Rock Art of the Dreamtime.

Tacon, Paul S.C.

For at least 60,000 years the Indigenous peoples of Australia have been transforming natural landscapes into culturally meaningful and relevant places in enduring, long-lasting ways. This was one of the ways people socialized the land and now more than 100,000 rock-art sites, consisting of engravings, paintings, stencils, prints and motifs made from native beeswax dot the continent. Unlike many other parts of the world, however, dozens of large, significant sites continue to be 'discovered' by scientists and amateurs each year. And also unique to Australia, there are still many knowledgeable elders who painted or engraved the land or witnessed their relatives adorning rock-shelters with elaborate imagery when they were young.

There has been a steady interest in Australian rock-art by non-Indigenous people for over 220 years but since the early 1980s rock-art research in Australia has increased at an incredible rate, so that each year a vast array of scholarly papers and reports burst into print. Lately there has been a trend to synthesize the new data with the old and Josephine Flood's Rock art of the Dreamtime is the most recent attempt. This well-written and well-illustrated account is both scholarly and a darn good read! Flood injects the thrill and excitement of discovery into the mind of the reader, as well as warning of the pitfalls of academic rivalry in the pursuit of knowledge.

Although much of the book focuses on the more ancient forms of engraved art, Flood concludes with brief discussions about the contemporary Aboriginal significance of tropical Australia's wonderful rock paintings. Unfortunately, there is little discussion of the painted or engraved rock pictures of the greater Sydney region and a number of other significant areas, such as those of Western Australia, also get no more than a mention. Another shortcoming is an overemphasis on Lesley Maynard's now somewhat dated dichotomy of 'Panaramitee' versus 'Silhouette' art (sometimes referred to as 'styles'). In a sense there is an oversimplification and the reader is left with the impression that the entire body of Australian rock-art was motivated by only two major influences. The changing nature of Australian rock-art, whether it be temporal or geographic, is far more convoluted and complex.

Rock art of the Dreamtime is well researched but the referencing system is irritating because of the over-use of 'op. cit' when referring to an article mentioned chapters earlier. Furthermore, some key references cannot be found in the Notes section. Another annoyance, with what is generally a very informative book, is the occasional mis-quoting. For instance, on p. 132 statements by Christopher Chippindale, Paul Tacon and Joan Vastokas have been all muddled up.

Finally, I totally disagree with Flood's speculation about Australian art origins. She argues the art developed as a result of a 'resource crash' that followed the claimed human-driven extinction of megafauna, basing this on speculations by naturalists such as Tim Flannery. She also suggests that cupules and other designs may have resulted from increase ceremonies. I would argue that the art has less to do with increase rituals, sympathetic magic or the pursuit of megafaunal ghosts but reflects instead a need to mark, map and socialize landscapes - to transform and humanize them in recognizable, long-lasting ways as well as to communicate to others essential features about places and spaces. In more recent times, this has led to rock-art sites, and the landscapes they are an integral part of, becoming pictorial records of a history of changing social and environmental circumstance. Right across northern Australia knowledgeable Indigenous elders refer to rock-art sites in this way and it is clear that, at least in recent times, rock-art imagery was used to teach the young and uninitiated about both the past and present. Of course, there were also many other factors that led to the production of the hundreds of varied rock-art motifs and subjects scattered across the continent and we should also not forget that it is very common for visual imagery to have several levels of meaning in Aboriginal societies.

These issues aside, I regard Rock art of the Dreamtime as a very important book - if anyone is at all interested in Australia's past I highly recommend it. Ideally it should be read in conjunction with Robert Layton's Australian rock art: a new synthesis (1992) and Tim Flannery's The future eaters (1994), in order more fully to experience the richness of Australia's unique past and its lessons for the present. It should also be kept in mind that any book on Australian rock-art soon becomes out-of-date because of the prolific nature of current research and publishing. New finds, ideas and interpretations appear monthly. No doubt new books by Flood and others will follow as we attempt to make sense of the hundreds of new threads of evidence available for the piecing together of the rich tapestry that is Australian rock-art.

PAUL S.C. TACON Division of Anthropology, Australian Museum, Sydney

References

FLANNERY, T. 1994. The future eaters. Chatswood (NSW): Reed Books.

LAYTON, R. 1992. Australian rock art: a new synthesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.