Histories of rock art research in Western Australia’s Kimberley, 1838–2000

Abstract

Picturing Kimberley rock art researchHistories of archaeology in general, and the history of Kimberley rock art research in particular, are often pictured through a modernistic world view outlining defining moments in time: watersheds that delineate a 'before and after'.The first dating of an Aboriginal occupation site in Australia to the Pleistocene (Mulvaney 1964) or Maria Sanz de Sautuola's discovery of the bison in Altamira cave in Spain (Madariga de la Campa 2001), are classic examples used to generate synchronic picture histories of archaeology.Stories about how outsiders first 'discovered' and made known Kimberley rock art are no exception (see Akerman 2016; Crawford 1968; Rainsbury 2009;Walsh 2000).Such stories are often redeployed as a tactic to centre and legitimise archaeological practice, including rock art research.These accounts also naturalise otherwise politicised knowledge projects by presenting a history of archaeology as a natural and noble part of outsiders' research quest to learn more about the past.Seldom are these events discussed from an Indigenous perspective (but see Mangolamara et al. 2018;O'Connor et al. 2008; Woolagoodja 2020), and how Aboriginal people had agency and participated in such 'discoveries'.Pioneering examples of the latter include Olsen and Russell's (2019) chronicling of how Aboriginal people, with their profound knowledge of Country, constitute an essential part of outsiders' mapping of the flora and fauna in Australia.The same is true for Kimberley rock art research (e.g.Blundell and Woolagoodja 2005; Crawford 2001; Redmond 2017), but many of these stories still wait to be written.Some reasons for such 'dissociative' history writing are explored by McNiven and Russell (2005) in their unpacking of how Australian archaeology was forged through a double manoeuvre that removed Aboriginal people from their past while archaeology appropriated it (i.e.Trigger 1984).This imperial and colonial history unfolded as distinct tropes, primarily:• Progressivism viewed European history as exceptional and progressive, which left Indigenous cultures and other nations as 'living fossils' of earlier stages of human evolution.• Migrationism suggested that First Australians were not the 'original inhabitants' but had replaced an earlier 'race' often described as 'alien' and/or 'mystic' with a 'higher degree of culture'.• Diffusionism, often focused on why some cultural traits among First Australians were 'advanced' by invoking contact with outsiders holding advanced aesthetic practices.

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