Rock Art Research

This paper traces the role of rock art in the process of pastoral place-making on Ngadjuri Aboriginal lands in the mid-north region of South Australia, from initial invasion by British settlers in the 1860s to the present day. A combination of archaeological analysis, archival research and ethnographic insights facilitates a deeper understanding of how rock art has played an active role in triggering particular kinds of colonial encounters between settlers and Ngadjuri people. I argue that the affective presence of rock art in the landscape invites human action and interaction through its very existence. In a sense, rock art is the agency of dead people. Other forms of material culture may also be interpreted as agents of the dead. In the first stages of settlement, British settlers inscribed their names, initials and other images adjacent to Aboriginal rock art as a form of memorialisation and as one way of embedding their identities on unfamiliar and often hostile landscapes. In recent years, rock art has played an active role in motivating contemporary pastoralists (sometimes the descendants of early colonisers) to reach out to Ngadjuri people to obtain a greater understanding of an Indigenous past that has been largely erased from the region. The overall movement is from existential disquiet and heritage erasure to acknowledgement, respect and reconciliation.