The Incredible Human Journey

by Alice Roberts

  These very early dates for colonisation of north Australia have been questioned by other archaeologists, including Jim Allen and Jo Kamminga (who discovered Malankunanja and also dug at Nauwalabila; I was to meet Jo later in China).

  Critics of the early dates from Malakunanja II and Nauwalabila have raised concerns about the accuracy of themoluminescence and OSL dating, and, in addition, have suggested that the artefacts could have moved downwards in the sandy sediments, ending up in earlier layers that they didn’t really belong to. In 1998, James O’Connell and Jim Allen argued that dates of around 35,000 to 40,000 years for the first colonisation of Australia would make more sense in the context of the existing archaeology between Africa and Australia.25 Six years later, the same authors had revised their date of colonisation back to 42,000 to 45,000 years ago, based on archaeology within Australia, although this is still very much a ‘short chronology’.26 It’s a conservative position, and certainly ignores the possibility of the loss of earlier archaeological sites beneath the sea. In contrast, David Bulbeck seemed content with a date of 60,000 years ago for the first colonisation of Australia: it sat well with his suggestion of a rapid dispersal of humans around the rim of the Indian Ocean to Sunda and Sahul.27 However, the hard evidence is still lacking for those who doubt the dates from Malakunanja and Nauwalabila.

  Rhys Jones and his colleagues published replies to the criticisms of their dates for Malakunanja and Nauwalabila, arguing that the stone tools were found orientated flat, not angled, so were unlikely to have edged their way downwards in the sediment. The dates from the two rockshelters corroborate each other, and, at higher levels within the rockshelters, the luminescence dates tallied with radiocarbon dates, suggesting that the former were indeed reliable.24,28 I had bumped into Bert Roberts in India, where he was collecting samples at Jwalapuram. He had seemed utterly convinced that the first Australians could have reached the northern coast of the continent by soon after 60,000 years ago, and he was sure of his methods, and of the conclusions. But still, there are many archaeologists who do not believe the evidence to be either robust or conclusive.

  In 1996, an article was published in the journal Antiquity that caused a huge splash in the Australian media, and sent a strong wave of scepticism spreading through the archaeological community.29 Another rockshelter in the Northern Territory, Jinmium, had been excavated, and the thermoluminescence dates for layers bearing quartz flakes were extraordinary: 116,000 to 176,000 years old. However, just two years later, the excitement was over when the site was redated and found to be less than 10,000 years old.30

  Mulvaney and Kamminga10 used Jinmium as a cautionary tale, to warn both professional archaeologists and the media not to grasp so readily for the ‘Holy Grail of Australian archaeology’: the earliest date of colonisation of Australia. So, are Malakunanja and Nauwalabila the real thing? I’d like to think so, but I’ll keep an open mind as more evidence comes to light. It’s clear that the critics are not yet convinced. At the moment, those two rockshelters hold out the tantalising possibility that Australia may have been colonised 60,000 years ago, about 20,000 years before the first evidence of modern humans in Europe. But more archaeology and more dates are needed to clarify the situation.

  Art in the Landscape: Gunbalanya (Oenpelli), Northern Territory, Australia

  The traces of ground ochre at Malakunanja and Nauwalabila suggest that rock art could have a very deep history in Australia. Pieces of ground-down ochre are enigmatic and frustrating in many ways: like finding a pencil stub but not being able to find what was written or drawn with this implement. There are some more recent but still ancient rock paintings in north-west Australia that have been dated to more than 20,000 years old – but nothing as old as the ‘crayons’ from Malakunanja and Nauwalabila. The sophisticated, figurative style of the rock art in north-west Australia has links with paintings in Borneo dating back to more than 10,000 years ago. Mike Morwood argues that the particular complexity of the art and language families of this region provides an additional reason to suspect that Australia was colonised from the north.1 Links between styles of ancient rock art may be a little flimsy, but there is no doubt that rock art has deep roots in Australia – and it is still important today.

