WEST KIMBERLEY PLACE REPORT - Department of Sustainability ...

including the corresponding western aesthetic value of beauty. Aboriginal people
consider art as a process, in which the active practice of making the art, the uses to
which it is put, and the place in which it is made or used, are of paramount
significance (Mowaljarlai et al. 1987, 691 citing Forge 1973; Layton 1981).
Moreover, in the case of rock paintings, the images are seen – quite literally – as
visible manifestations of ancestral Creator Beings, among them Wanjina and the
Wunggurr Snake.
As David Mowaljarlai (1987, 691) states:
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'We have never thought of our rock paintings as 'Art'. To us they are images. Images
of energies that keep us alive – every person, everything we stand on, are made from,
eat and live on. Those images were put down by our Creator, Wandjina, so that we
would know how to stay alive, make everything grow and continue what he gave to us
in the first place…'
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Rock paintings are meaningful texts, they were not produced as just beautiful images
(Blundell 2003). For the Wanjina-Wunggurr community of the north Kimberley
region, the Wanjina (also spelled Wandjina) figures are the visible manifestations of
primordial supernatural beings who have transformed themselves into paintings at
caves and rock shelters located in their country. The Wanjina are their spirit ancestors
and are the source of some of their most significant laws and customs (Blundell et al.
2009). However, while their Traditional Owners do not consider these ‘paintings’ to
be ‘art’ in the Western sense, they are nonetheless a source of inspiration, admiration
and awe for Wanjina-Wunggurr people (Blundell 2003; cf. Geertz 1976). Like other
features of their cultural landscape, paintings make visible the events of the Dreaming
which are also conveyed in complex and nuanced religious narratives. They are forms
of visual culture based on an Indigenous aesthetic that gives material expression to the
way in which Wanjina-Wunggurr people understand their world. As noted by
Robinson (1986, 203) '…failure to recognise the Aboriginal perception would risk the
omission of an important aspect of the painted images – one of the world's longest
unbroken painting traditions'.
The west Kimberley has some incredibly large, colourful and varied rock paintings,
which are considered amongst the most spectacular examples of 'rock art' in the world
(Flood 1990, 70) and have been judged as having likely World Heritage value (Clottes
2002). Crawford (1968, 28) notes that:
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'[T]he most famous of the Kimberley paintings are the Wandjina figures, huge manlike
beings which are sometimes over twenty foot long. These are spectacular
paintings, because of their size, and for their colours, as the figures are depicted in
black, red or yellow over a white background'.
* * * *
So visually powerful are the Wanjina images that the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games
organisers, with the permission of the senior Traditional custodian, used a giant
Wanjina image called Namarali as the 'Awakening Spirit' in the opening ceremony of
the Games. The extraordinary fabric sculpture rose from amongst a barrage of
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