Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows rock art at Carnarvon Gorge in southern Queensland, where the major landmarks were centres of religious and ceremonial life for the local Aboriginal people. The ochre stencils on the walls of Cathedral Cave in the Gorge portray artefacts and weaponry such as lil-lils and other kinds of boomerangs. Grahame Walsh theorises that stencilled artwork in the Gorge was used as a language as well as an art form, and he also theorises about the meanings behind the artwork. He says, ‘there’s a fair chance some of the stencil art that we’re looking at is towards 20,000 years old’.

Educational value points

• The clip shows Aboriginal rock art in the form of the stencils, engravings and freehand paintings in Carnarvon Gorge and stresses that such art was created to pass on spiritual beliefs, laws and culture. The stencils in Cathedral Cave were created by blowing, with the mouth, a mixture of water and ochre over an object such as a hand or a weapon placed against the wall, then removing the object to reveal its outline.

• In the clip, Grahame Walsh presents stencil art as a language as well as an art form, but some other experts do not accept this interpretation. He sees particular hand stencils as symbols, for example the vertical arm as representing an emu. He says this is language. Other experts argue that it is impossible to know precise meanings of such ancient materials unless other information is available to confirm it.

• The stencils in Cathedral Cave are sources of information about the material lives of the peoples who produced them. They depict hands, feet, goannas, animal tracks and tools including axes, coolamons (wooden dishes) and hunting boomerangs. There are shields and weapons including boomerangs and lil-lils (boomerangs shaped like a club with a hump on one side). Some stencils are painted over, reflecting the ongoing nature of the tradition.

• Carnarvon Gorge is in Queensland, 400 km north-west of Brisbane on the eastern side of the Carnarvon Range, part of the Great Dividing Range. The Gorge is about 32 km long, 45 to 370 m wide and its walls rise to 180 m. The Gorge walls are sandstone and in these walls are crevices, some of which contain stencils of hands and artefacts as well as other images and symbols of Dreaming of the local Bidjara and Garingbal peoples.

• The style of rock art in each region is distinct and different, and Walsh says that stencil art often appeals less to Western aesthetics than art that highlights figures, such as the Wandjina figures in the Kimberley that have white outlined bodies and halo-like headdresses, or the 'X-ray’ style in western Arnhem Land showing the internal anatomy of animals.

• Grahame Walsh (1944-2007) had been passionate about rock art in Australia since he was shown examples of stencilled hands in the Queensland bush as a child. His work in the Kimberley in Western Australia has been controversial due to his theory that the 'Bradshaw’ figures in the Kimberley are so different from other art that they must have been painted before Aboriginal people occupied the region.