Rock Art Network

ROCK ART NETWORK STATEMENT

Rock art - ancient paintings and engravings on rock surfaces - is a visual record of global human history. It is a shared heritage that links us to powerful ancestral worlds and magnificent landscapes of the past. It tells the story of the birthplaces of art, the dawn of artistic endeavors. It creates connections to significant places and depicts encounters with the surrounding living world. Through its existence nature and culture are connected in the landscape. It resonates with our individual and collective identity while stimulating a vital sense of belonging to a greater past. Rock art illustrates the passage of time over tens of thousands of years of environmental and cultural change. It incarnates the essence of human ingenuity and facilitates contacts today between cultures and aspects of spirituality. Rock art is artistically compelling and full of meaning. This fragile and irreplaceable visual heritage has worldwide significance, contemporary relevance and for many indigenous peoples is still part of their living culture. If we neglect, destroy, or disrespect rock art we devalue our future.

 © Rock Art Network

Carvings at the Bulgandry Aboriginal Art Site near Kariong were damaged, along with a separate sacred women's site dating back thousands of years, with each telling a unique story about Aboriginal culture and spirituality. Wiradjuri woman Minmi Gugubarra said the destruction of the ancient rock carvings at the women's site was heartbreaking, stating "The formations and the features of [Dinawan's] face, which have been here since those women who carved this thousands and thousands of years ago, have now been decapitated." Fire remnants also littered the ancient rock face.

Damage was evident as well at the Bulgandry site - within the Brisbane Water National Park - with motorcycle tracks and scratch marks over the rock carvings. The vandalism occurred despite the National Parks and Wildlife Act where it is an offence to "harm or desecrate" an Aboriginal object or place, and where there is a maximum penalty for individuals found guilty of damaging an Aboriginal place of a $550,000 fine or imprisonment for two years, or both.

University of Sydney historian Tristen Jones said vandalism was happening at important cultural sites right across Australia. Two men were recently convicted and fined $8,600 each in an Alice Springs local court for vandalising sacred Uluru cave art. Dr Jones said the ongoing instances of vandalism showed more education was needed. "Vandalism of places like that really represents an under-educated general Australian public on the significance of these places to Aboriginal communities," she said. "But [also] to the broader bigger story of the significance of that story to Australian and global history."

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Minmi Gugubarra, or
Lily Hodgson,is a proud
Wiradjuri woman.

 © Keira Proust

 

Minmi Gugubarra shows disrupted
ancient rock carvings at
Bulgandry Aboriginal Art Site.

 © Keira Proust

 

An ancient Aboriginal rock
carving of Baiame has signs
of motorcycle tracks over it.

 © Keira Proust

 

Kevin Duncan wants better
protections of Aboriginal
sacred sites put in place.

 © Keira Proust

 

The NPWS has put signage
in place at the Bulgandry
Aboriginal art site.

 © Keira Proust

 

Bulgandry Man,
Brisbane Water National Park,
NSW, Australia.

 © PRFenelon

Photograph: Bulgandry Man, Brisbane Water National Park, NSW, Australia, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.