  I was very keen to meet some practising Aboriginal artists and find out more about what their art meant to them. In many places, Aboriginal art has become popularised, sanitised and commercialised, but I was going to a place where (I hoped) the old traditions were being kept alive. When I flew to the Northern Territory it was the middle of the wet season. Sites like Malakunanja were very difficult to get to, but so were towns and villages. For months during the wet season, the settlement of Gunbalanya (also called Oenpelli) was effectively an island, surrounded by water as creeks flooded and rivers broke their banks and coalesced. The only way in was by plane – so I caught a small Gunbalanya Air Cessna. We took off from Darwin, and flew about 300km east over a wet, green landscape where drowned trees stood up like white matchsticks in the flooded creeks, and engorged rivers short-circuited their meanders to flow northwards to the sea. We landed on a tiny airstrip at Gunbalanya, and I headed straight for Injalak Arts & Crafts Centre.

  Gunbalanya is a community of about a thousand people, the vast majority of whom are Aboriginal. Most are Kunwinjku people, a discrete tribal group in western Arnhem Land, with their own language. They call themselves ‘Bininj’, and refer to white people as ‘balander’ (which may be a derivative of ‘hollander’, after the Dutch settlers). About a quarter of the locals in Gunbalanya were artists: painters, sculptors and basketmakers.

  The Arts Centre, a single-storey building on the edge of the town, comprised a gallery, office and studio spaces. In the gallery there were beautiful paintings on bark and cartridge paper, painted didjeridus, burial logs, and piles of baskets. In the office, I met the director, Anthony Murphy, who managed the finances, arranged exhibitions and generally kept the thing going as a commercial enterprise. Through a door at the back of the office I was into the studio spaces. They were grubby and basic, but adequate. Aboriginal artists sat on concrete breeze blocks, painstakingly painting Dreamtime stories and animals on large sheets of cartridge paper.

  Graham Badari was painting a frieze of fruit bats on a blue-green background. Over the days that I was there, the black shapes of bats appeared, and then their bodies came alive with fine white edging and hatching.

  ‘Have you seen them?’ he asked. ‘They sleep in the day then start flying out as the sun goes down.’ I saw the bats, exactly as he said. At dusk, they left their perches in the tall trees and came alive, swooping down the streets of Gunbalanya.

  Gershom Garlngarr was painting an epic tale of death and destruction, on a red ochre ground. A black cleft in the earth had opened up and was swallowing creatures: turtles, echidnas and crocodiles; even Mimi spirits (who inhabit the rocks) and yawk yawks (mermaid-like water spirits of the billabongs and creeks) were being sucked to their fate. Anthony said that a similar painting had been used as a cultural objection – in court – against the opening of another uranium mine in the Northern Territory. This was powerful art.

  It reminded me of observations and conversations contained in Bruce Chatwin’s book about his travels in search of the Aboriginal ‘songlines’, ancient tracks that criss-cross Australia, a ‘labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia’, and which are passed on in song. The pathways are also known as the ‘Footprints of the Ancestors’, and Chatwin describes how these tracks are intimately linked with Aboriginal creation stories, which ‘tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path … and so singing the world into existence.’ The songlines also link up sacred places across the landscape. Chatwin met Arkady, who was mapping these sites, and who said, ‘To wound the earth … is to wound yourself, and if others wound the earth, they are wounding you. The land should be left untouched: as it was in th
e Dreamtime when the ancestors sang the world into existence.’2

