Eagle's Reach: a focal point for past and present social identity within the northern Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, Australia

Abstract

The key to understanding Australian Aboriginal rock art is identity, relationships, and history. Australia has at least 125,000 rock art sites, more than any other country. These consist of paintings, drawings, stencils, prints, engravings of various sorts, and, in parts of northern Australia, fi gures made of beeswax pressed onto rock walls and ceilings. Sometimes sites have only one type of rock art, such as pecked or abraded engravings on platforms or boulders, but often in shelters combinations of forms and techniques can be found arranged in overlapping layers and/or spread across great expanses of wall and ceiling. These motifs were made from tens of thousands of years ago on an ongoing basis until at least the 1960s. Since then, sporadic rock art has been made in various locations up to the present day, but much rockart subject matter, iconography, and design continues in new forms on bark, paper, canvas, and even multimedia applications. In each part of Australia, Aboriginal people are proud of their rock art heritage, with particular sites contributing to aspects of both contemporary group and individual identity.