the world these ancient artists lived in. We can never know what was in the mind of the artist when he/she painted this piece of work more than 600 generations ago, but we do know that the Naturalistic period extended back into the Last Ice Age, so the environment was cooler and dryer than today.” [Source: University of Melbourne, February 23, 2021]

The Kimberley-based research is part of Australia’s largest rock art dating project, led by Professor Andy Gleadow from the University of Melbourne. It involves the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, the Universities of Western Australia, Wollongong, and Manchester, the Australian National Science and Technology Organisation, and partners Rock Art Australia and Dunkeld Pastoral. In an article published in in February 2021 in Nature Human Behaviour, Dr Finch and his colleagues detail how rock shelters have preserved the Kimberley galleries of rock paintings, many of them painted over by younger artists, for millennia – and how they managed to date the kangaroo rock painting as Australia’s oldest known in-situ painting.

17,500-year-old kangaroo art

The kangaroo is painted on the sloping ceiling of a rock shelter on the Unghango clan estate in Balanggarra country, above the Drysdale River in the north-eastern Kimberley region of Western Australia. Earlier researchers looked at the stylistic features of the paintings and the order in which they were painted when they overlapped, and were able to work out from there that the oldest style of painting is what’s known as the Irregular Infill Animal or the Naturalistic period, which often features life-size animals. This kangaroo is a typical example of paintings in this style.

Dr Sven Ouzman, from University Western Australia’s School of Social Sciences and one of the project’s chief investigators, said the rock painting would unlock further understanding of Indigenous cultural history. “This iconic kangaroo image is visually similar to rock paintings from islands in South East Asia dated to more than 40,000 years ago, suggesting a cultural link – and hinting at still older rock art in Australia,” Dr Ouzman said.

Mindy Weisberger of Live Science wrote: Over a period of five years, they collected and analyzed 27 nests associated with 16 different rock paintings in Drysdale River National Park, painted in the region's oldest style. "We then use the pattern of all the maximum and minimum dates that apply to paintings of the same style, to estimate the period when they were painted," Finch explained. "The accuracy of this estimate increases as more and more nests are dated." They found that most of the paintings were likely made between 13,000 and 17,000 years ago. As for the kangaroo painting, six nearby nests provided both minimum and maximum dates, enabling the scientists to estimate its age. [Source: Mindy Weisberger, Live Science, February 23, 2021]

Dr Finch said it was rare to find mud wasp nests both overlying and underlying a single painting. For this painting they were able to sample both types to establish the minimum and maximum age for the artwork. “We radiocarbon dated three wasp nests underlying the painting and three nests built over it to determine, confidently, that the painting is between 17,500 and 17,100 years old; most likely 17,300 years old.” In total, the pioneering radiocarbon dating technique was used on 27 mud wasp nests underlying and overlying 16 different paintings from 8 rock shelters to show paintings of this style were produced between 17,000 and 13,000 years ago.

Aboriginal Rock Art as a Window to the Past

Aboriginal rock art on the Barnett River, Mount Elizabeth Station in the Kimberley region of Western Australia

In 2003, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported: Hundreds of Aboriginal cave drawings, some as old as the Egyptian pyramids, have been discovered in rugged woodland near Sydney in what Australian scientists are calling a major find. The cave containing 203 rock paintings up to 4,000 years old were kept secret for eight years after a hiker stumbled upon it in rugged parkland in 1995, scientists told reporters. The inaccessibility of the area in the Wollemi National Park, about 150 kilometers north of Sydney, kept researchers from conducting a full-scale investigation of the find until May 2003. "It's like an ancient world that time forgot," said Dr Paul Taçon, an anthropologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, who led the expedition. The cave holds 203 paintings, stencils and prints in "pristine condition", depicting humans and god-like human-animal composites, birds, lizards and marsupials, he said. [Source: ABC, July 2, 2003]

There are life-size, delicately drawn eagles, kangaroos and an extremely rare depiction of a wombat, Taçon said, describing how the images were painted in 11 layers during a period from around 2000 BC to the early 19th century. There are also stencils of human hands, boomerangs and other tools. "We've never seen anything quite like this combination of rare representations in so many layers," Taçon said. The exact location of the site — described as a rock shelter about 12 meters long, 6 meters deep and 1 to 2 meters high — was being kept secret to prevent damage by vandals or sightseers.

