Bradshaw Rock Paintings - History

History

Rock art in the Kimberley region was first recorded by the explorer and future South Australian governor, Sir George Grey as early as 1838, this rock art is now known as Wandjina style art. While searching for suitable pastoral land in the then remote Roe river area in 1891, pastoralist Joseph Bradshaw discovered an unusual type of rock art on a sandstone escarpment. Bradshaw recognised the uniqueness of this style of painting when compared to the Wandjina style and in a subsequent address to the Victorian branch of the Royal Geographical Society, he commented on the fine detail, the colours, such as brown, yellow and pale blue and he compared it aesthetically to that of Ancient Egypt.

The American archaeologist, Daniel Sutherland Davidson, briefly commented on Bradshaw’s figures while undertaking a survey of Australian rock art that he would publish in 1936. Davidson noted that Bradshaw’s encounter with this art was brief and lacked any Aboriginal interpretations, furthermore, as Bradshaw’s sketches of the art were at this time the only visual evidence, Davidson argued that they could be inaccurate and possibly drawn from a Eurocentric bias. Bradshaw’s figures and their existence as an artistic tradition was questioned and published material did not appear until the 1950s.

With the growth of anthropological interest in Australia, research in the Kimberley bought with it an awareness of Aboriginal art and culture, however, attention focusing on the Bradshaw art was sporadic. Several researchers who did encounter the Bradshaw type of paintings during expeditions to the region were members of the 1938 Frobenius Institute expedition. Agnes Schultz noted that unlike with Wandjina art, Aboriginal people showed little interest in the Bradshaw paintings, although they recognised them as depictions of bush spirits or D’imi. The expedition’s Aboriginal guide when pressed explained their creation:

Long ago Kujon a black bird, painted on the rocks. He struck his bill against the stones so that it Bleed, and with the blood he painted. He painted no animals, only human-shaped figures which probably represent spirits”.

Anthropologist Robert Layton notes that researchers such as Ian Crawford who worked in the region in 1969 and Patricia Vinnicombe, who work in the region in the 1980s, were both told similar creation stories regarding the Bradshaw type art. In the last 35 years more systematic work has been done in an attempt to identify more Bradshaw rock art sites in the Kimberley. The most notable being the work undertaken by amateur archaeologist Grahame Walsh, who began work there in 1977 and returned to record and locate new sites up until his death in 2007. The results of this work produced a database of 1.5 million rock art images and recordings of 1,500 new rock art sites. He would further expand his records by studying superimposition and style sequences of the paintings to establish a chronology that demonstrated that Bradshaw art is found early in the Kimberley rock art sequence and proposed that the art dated to a period prior to the Pleistocene. Many of the ancient rock paintings maintain vivid colours because they have been colonized by bacteria and fungi, such as the black fungus, Chaetothyriales. The pigments originally applied may have initiated an ongoing, symbiotic relationship between black fungi and red bacteria.