Hearson

We got on board a tour of this site with Vince, a Ngurrangga guide. Benefits of an end of (tourist) season adventures is there was only one other participant.
We went to see petroglyphs, and we got that in spades.
The terrain around Nganjarli on the Burup Peninsula onto the plains beyond blows my mind. It looks like somebody dumped big basalt boulders in heaps that stretch for a hundred kilometres in all directions. They don’t have vegetation growing on them which makes them even more prominent.
On these hard metamorphic rock surfaces over 10’s of thousands of years, the Yaburara people etched 100s of thousands of carvings of fauna, flora, their stories and law. Following generations would maintain and refresh the drawings as the stone weathers. Unbelievably difficult when the only tools available are rocks of the same material. They must have been incredibly industrious folk because of the number, size, geographical spread of the petroglyphs. and the imposing difficulty of the work. Some anthropologist and palaeontologist believe that some animals depicted may have gone extinct 40-50,000 years ago.

The tour ended promptly as the sun dipped toward the horizon. The indigenous folk won’t stay here after sunset because the spirits are very bad and very strong. Flying Foam Massacre occurred in this area which effectively wiped out the Yaburara tribe who were the original owners in a series of massacres triggerd by an Aboriginal woman who refused to work as a slave and was killed to make her an example, there was a response by the tribe who killed 2 policemen, and then the disastrous escalation. Up to 150 (many say much more) people are now buried in mass graves in the area.
It’s gut wrenching to think this could happen just 100 years before Regina was born. We also learned of massacres at Timber Creek NT making us seriously consider the extent of theses atrocities?
Because the people were eliminated the stories of the petroglyphs are largely lost. Yindjibarndi people, the nearest neighbouring tribe, care for the land, but their law won’t allow the Yindjibarndi to maintain the art because they don’t have the knowledge or permission of the original owners.
Eventually it will be lost.

A tidbit about the art:
https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp.theguardian…Read more