  I walked through into a larger room, which had originally been used for screen-printing but was now acting as a dormitory. The trestle tables for laying out screens were being used as beds, and a group of artists were taking time out, lounging around and – bizarrely – watching reruns of The Bill on television. Outside the back of the Centre I found Wilfred Nawirridj, sitting on the floor and grinding a chunk of ochre on the concrete floor, ready to colour the background of a new painting. The ochres were gathered from around Gunbalanya, and determined the artists’ traditional palette: largely red, brown and yellow. The ritual of the painting started with the collection of the materials: the sites from which the ochres were gathered may be spiritually important to the artist, and various colours may also have ritual significance in the paintings. White clay and black charcoal were used for fine line work, for edges and crosshatching. Some artists were also excited by new colours available to them in tubes of gouache: purples, blues and greens, just as I had seen Graham using in his bat painting. Traditionally, a paste made from tree orchid roots was used as a bonding agent, and Wilfred showed me where an orchid had been deliberately seeded on to a tree just behind the Arts Centre. But Wilfred was mixing his ground ochre with a modern alternative: PVA glue. He thinned the mixture with water then applied it to cartridge paper with heavy strokes of a thick brush. The Injalak artists have been using heavy cartridge paper – more familiar to watercolourists – since the 1990s. They had traditionally used sheets of bark, but these were only harvestable during the wet season, and were also less stable over time.

  Gabriel Maralngurra, one of the founders of the Arts Centre, was also outside, sitting at a table and starting to paint in white on a red ochre ground.

  ‘Is there a story in this painting?’ I asked, as he carefully laid down white hatching against the red ochre ground.

  ‘Yeah. This one is about the flood and then the fresh water,’ he replied. ‘It’s from the beginning. These are the escarpments,’ he said, pointing out the hatched areas.

  ‘There’s the waterfalls, fresh water, and that’s the sea. That’s the rainbow serpent – making creeks. That’s when the creation started.’

  Ngalyod, the rainbow serpent, was one of the powerful creator spirits of the Dreamtime. In his painting, Gabriel was illustrating the great flood brought by Ngalyod, when fresh water started to flow. Meandering black lines in his painting expanded into billabongs. He was painstakingly filling in the flood with hatched white lines, or rarrk, using a fine brush with just four long fibres – made of sedge.

  ‘How long does it take you to do a painting?’ I asked Gabriel.

  ‘Probably take me about a week and a half,’ he replied.

  ‘How long have you been painting for?’

  ‘Oh … since I was twelve.’ I asked him if anyone had taught him to paint.

  ‘I used to sit with my grandfather,’ he said. ‘Sit next to him, see him paint, tell stories. That’s how I learnt from him.’

  ‘Are there any children learning to paint at the moment?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, there are. Schoolkids. Some of them even made a clay-mation about the Turtle and Echidna story.’

  (The tale of the Turtle and Echidna was a bizarre just-so story about how those animals originated. They had once both been women. One woman was meant to be looking after the other’s children but somehow ended up eating them instead. The children’s mother was understandably annoyed, and threw a stone at the greedy woman, which had stuck to her back and she became a long-necked turtle. The turtle, in turn, threw spears at the outraged mother, who became an echidna.)

  All the artists I had met at the Arts Centre were men. ‘Are there any women artists?’ I asked Gabriel. ‘No, not really. The women make baskets – secret women’s work!’ he smiled. The baskets themselves were works of art. Woven from pandanus leaves, they were coloured with natural pigments which echoed the ochres used traditionally in the paintings, but with the reds, browns and oranges combined with green and yellow plant dyes. There was a great range of different basketwork in the Arts Centre, from large, flat trays and mats to string bags and small, fluted dilly bags. These little bucket-shaped bags were both practical and symbolic; they could be used to carry bush food or sacred objects. Just as Gabriel had learnt to paint from his grandfather, young girls would sit with their mothers and grandmothers, watching them weaving and listening to their Dreamtime stories. They would also learn the practicalities of how to collect pandanus, bush string, pigments and bush food.3

  Gunbalanya is special not only for its thriving community of artists, but as an area containing a very rich concentration of rock art ‘galleries’, which can be visited only with permission from the traditional, Aboriginal landowners. I was lucky enough to be getting a personal guided tour by Wilfred and his cousin, Garry Djorlom. Gunbalanya lies on a coastal plain, just to the west of the ‘Stone Country’ of the Arnhem Land escarpment. The Arts Centre is named after Injalak Hill, an outlier of the escarpment, separated from the settlement by a lily-fringed billabong during the wet season.

