Rock Art Research

We address the questions of how two rock paintings identified as Moluccan fighting boats came to be made at Awunbarna (Mount Borradaile), far inland from the coast, and who could have made them.  Aboriginal people from the Cobourg Peninsula, immediately north of Awunbarna, were boarding foreign watercraft since at least 1705 and travelling to and from Sulawesi on Macassan perahus regularly since at  least the 1820s. But in historical records of the 1830s to 1850s from the settlement of Victoria, Port Essington  there are a few named individuals who stand out as sea voyagers on foreign vessels. One Aboriginal man,  Alamurdie (Jack White), who travelled around and across the Cobourg Peninsula on foot, visited several  Moluccan islands on a ship in 1839. The rock paintings of the Moluccan boats are only a few days walk from  Victoria, and the Amurdak speaking people on whose land the paintings are situated have long had close relations with their northern Iwaidja neighbours. We argue that Alamurdie could well have been the person who made the paintings, perhaps after his 1839 voyage to the islands of Tanimbar, Aru, and Kei in what is today Indonesia.