In the Face of European Colonization, Aboriginal Artists Created Images of Powerful Beings, Study Finds

In the face of European colonization, Aboriginal artists created images of powerful ancestral beings, a new study has found. The results of the eight-year study, led by Paul Taçon, an archaeologist at Griffith University, were published online by the journal Australian Archaeology August 14.

Awunbarna is a landmark located in the northwestern region of Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory. The area, which is owned by the Aboriginal Amurdak people, is renowned for its Aboriginal rock paintings made over the last 15,000 years.

Also known as Mount Borradaile, Awunbarna is particularly known for its rock art produced in the 1800s and early 1900s, which is characterized not only by traditional images of local fauna, but by the introduction of new subject matter, including painted hands and depictions of European ships and firearms.

It is also notable for its numerous very large paintings of humans, animals, and ancestral entities, including Rainbow Serpents, likewise produced after the arrival of Europeans to the region. While extra-large paintings were made at various times in western Arnhem land, beginning as long as 18,000 years ago, the number of oversized figures increased during the contact period, both in Awunbarna and throughout the region.

To address the question of why huge paintings became common post-contact, Taçon and his colleagues worked with senior Amurdak traditional owner Charlie Mungulda to record rock art 165 sites across the Awunbarna region. They concluded that the increased production of such paintings was a way of reasserting power over their land and culture, then under threat by colonization.

The team focused on images of Rainbow serpents, including one 20 feet long with a fierce crocodile head, a long tongue, and razor-sharp teeth. They also reviewed a depiction of a giant man and the only known rock art image of a whale. In addition to paintings of Rainbow Serpents, they also recorded a large, serpent-shaped stone arrangement measuring 125 feet in length.

While dating the paintings is difficult, the researchers found that a number of images of Rainbow Serpents were rendered on top of older paintings in white pipe clay. Such paintings do not last long, usually eroding within a few hundred years and sometimes within a few decades, leading the team to conclude they were made post-contact.

Rainbow Serpents are ancestral beings believed to have the power to fold time and are associated with change. Learning to accept, cope with, and perhaps control change is one of the lessons taught by Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent stories.

Large paintings of these creatures and other entities, the authors of the study write, were a visually compelling way to make “authoritative declarations about the importance of maintaining Aboriginal tradition in the face of cultural change.”