  I went up on Injalak Hill with Wilfred and Garry. Getting there was a feat in itself; we had Land Rovers which we could drive into the creek up to the tops of their bonnets, but there would be parts that were too deep. We had taken a flat-bottomed boat with us as well, to navigate the last section of the billabong, which would have been fine if the water had stayed deep, but sometimes we were trying to float in less than a foot of water. It would get too shallow to use the motor, then the bottom of the boat would scrape along on the gravel, like nails down a blackboard, and we’d be forced to get out and wade alongside the boat, pushing it. This was rather nerve-racking as I’d been told that there were crocodiles around. We kept a beady eye open and I was very pleased not to see any.

  Eventually, we were back on dry land. Wilfred and Garry led me through tall grass (we were now on the lookout for snakes) and to the foot of Injalak Hill. We made our way up a narrow, winding path, between boulders which became larger as we climbed higher up the hillside. About halfway up, we paused on a flat outcrop and surveyed the landscape. We were looking down on the billabong, the lush green landscape, and Gunbalanya beyond. Garry told me about hunting in the bush. Although apparently living a settled existence, many of the Aboriginal families of Gunbalanya still went off into the countryside from time to time to find bush tucker. Garry said that people would do this when they’d had enough of eating bad, Western food from the supermarket.

  Whole families would head off into the bush to live more naturally, as their ancestors had done. The land looked lush and bountiful: it had always been a good place for hunter-gatherers, with abundant food all year round, and rocky escarpments providing shelter from tropical monsoons.

  We climbed further up the hill, and the ground levelled off. We were now in a clearing with a large, overhanging rock on one side. Garry and Wilfred gestured upwards: I looked at the rocky ceiling above me and an amazing sight met my eyes. The overhang was covered in paintings. It had been painted over and over: a great palimpsest of images stretching back who knows how many hundreds or thousands of years. The last paintings were done in the 1960s, and as far as Garry and Wilfred were concerned the earliest paintings went back into the Dreamtime, the time of their ancestors, when the world was young.

  All across this rock face were paintings of animals. Garry pointed out the different species to me: echidna, crocodile, turtle, kangaroo, snake, and many, many types of freshwater fish, including whiskered catfish, fat barramundi and slender long tom. After all, this was Fish-Dreaming (Injalak) Hill. Beyond a kangaroo’s head, a human-like arm reached out. The colours – red and yellow ochres, white and black – and the patterns including the hatching, or rarrk – were familiar from the paintings I had seen down at the Arts Centre, as was the ‘X-ray’ style of the barramundi, showing its spine.

  On first inspection, the paintings seemed to be about what animals
were available in this rich environment: a sort of à la carte menu for hunter-gatherers. But although this was one level of meaning, the various animals also stood for other things, including features of the landscape. Aboriginal mythology was very firmly tied to geography. Creation stories described how land and waters had arisen, but also how particular elements of the countryside had come into being. Some ancestral beings had even changed into parts of the landscape, to become sacred sites.

  Garry described how the children of Gunbalanya would still be brought up here to learn about their environment and their heritage from elders. The rock paintings were so much more than decoration: they were a method of communicating ideas. And, as I had already learnt, this tradition was much more ancient than writing.

  ‘Always pass it on, pass it on. That’s the real importance of painting,’ said Garry.

  Higher up on the hill, I followed Garry and Wilfred down narrow corridors formed by cracks between enormous boulders. A niche in one rocky wall formed a canvas for a very special piece of rock art. No animals here – this image was purely mythological. ‘This is a picture of the creation mother: Yingana,’ Wilfred told me. He loved nothing better than telling a story. He had a wonderful voice: slow and measured, and, quite strangely, English-sounding. I later found out he had been brought up by missionaries (Gunbalanya was originally a mission town). He sounded like an English country vicar telling parables from the pulpit.