The parkland is so rugged that it was not until 1994 that scientists were amazed to discover trees that had been thought extinct for 150 million years. Now known as Wollemi pines, there were only 43 of the trees found in a gully, of a species that covered the planet when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The Premier of New South Wales state, Bob Carr, told reporters: "This reminds us [that] 4,000 years ago, when you had civilisation flourishing in Mesopotamia, when you had the power of Egypt, before China was united, while Stonehenge was being built, we had Aboriginal people in these lands, on the outskirts of the Sydney basin," he said. "This is eerie, because it's contact with a very old Australia and it's why we've got to honour our Aboriginal people." "We know so much about the history of other cultures across the world ... but we know very little about our own," said Samantha Mattila, a spokeswoman for the Australian Museum. "This is at the backdoor of Sydney and it's untouched, it's pristine."

Aboriginal Rock Art: World’s Longest Continuously Practiced Art Tradition

Eric Kjellgren of the Metropolitan Museum of Art wrote: “The rock art of the Australian Aborigines represents the longest continuously practiced series of artistic traditions anywhere in the world. The site of Ubirr in Arnhem Land, northern Australia, contains one of the most impressive assemblages of Aboriginal rock painting, ranging from the earliest periods to works created within living memory. A favored camping place during the annual wet season, the rock faces at Ubirr have been painted and repainted for millennia. The sequence of rock art at Ubirr and other sites in Arnhem Land has been divided into three periods: Pre-Estuarine (ca. 40,000?–6000 B.C.), Estuarine (ca. 6000 B.C.–500 A.D.), and Fresh Water (ca. 500 A.D.–present). These classifications are based on the changing style and iconography of the images. [Source: Eric Kjellgren Department of Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org, October 2000 \^/]

“Pre-Estuarine rock art is characterized by a variety of images in red ocher pigments. In historic times, such images were created with brushes made from bark, feathers, or the chewed ends of sticks, and it is likely similar tools were used in the past. Among the most distinctive images are the animated stick figures of the Dynamic Figure tradition, which are often depicted clad in elaborate regalia and shown participating in hunting and other activities. Some contemporary Aboriginals identify these figures as mimi, slender spirits who taught humans to hunt and paint during the Dreaming, or creation period. In present-day Aboriginal belief, many Dynamic Figure images are said to have been painted by mimi rather than humans. Pre-Estuarine rock paintings also include depictions of extinct animals and enigmatic beings that combine the features of humans and wild yams. \^/

“Rock painting had several functions in historic times. Images were created to increase the population of game animals or for use in magic. Depictions of important Dreaming beings are common, as well as secular paintings made for amusement. Although the original significance of Ubirr's prehistoric images is unknown, they likely had similar functions.” \^/

Archaeology and Preservation of Early Aboriginal Rock Art

Matt Stirn wrote in Archaeology Magazine: Although Australia contains thousands of documented archaeological sites, including camps, quarries, butchering sites, and stone tool production areas, there are nevertheless obstacles for researchers working to understand its history. Low amounts of soil accumulation coupled with intense seasonal flooding have made it difficult to date sites stratigraphically. And there is little variation in the styles of chipped stone artifacts over time, which stands in the way of accurate stylistic dating and of recognizing different populations who may have used a particular assemblage of tools. To help construct a more accurate narrative, researchers have turned to Arnhem Land’s rock art. [Source: Matt Stirn, Archaeology Magazine, May/June 2021]

University archaeologists have worked closely with Traditional Owners and Aboriginal collaborators to better understand the significance of styles and scenes. “By combining traditional knowledge with Western science we can take a two-toolbox approach to research that gives us more options and better outcomes for both the Indigenous and world communities,” says Tacon. In the course of the team’s work, several elders have explained that rock art acts as a community’s memory repository, depicting past experiences and tales that can be used to teach future generations. Traditional Owners explain that the Maliwawa Style figures were made by their ancient ancestors to tell stories of their culture and experiences. “They told us that their sites are like books,” says Tacon, “and that large rock art sites are like libraries that hold the stories of all the people who lived and visited the area in the past.”

Archaeologists in Arnhem Land in northern Australia have documented that millennia-old rock art scenes are being eroded by tropical cyclones that have become more frequent and intense as a result of modern climate change. “The landscape of Arnhem Land is resilient and highly adapted to extremes in essentially everything both long and short term,” says Rowe, “but that’s not to give the impression that this region can cope with current threats.” The next step for rock art researchers in West Arnhem Land is preservation, to ensure that the ancient panels will offer knowledge and guidance to future generations as they have done for millennia. At the same time, rock art in Arnhem Land is a living canvas, and new paintings will take the place of old ones that may have faded, commemorating events and messages from the present as they have done in the past.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Australian Museum, National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP and various books and other publications.

Last updated September 2025