Download 1996: Book review: Bradshaws: Ancient paintings of northwest

BOOK REVIEWS
BRADSHAWS: ANCIENT PAINTINGS OF NORTHWEST AUSTRALIA by G d a m e L. Walsh. Edition Limit&,
Switzerland (1994) 285 pages. ISBN 2 970022 1 3 (hardcover). Price $120.00 plus postage.
M.J. Morwood
Bradshaw rock paintings of small (usually) red human
figures wearing a range of ceremonial regalia and which
appear to 'float', have long been recognised as a highly distinctive style of rock painting - especially in the degree of figurative detail and the technical skills of the artists. A unique
feature of the Bradshaw paintings in comparison to other
Australian rock art is that the feet invariably point in the same
direction. Bradshaws also predate the historical Wandjina
rock painting tradition and the associated Wandjina ideology.
The fact that Bradshaw paintings are of unknown age has
added to their mystique.
In fact, Bradshaws are so distinctive compared to most
other Australian rock art styles, that some have suggested
that they are evidence for foreign contact. For instance, on
ABC Television, Les Hiddins, The Bushtucker Man noted the
resemblance between Bradshaws and African rock art styles.
Others have observed the similarities between Bradshaws
and rock art styles in Southern Africa, Northern Afkica, central
India and Spain. It appears that the famed Australian
cultural cringe extends well back into prehistory.
The Kimberley region in the northwest of this continent is
the most likely point of contact for new influences or peoples
moving into Australia. The Bradshaws could therefore represent outside contact. However, if very similar rock art styles
have appeared at different times and places throughout the
world, independent invention is a much more parsimonious
explanation. There is no real reason to invoke non-Aboriginal
artists to explain the Bradshaw paintings and certainly no
reason to assume this. Then, of course, there is the evidence
fiom Western Arnhem Land.
The rock art sequence in Western Arnhem Land is long,
complex and largely undated. There are also many parallels
with the Kimberley. In both regions, the oldest surviving rock
art comprises deeply weathered pecked cupules, while the
oldest surviving paintings are large paintings of (mainly)
animals. Later the Arnhem Land rock painting sequence
features DynarnicMimi figures, which have many parallels
with classic Kimberley Bradshaw paintings.
These resemblances are so many and so specific that some
researchers have suggested that these two regions were once part
of a single rock art province. In fact, Darrell Lewis (1988)
has argued that the widespread and relatively homogeneous
character of the Bradshaw/Dynarnic painting style means that
the style probably dates to a time of low population density
and environmental stress right across the KimberleyNictoria
RiverIArnhem Land area. He suggests that they may date
to the height of the last glacial maximum. This is another
circumstance where a little bit of hard evidence is going to
out-weigh a lot of speculation. (A dating program for Kimberley rock art is currently in progress, see Morwood et al.
1994).
Auslralian Archaeology, Number 43, 1996
Given this background, what is the value of Grahame
Walsh's latest book? Firstly, it puts on record many more
e x a m ~ l e s o Bradshaw
f
paintings. The book is285 Pagesin
length and of these 197 are devoted to hll-page colour photographs (mainly of Bradshaws) and accompanying extracted
line drawings. Walsh has spent some 18 years tracking down
rock art sites in the Kimberley, and this book shows some of
the results of this work. There is much here for Aboriginal
communities, scholars, artists and the general public.
Overall, this is a beautiful book about beautiful art. The
standard of rock art photography is only matched in Australia by that in Walsh's previous book, Australia's Greatest
Rock Art, and by George Chaloupka in his masterly Journey in
Time, which syntheses his long-time study of rock paintings in
Western Arnhem Land.
On the down side, the text is uneven. When dealing with
his speciality, rock art and its environmental context, Walsh is
unsurpassed. In his general Kimberley research, he has
gone to extraordinary trouble to obtain accurate recordings
of rock art sites and their cultural contexts, to work out a
relative rock art chronology based on superimpositions, to
document the history of rock art research in the region, and to
understand Kimberley Aboriginal ethnography (especially
Wandjina ideology). Thus the chapters in this book dealing
with the Kimberley setting (Ch. l), the history of Bradshaw
discovery (Ch. 2), the Kimberley rock art sequence (Ch. 3),
pre-Bradshaw art styles (Ch. 4), and the Bradshaws (Ch. 5), are
informative and well constructed. Most of the data given on
the rock art sequence are also based upon his own detailed
field observations.
The final three chapters tackle the questions 'Who were
the Bradshaw artists? (Ch. 6), 'How did they anive and what
happened to them? (Ch. 7) and 'How old is Kimberley rock
art? (Ch. 8). To all these questions a straight-forward answer,
given the current state of knowledge, would be 'We don't
know'. Instead, Walsh is determined to make a political point
- that during the long prehistory of the Kimberley region,
there are likely to have been (many) major changes in the
ethnic identity of the people living there. He therefore
argues that we can not assume that the ancestors of the
present-day Aboriginal people were responsible for the
Bradshaw paintings.
This view is clearly stated in the text (p.57) and is also
apparent in his proposed schema for the Kimberley Rock
Art sequence by which all rock art periods are placed into
three broad epochs separated by major breaks in style, theme
and technique (i.e. Archaic, Erudite and Aborigine). Only
Wandjina and preceding Clawed Hand painting styles are
attributed to Aborigines in this schema, while Bradshaw
paintings are all firmly positioned in the preceding Erudite
(i.e. non-Aborigine) Epoch.
