Talk:Quinkan rock art

Annotated Bibliography for Stub Article

19801021

Australian Heritage Commission(1980) Quinkan Country, Peninsula Development Road, Laura, Queensland, Australia. Initial Entry on the Australian Heritage Commissions Register of the National Estate, now entry upon the Australian Heritage database accessed 20 January 2013

19840000

Mulvaney, D.J (1983) "Forward - Archaeology in Queensland" Queensland Archaeological Research Vol 1., University of Queensland

(Trezise 1969, 1971) "..the archaeology and art of the Laura region became recognised for its richness and significance. Percy Trezise became oneof the best known rock art recorders in Australia

(Rosenfeld et . al . 1981) Given the Pleistocene antiquity of engravlings at the Early Man site , near Laura there are opportunities to apply Morwood's approach (compential analysis .. correlating ceremonial assemblages and cycads/ food resources) through an impressive time depth. The immense number and variety of paintings in the same region, currently under the joint scrutiny of Percy Trezise and Josephine Flood, offer comparable possibilities .

Percy Trezise continues his long-term recording of rock art , now assisted by teams from Earthwatch. Josephine Flood has been associated with this research, particularly in her excavation of the Green Ant Site.

20060800

Layton, R (2006) The cultural context of hunter-gatherer rock art. Man Vol 30. No 3 434-453

In visual terms Australian Aboriginal rock art can be classified as to whether they use silhouette & geometric representations. where the silhouette representations/styles are less widely spread than geometric representations/styles, and more common to coastal areas .. with silhoutte representations rendering humans and animals in terms of their bodily outline, viewed frontally, from side, or on top according to species .. a number of regionally distinct styles can be recognized within the silhouette category .. and Laura has the silhoutte style

2008

http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/10516/1/10516_Milledge_2008.pdf

Established Indigenous populations created enduring designs in rock shelters as both engravingsand elaborate paintings west of the coastal rainforeststrip. At Laura, legendary rock art galleries foundover an area of 10,000-15,000 square kilometres define Quinkan Country after the mythological spirit figures represented there. Pigment from one ofthese sites has been dated to 25,000 years before present. These same designs inform the continuityof contemporary work by a number of artists

2009 http://www.flinders.edu.au/ehl/fms/archaeology_files/dig_library/theses/Wade%20V%20Honours%202009%20o.pdf

The Laura Province, in the north, is associated with anthropomorphic ‘Quinkan’ figures. Often portrayed with distorted bodies, these motifs are depicted frontally with a variety of infill techniques, including dots, marks, grids, lines and bands (Cole 1995:56, 59).

Stencilling (typically of hands) is also common, and hand prints occur in small numbers (Cole 1995:54). Human, animal, bird, reptile, fish and plant motifs are all stencilled, though depictions of material culture–typically common in other stencil rich areas (see below)–are infrequent here (Cole 1995:62; Trezise 1971a:9).

Located only 50 km west of Laura, the Koolburra Province is best known for its polychrome anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and therianthropic (most commonly of the ‘echidna people’) motifs, even though 96% of sites also contain hand stencils (Flood 1987:94). Here, motifs are considerably smaller in size than those around Laura, depictions of fauna are comparatively rare and naturalistic human figures are common.

The Chillagoe Province, immediately south of Laura, represents the contrast between the northern and southern regions of CYP (David 1991:51, 1992a:140). The paintings of Chillagoe are geometric and linear in nature, with more than 250 different non-figurative motif types recorded (David and Cole 1990:797).

Occurring even in the earliest superimposed layers, hand stencils range in size from large adults to infants and are predominately of left hands (Trezise 1971a:10). In CYP some interpretation of such motifs is facilitated by contemporary Indigenous knowledge, which reveals that hand and foot stencils were created as the ‘signature’ of an individual and that, in at least some instances, boomerangs and spear throwers were stencilled to generate good luck in hunting (Cole 1995:63).

The petroglyphs of CYP are generally overshadowed in the literature by the more spectacular painted anthropomorphs. However, critical to a holistic analysis of style and its relationship to social and demographic issues, is this lesser known, seemingly more homogeneous, rock-art tradition. Engravings are found throughout the region and consist primarily of non-figurative motifs, though some isolated examples of figurative motifs have been recorded (Cole and Watchman 2005; David and Lourandos 1998

201; Trezise 1971a

11, 1993:126-127; see Table 2.1).

20090200

Sauvet G, Layton R, Lenssen-Erz T, Taçon P & Wlodarczyk A (2009) "Thinking with Animals in Upper Palaeolithic Rock Art" Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19:3

The secular case was represented by the art of Laura in North Queensland,for which Trezise (1971) has published good site data and which the limited ethnography (Layton 1995) suggests was predominantly secular.

