Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows rock art expert Percy Trezise describing and interpreting Aboriginal rock art at the Split Rock gallery in Queensland. The clip opens with footage of a group of men walking along the escarpment to the rock gallery. Shots of Trezise in close-up precede a panning shot of the gallery showing the range of overlapping images displayed there. Trezise speculates on the age of the art and talks about two images in particular, an ancient petroglyph etched on the rock and a painted spirit figure. Music with clapping sticks begins the clip.

Educational value points

• The Split Rock gallery is one of the world’s most significant rock art sites. It has been included on the Australian Heritage Estate and listed by UNESCO. Located 13 km south of the town of Laura on Cape York, it contains a large array of paintings, engravings and drawings of animals, humans and ancestral spirit figures. The artwork presents a rich pictorial record of the spiritual life and identity of the local Indigenous people.

• Percy Trezise (1923-2005) explored this rock art site in 1959 and went on to visit and record 1,500 other rock art sites in the Cape York region. Working with Elders and respecting their knowledge, he recognised the significance of the sites for Indigenous peoples and documented them for all Australians. It was through his efforts that the sites were declared a protected area in 1975. Trezise gained fame as an artist, writer, painter and rock art authority.

• The artwork in the Split Rock gallery includes superimposed examples of pictograph and petroglyph images. Petroglyphs, in this case carved geometric shapes, are created by removing part of a rock surface by carving, hammering or abrading. Pictographs are images drawn or painted on the rock surface using dry or wet pigments, usually ochre. The fact that the pictographs occur in layers over the carvings denotes lengthy human occupation of the area.

• The Anurra, one of the figures painted on the wall, is the more malign manifestation of the Quinkan, a spirit being sacred to the Indigenous peoples of the region, the Agayrra-Timara and Wulburjubur-Bama peoples. Trezise acknowledges the sacred nature of the site to Indigenous people based on their belief in the continuing presence of the Quinkan. The sandstone region of Cape York, which contains many rock art galleries, is known as the Quinkan Reserve.

• Trezise speculates on the age of the rock art, suggesting that the early rock engravings could be 10,000 years old. While the date is still subject to scientific enquiry, the Gallery’s engraved walls have now been dated to more than 13,000 years ago. Layers of pigments in two rock shelters on Cape York have been dated to 25,000 and almost 30,000 years old. The oldest known human occupation of rock shelters in the Quinkan region is dated to 32,000 years ago.

• The knowledge and viewpoints of the local people on the rock art, which their ancestors produced and whose Dreaming continues, are not acknowledged in the clip – a common practice at the time when non-Indigenous commentary was regarded as the only authentic authority by television producers and audiences. Such reporting was not reflective of Trezise’s practice, however, as he worked respectfully with Elders to understand and record culture.

A group of men walk along the escarpment to the rock gallery at the Split Rock gallery in Queensland.
Narrator For the past nine years an airlines captain has been finding and drawing Aboriginal cave paintings. He spots them by flying low over the country and he’s found 200 of them. His name is Percy Trezise.

Percy Trezise is interviewed at the rock gallery. Footage of him speaking is intercut with images of the rock paintings.
Percy Trezise Well, this was once a sacred site and I’m certain by the debris about here – the campfire debris – that this was converted to secular use, to family living.
Interviewer Now, Perce, why is this gallery so interesting to you?
Percy Because of the tremendous number of super-impositions. One style is painted one on top of the other and it actually starts off with the very earliest of the chronological sequence of art styles in that ancient petroglyph there, the curious abstract shape with the – oh, and there’s other meandering lines here.
Interviewer Do you know how old that would be?
Percy No, we haven’t – we do know that Aborigines were rock engraving 5, 6000 years ago in Arnhem Land but I suspect that these could be very much older. They might – I think possibly in terms of 10,000 years for the very earliest of the rock engravings.
Interviewer Now, which ones would be the newest?
Percy Well, the most recent painting here would be, I think, that spirit figure up there – Anurra. That’s the one with his legs bent up and his long tail there. He’s a spirt figure – Quinkan – which – he bounces about on his penis and they say that he can travel half a mile in one hop and he’s potentially malignant.