Overview

The rock art of Australia is among the oldest, most complex, and most fascinating manifestations of human creativity and imagination in the world. Aboriginal people used art to record their experiences, ceremonies, and knowledge by embedding their understanding of the world in the landscape over many generations. Indeed, rock art serves as archives and libraries for Australia's Indigenous people. It is, in effect, its repository of memory. This volume explores Indigenous perspectives on rock art. It challenges the limits and assumptions of traditional, academic ways of understanding and knowing the past by showing how history has literally been painted 'on the rocks'. Each chapter features a biography of an artist or family of artists, together with an artwork created by contemporary artist Gabriel Maralngurra. By bringing together history, archaeology, and Indigenous artistic practice, the book offers new insights into the medium of rock art and demonstrates the limits of academic methods and approaches.

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9781009523318

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Laura Rademaker is Australian Research Council DECRA Research Fellow at the Australian National University. A historian of Indigenous Australia, she is a winner of the Australian Historical Association's Hancock Prize and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia's Paul Bourke Award for her interdisciplinary and community-based historical methods. Sally K. May is Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow in the School of Humanities, University of Adelaide. Her research, which is based on more than twenty years of fieldwork in northern Australia, focuses on relationships between people, landscapes, material culture, and imagery. Gabriel Maralngurra is a renowned Australian Indigenous artist. He also works as a translator, artistic mentor, tour guide, and co-researcher in Aboriginal and colonial history and art from western Arnhem Land.  He is one of the founding members of Injalak Arts and is currently its co-manager. Joakim Goldhahn, author of Birds in the Bronze Age, is an internationally acclaimed rock art researcher who also works in the fields of Indigenous Archaeology and the European Bronze Age.

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