The rock art of Laura, North Queensland, includes a number of sites where human head-dressed figures are depicted. Rosenfeld’s (1982) archaeological research showed that there were two types of site at Laura. One is filled with animal paintings of numerous species, often superimposed in many layers. These tend to be found in rock shelters with substantial habitation debris. The head-dressed humans are almost always painted on otherwise empty walls in sites with little habitation debris, suggesting a ritual theme at sites to which access was restricted. In this case, it seems that the ceremonial dimension of the rock art is clearly segregated from the animal component, but the patterning of the animal component does not imply that the Aboriginal people of Laura lacked ceremonies

In the Laura area, sorcery paintings do impinge on the frequency of animal figures. Sorcery paintings are the only type of rock art on which Trezise was given information based on the personal experience of his Aboriginal guides. He was told that snake or catfish were sometimes painted next to the painting of a sorcery victim in the hope the animal would harm the victim (Trezise 1969, 108). Although catfish is, by a small margin, the most common species depicted in rock shelters (at 14 per ent), catfish and snake are only two of the 18 species categories identified in Laura rock art. Sorcery therefore has little effect on the overall distribution of animal motifs.

20101100

Nulty,D & Conway,J (2010) "Tour Guide Manual for the Laura Rangers" Guidebook produced for the Laura rangers, South Cape York Catchments, and Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management Accessed 20 January 2013

20110428

Sutton,P (2011) "Cape York Peninsula Indigenous Cultural Story:Preliminary Outline". Paper produced for the Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management Accessed 20 January 2013

The Cape contains some of the world’s oldest rock art. Unusually, it also contains rock art sites where it has been demonstrated archaeologically that occupation was continuous for c34,000 years (Table 1). Although the caves of France and Spain have rock art of comparable age, they are not of comparable continuous creation

Laura Battlecamp sandstones Laura area Ancient rock art in shelters continuously occupied for up to 36,000 years. Spectacular recent contact art. Rugged beautiful terrain.

(Roth 1899, Hale & Tindale 1933, Layton 1992) sharing human figures with the Laura region, including sorcery images

(Trezise 1969, 1971; Rosenfeld et al 1981; Flood 1987, 1989; Flood & Horsfall 1986). The Laura regional painted images, including those of the Koolburra plateau, are dominated by inland/freshwater species, human figures and, in the latest phase at Laura, images of riders on horseback

(Rosenfeld et al 1981:53) there is also an ancient rock engraving tradition in the Laura region, one with far less elaboration and detail than is found in the paintings. Here the motifs are not only figurative, indicating tracks and human and animal figures, but, unlike the paintings, there are also many forms that have no obvious figurative interpretation. These include pits, mazes, meandering forms, rings and radiating forms .

(Cole 2000, 2005, 2010; Cole & Watchman 2005; Cole, Watchman & Morwood 1995; Watchman & Cole 1992) In caves near Laura, occupation dates range continuously from the recent present to about 34000 BP (BP = before present, i.e. before 1950) .

(Morwood & Hobbs 1995, Cole et al. 1995 Watchman 1993; Cole and Watchman 2005; Cole 2010) >34,000 BP to 19th C Rock art caves of Laura region occupied

(Rosenfeld et al 1981:12) c13,000BP Earliest evidence of occupation of Early Man rock shelter, Laura area

(Flood & Horsfall 1986, Flood 1987) c8,500BP Earliest evidence of occupation of Green Ant & Echidna caves, NW of Laura

(Trezise 1969) 19th century Post-contact rock art including horsemen, guns, ships

20121200

Cole,N & Buhrich, A (2012) "Endangered Rock Art: Forty Years of Cultural Heritage Management in the Quinkan region, Cape York Peninsula" Australian Archaeology Number 75

History

1971

From 1971 State and Federal governments acted to address concerns over protecting Quinkan rock art from modern impacts such as tourism: Gresley Holding (locally known as Crocodile Station) received statutory recognition as a declared ‘Aboriginal site’, the Quinkan Reserves were created, and ‘Quinkan Country’ was listedon the (now defunct) Register of the National Estate

1990

In the 1990s the Quinkan Reserves were transferred to Aboriginal Land Trusts, and the local Aboriginal corporation received intermittent government grants to help manage tourism

2004

In 2004 the State government opened an interpretive centre in Laura as a tourism initiative without providing for a visitor management system. Today, virtually the entire Quinkan region is affected by applications for minerals and coal exploration. The outstanding heritage values of the Quinkan region are threatened by this potential mining development,coupled with expanding tourism, and traditional owners arestruggling to manage their cultural heritage

George, T & Musgrave, G "The Quinkan Reserves" Text to Short James Cook University on-line introduction to the Quinkan reserves Accessed 22 January 2013

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