Abstract

The contact period rock art of northern Australia provides unprecedented insights into Aboriginal cross-cultural experiences during the last few hundred years. Northwest Arnhem Land, Australia, has an extensive rock art assemblage and a complicated history of interactions between Aboriginal communities and island South East Asians (Macassans), colonists, explorers, missionaries, buffalo shooters, and more. This contact period rock art offers a unique opportunity to explore a variety of questions relating to cross-cultural interactions and artistic responses to new people, objects and ideas. In this paper we argue that a dichotomy exists in the number of European and south-east Asian themed rock art motifs. We suggest that there is an underlying theme in the proliferation of European related imagery relating to threats to Indigenous sovereignty. Our findings suggest that rock art illustrates the Aboriginal community’s responses to both groups and their experience of the existential threat posed by European intruders. The apparent lack of rock art relating to south-east Asian interactions, although perplexing, may in fact provide circumstantial evidence for a very different type of interaction between some northern Australian and south-east Asian communities.

摘要

澳大利亚北部的接触时期岩石艺术提供了对过去几百年来原住民跨文化体验的前所未有的见解。澳大利亚西北阿纳姆地拥有广泛的岩画组合，以及土著社区与岛屿东南亚人 (Macassans)、殖民者、探险家、传教士、水牛射手等之间复杂的互动历史。这个接触时期的岩石艺术提供了一个独特的机会来探索与跨文化互动和对新人、物体和想法的艺术反应有关的各种问题。在本文中，我们认为欧洲和东南亚主题岩画图案的数量存在二分法。我们认为，与对土著主权的威胁有关的欧洲相关图像的扩散存在一个潜在的主题。我们的研究结果表明，岩画说明了原住民社区对这两个群体的反应以及他们对欧洲入侵者构成的生存威胁的经历。与东南亚互动相关的岩画明显缺乏，虽然令人困惑，但实际上可能为一些澳大利亚北部和东南亚社区之间非常不同类型的互动提供了间接证据。