There seems to be some confusion on the part of Walsh
between the terms 'ethnic' and 'race'. He is cautiously guarded
in pointing out that we cannot be certain about the ethnic
identity of the Bradshaw artists, but the 'mystery race' interpretation has received much heavy-handed publicity in the
general media, as well as adverse comment from the Australian
Book Reviews
archaeological community. For instance, in a press release
from the Australian Archaeological Association, Dr A n M e
Rosenfeld is quoted as saying: 'It is the aesthetics and elegance of the figures that is being used to substantiate a nonAboriginal authorship for these works'. She continues by
noting that such a conclusion is ill-founded given the
internationally-recognised aesthetic value of much contemporary Aboriginal art.
The human prehistory of the Kimberley region certainly
involved cultural, technological, linguistic, artistic, and genetic
changes. For instance, at various times, local population
extinctions and replacement seem to have occurred as a result
of climatic fluctuations and environmental deterioration during the Pleistocene (O'Connor 1990). The sheer linguistic complexity of the region today also indicates that the cultural
sequence has been complex and probably involved contact
and genetic input from adjacent areas of SE Asia. To argue for
human cultural and genetic continuity in the Kimberley region
over a minimum of 40,000 years, is to argue for a degree of
conservatism without parallel anywhere else in the world and
which is at odds with the current archaeological record.
Even so, there is no basis for ascribing Bradshaws, or any
other prehistoric Australian rock art, to any other than the
ancestors of contemporary Australian Aborigines.
It is worth noting here that at the time of European
contact there was significant cultural, linguistic, artistic and
genetic variation between indigenous groups across Australia,
but all were by definition 'Aboriginal'. Similar chronological
variability between Aboriginal groups is evident in the archaeological record. If the Bradshaws prove to be relatively
recent in age (i.e. Holocene), as preliminary AMS determinations would suggest, then one could argue for a fairly
direct line of Aboriginal descent fiom Bradshaw artists to
present-day local people. If the Bradshaw paintings prove
to be much older, for instance if they were to predate the
last glacial maximum and the associated depopulation of the
region, then the Aboriginal line of descent is less direct, but
still clear.
Rather than explaining changes in the rock art sequence in
terms of ethniclracial replacement, however, an alternate and
simpler explanation for the Bradshaw paintings might be
their association with a prolific, but short-lived cult - either
home-grown or resulting fkom outside contact. A number of
such cults &re known to have spread throughout the Kimberley
region during recent times and are evident in the most recent
rock art phase. At least two show definite Indonesian influence (see Crawford 1969).
If you are interested in Australian rock art, you must
have this book on your shelf. The Bradshaw paintings of
the Kimberley region are exquisite and Walsh is a consummate photographer with a fanatical eye for detail. The
volume is expensive, but once out of print, 1 predict that it
will quickly become a valued collector's item. Despite some
problems, the book manages to convey a sense of mystery,
as well as the excitement of discovery. We all need this from
time to time.
Lewis, D. 1988 The Rock Paintings of Arnhem Land, rlustrdia:
Social, Ecological and Material Culture Changes in the PostGlacial Period. Oxford: BAR International series 4 15.
Morwood, M.J.,Walsh, G.L. and Watchman. A. 1994 The dating
potential of rock art in the Kimberley, N.W. Australia. Rock
Art Research 1 1(2):79-87.
O'Connor, S. 1990 30,000 years in the Kimberley: A prehistory of
the islands of the Buccaneer Archipelago and adjacent main-
land, west Kimberley, Western Australia. Ph.D. thesis. University of Western Australia, Nedlands.
FIRST IN THEIR FIELD: WOMEN AND AUSTRALIAN
ANTHROPOLOGY edited by Julie Marcus. !Melbourne
University Press (1993) 189 pages. ISBN 0 522 84466 9
(paperback). Price $24.95.
Claire Smith
This volurne is a fascinating collection of essays focussing
on the pioneering work of early women anthropologists in
Australia. As Marcus comments in the Preface, not all of
the women who are the subjects of these essays have been
recognised as anthropologists as such (indeed, part of the
impetus for the volume, I would think). though each has provided a unique contribution to anthropological knowledge
and to public understandings of Aboriginal life. The book is
the result of a small conference held at Glenelg, Adelaide
in 1990, entitled 'When the Voice of the Turtle shall be heard
in the Land ... Women and Anthropology in Australia', and a
workshop held at the Academy of the Humanities, Canberra in
1991 . Each essay is written by a fern in ist scholar of established stature.
The volume opens with an overview article by Marie de
Lepervanche which discusses how issues of gender and race
have contributed to a lack of recognition of women's contributions to anthropology. She provides an interesting discussion of Rabinow's (1 985: 12) observation that:
It is impolite in many places to talk about institutional racism, sexism, and even colonialism and
anthropology. Who enforces these civilities and
why?
De Lepervanche comments (p. 1 1):
True, anthropology has prided itself on being a
pioneer in gender studies, but it has been curiously
silent on the racist and sexist implications of anthropological knowledge.
This volume takes an important step towards redressing this
silence.
The first biographical paper is Isabel McBryde's inquiry
into the influences that shaped the life and values of Mary
Ellen Murray-Prior, whose meticulously documented ethnographic collections of material from northeast New South
Wales are held in the Australian Museum, Sydney, and the
Rijkmuseurn voor Volkenkunde, Lieden. Taken together, these
collections comprise over half the known examples of Aboriginal material culture from the Richmond River district in
major museums. McBryde interprets Murray-Prior's painstaking scientific recording and collection as 'an inheritance of
concern' which faced the responsibilities of being disReferences
Crawford, I.C. 1969 Late prehistoric changes in Aboriginal culture possessors. One implication is that perhaps there was also
in Kimberley, Western Australia. Ph.D. thesis, University a need to create sense and order from the non-sense and chaos
of London.
of dispossession.
Australian Archaeology, Number 43. 1996