THE ORIGINS OF THIS PAPER

A specific form of rock art in the Kimberley in Western Australia is the subject of this study. These figures have been called the Bradshaws after Joseph Bradshaw, an explorer, who was the first European to record and describe them. The Bradshaws are distinctive in that they differ markedly from the forms that preceded and supplanted them. This phenomenon has been explained as a result of the immigration of a different culture, people who were finally displaced by the ancestors of the present people. The displacement of these people has been used to explain why this art ceased to be painted. The implication is that the creation of the Bradshaws was a discrete event and not a part of the development of the Australian Aboriginal culture as it exists today. The sole evidential basis for this contention is the appearance of the Bradshaw figures. It is alleged that the Bradshaws do not resemble any other Australian figures, but that they do have a marked similarity to overseas figures. These assertions, and thus the whole evidential basis, thus the contention, are the subject of this paper.

My research works through the evidence-the only evidence there is-the images themselves. The Bradshaws were compared to other rock art genres.

The first aim was to test the hypothesis that the Bradshaws resemble the rock art of somewhere else so much that they probably came from there. They were put in the context of other rock art throughout the world.

Grahame Walsh (1994:40) made a sequence division of the rock art of the Kimberley. He constructed three epochs and named them: 'Archaic', 'Erudite' and 'Aborigine'. He placed the Bradshaws in the Erudite Epoch. For me the use of the word 'erudite' assumed that the cultures from the other epochs were untaught and less developed. The use of the word 'Aborigine' suggested that there was no Aboriginal constituent to the previous epochs..

John Clegg, an archaeologist of the University of Sydney feared that this presumption might arise when he said:

What scares me about this Bradshaw claim is that Aboriginal people are having their Aboriginality stolen from them yet again. You know: the [idea that the] paintings are too good-therefore somebody else did them....If there was indeed another race, that raises the question then of who are the real Aboriginals.(Smith 1995:67)

The same problem occurred to other archaeologists. The following statements were made in a press release by the Australian Archaeological Association dated 18 December 1995:

It was pointed out that there was no archaeological evidence to support the claim that the Bradshaw figures were painted by people other than the ancestors of contemporary Aboriginal people.... ...Ms Claire Smith, Australian Research Council Fellow at the University of New England, said 'such interpretations are based on and encourage racist stereotypes'.

THE TRACK TO BE FOLLOWED

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