AUSTRALIAN ART Aboriginal –

The magnum opus of Australian rock art researcher, Grahame L. Walsh (1944-2007), being his detailed study of the rock paintings of the Kimberley region of North-Western Australia.

Illustrated record of Kimberley rock art; makes comparisons with other examples of rock art and image forms from around the world, including the modern world, to provide context for the international reader; focuses on the Bradshaw style as well as much earlier periods; Kimberley rock art sequence – Archaic Epoch (Pecked Cupule Period and Irregular Infill Animal Period); Erudite Epoch (Bradshaw Period and Clothes Peg Figure Period); Aborigine Epoch ( Clawed Hand Period and Wandjina Period); Section A, “The Kimberley region and European discovery”, provides geographical, geological and historical information about the region and its settlement – Joseph Bradshaw; A.P. Elkin and the Frobenius Institut Expedition – 1938; Section B, “Challenging current beliefs” – issues surrounding the evidence of early settlement, archaeological findings, various dating methods and artists’ tools, techniques and symbols; radiocarbon dating; accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating; luminescence dating of pigments and substances used to make rock paintings; rock surfaces; monochrome, bichrome and polychrome paint colours; paint application techniques; images, signs,symbols and figures; art form or style; Section C, “Kimberley rock art” – description of rock art forms of the Archaic and Erudite Epochs – stylistic analysis and discussing the primary elements of identified groups of figures; Pecked Cupules; concave surface modification and Abraded Grooves; Irregular Infill Animal (IIA) Period; stencils and imprints; depictions of food and resource themes; anthropomorphs and mythological forms; Bradshaw igure styles – Tassel, Sash, Acorn, Bland, Broad Hipped , Schematised, Convex Sweep, Dynamic, Elegant Action Figures; Mantis, Stylised,Slim Chest, Eastern , Stick and Miniature; Clothes Peg Figure (CPF) Period, including stick figures, outline figures and figures depicting activities and weapons; Clawed Hand Period; superimposition practices and sequences.

Since their ‘discovery’ by pastoralist Joseph Bradshaw in 1891, the Bradshaw rock paintings of the Kimberley, or Gwion Gwion, have been the subject of controversy. There are approximately 100,000 rock art sites spread over a 50,000 square kilometre area of the Kimberley; the age of the paintings, which depict distinctively attired human figures with elongated head-dresses, pubic skirts, armlets and tassels, often shown holding barbed spears in scenes of hunting and display, is now estimated to be up to 70,000 years. According to Walsh, an amateur anthropologist, this art was made by people of a non-Aboriginal culture – most likely Asiatic in origin – whose arrival in Australia predated Aboriginal occupation of the continent. He argues that these people had a ‘superior’ aesthetic to that of the Australian Aborigines, and that their culture disappeared sometime before the arrival of Aboriginal people.

The theories of Walsh, who remained a figure of notoriety in the academic art world from 1994, when his first book on the Bradshaws was published, up until his death in 2007, have been challenged and refuted exhaustively, and are now generally discredited. However, Bradshaw art of the Kimberley – an eccentric, lavish production which was sponsored by private backers (including Dame Elisabeth Murdoch and Maria Myers, to whom the book is dedicated), and which has now become a great rarity – offers an immensely important visual record of this vast ‘gallery’ of some of the earliest known evidence of human artistic expression.

• x, 464 p. : ill. (chiefly colour), maps; 25 x 36 cm. (Over-sized and over-weight item!)
• Oblong quarto, faux crocodile skin with pictorial inlay, illustrated endpapers,
• pp. [vi]; x; [4], 464, #190425 SCARCE!

• • Rock paintings — Western Australia — Kimberley
  • Kimberley (W.A.) — Antiquities
  • Australian