terra australis 27 © 2008 ANU E Press Published by ANU E Press The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 Australia Email: [email protected] Web: http://epress.anu.edu.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: McDonald, Josephine. Title: Dreamtime superhighway : an analysis of Sydney Basin rock art and prehistoric information exchange / Jo McDonald. ISBN: 9781921536168 (pbk.) 9781921536175 (pdf) Series: Terra Australis ; 27 Notes: Bibliography. Subjects: Rock paintings--New South Wales--Sydney Basin. Petroglyphs--New South Wales--Sydney Basin. Visual communication in art--New South Wales--Sydney Basin. Art, Aboriginal Australian--New South Wales--Sydney Basin. Aboriginal Australians--New South Wales--Sydney Basin--Antiquities. Dewey Number: 709.011309944 Copyright of the text remains with the contributors/authors, 2006. This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. Series Editor: Sue O’Connor Typesetting and design: Silvano Jung Cover photograph by Jo McDonalnd Back cover map: Hollandia Nova. Thevenot 1663 by courtesy of the National Library of Australia. Reprinted with permission of the National Library of Australia. Terra Australis Editorial Board: Sue O’Connor, Jack Golson, Simon Haberle, Sally Brockwell, Geoffrey Clark Terra Australis reports the results of archaeological and related research within the south and east of Asia, though mainly Australia, New Guinea and island Melanesia — lands that remained terra australis incognita to generations of prehistorians. Its subject is the settlement of the diverse environments in this isolated quarter of the globe by peoples who have maintained their discrete and traditional ways of life into the recent recorded or remembered past and at times into the observable present. List of volumes in Terra Australis Volume 1: Burrill Lake and Currarong: Coastal Sites in Southern New South Wales. R.J. Lampert (1971) Volume 2: Ol Tumbuna: Archaeological Excavations in the Eastern Central Highlands, Papua New Guinea. J.P. White (1972) Volume 3: New Guinea Stone Age Trade: The Geography and Ecology of Traffic in the Interior. I. Hughes (1977) Volume 4: Recent Prehistory in Southeast Papua. B. Egloff (1979) Volume 5: The Great Kartan Mystery. R. Lampert (1981) Volume 6: Early Man in North Queensland: Art and Archaeology in the Laura Area. A. Rosenfeld, D. Horton and J. Winter (1981) Volume 7: The Alligator Rivers: Prehistory and Ecology in Western Arnhem Land. C. Schrire (1982) Volume 8: Hunter Hill, Hunter Island: Archaeological Investigations of a Prehistoric Tasmanian Site. S. Bowdler (1984) Volume 9: Coastal South-West Tasmania: The Prehistory of Louisa Bay and Maatsuyker Island. R. Vanderwal and D. Horton (1984) Volume 10: The Emergence of Mailu. G. Irwin (1985) Volume 11: Archaeology in Eastern Timor, 1966–67. I. Glover (1986) Volume 12: Early Tongan Prehistory: The Lapita Period on Tongatapu and its Relationships. J. Poulsen (1987) Volume 13: Coobool Creek. P. Brown (1989) Volume 14: 30,000 Years of Aboriginal Occupation: Kimberley, North-West Australia. S. O’Connor (1999) Volume 15: Lapita Interaction. G. Summerhayes (2000) Volume 16: The Prehistory of Buka: A Stepping Stone Island in the Northern Solomons. S. Wickler (2001) Volume 17: The Archaeology of Lapita Dispersal in Oceania. G.R. Clark, A.J. Anderson and T. Vunidilo (2001) Volume 18: An Archaeology of West Polynesian Prehistory. A. Smith (2002) Volume 19: Phytolith and Starch Research in the Australian-Pacific-Asian Regions: The State of the Art. D. Hart and L. Wallis (2003) Volume 20: The Sea People: Late-Holocene Maritime Specialisation in the Whitsunday Islands, Central Queensland. B. Barker (2004) Volume 21: What’s Changing: Population Size or Land-Use Patterns? The Archaeology of Upper Mangrove Creek, Sydney Basin. V. Attenbrow (2004) Volume 22: The Archaeology of the Aru Islands, Eastern Indonesia. S. O’Connor, M. Spriggs and P. Veth (2005) Volume 23: Pieces of the Vanuatu Puzzle: Archaeology of the North, South and Centre. S. Bedford (2006) Volume 24: Coastal Themes: An Archaeology of the Southern Curtis Coast, Quuensland. S. Ulm (2006) Volume 25: Lithics in the Land of the Lightning Brothers: The Archaeology of Wardaman Country, Northern Territory. C. Clarkson (2007) Volume 26: Oceanic Explorations: Lapita and Western Pacific Settlement. S. Bedford, C. Sand and S.P. Connaughton (2007) Volume 27: Dreamtime Superhighway: Sydney Basin Rock Art and Prehistoric Information Exchange. J. McDonald (2008) . Volume 28: New Directions in Archaeological Science. A. Fairbairn, S. O'Connor and B Marwick (2008) Volume 29: Islands of Inquiry: Colonisation, Seafaring and the Archaeology of Maritime Landscapes. G. Clark, F. Leach and S. O'Connor (2008) terra australis 27 Dreamtime Superhighway Sydney Basin Rock Art and Prehistoric Information Exchange Jo McDonald Dreamtime Superhighway: an analysis of Sydney Basin rock art and prehistoric information exchange FOREWORD I remember the visit with clarity: it was 1991 and my first trip to Australia. One day was spent at Sydney’s West Head with the young and enthusiastic Jo McDonald, where we toured some of the rock engraving sites and the painted Great Mackerel rock shelter. I can still see the large flat curving rocks at West Head on which animals had been engraved - fish, kangaroos, a goanna. And, as is so often the case when I visit rock art sites, my imagination gets going as to the ‘how’s’ and ‘why’s’. I try to run some sort of a show in my head as to the people who produced these, viewed these, and what kinds of significations the images and their makings played in the lives of past peoples. At the time of this visit, Jo McDonald was well into her 1994 dissertation— the work upon which this monograph is based. Already, in that PhD dissertation, she was able to touch on some of the things that my imagination was searching for. Thus, it is with great pleasure and even more enthusiasm that I am writing this Foreword to a revised and thoroughly up-dated monograph based on that initial dissertation research. At the time of the 1994 dissertation, the anthropological and archaeological study of ‘rock art’ was really emerging into new trends and new prominence. Surely Australia was one of the leaders in the training of students and in the research that contextualized the images and ‘art’, thanks to such scholars as Andrée Rosenfeld, Robert Layton, and John Clegg among others. By this time, the work of David Lewis-Williams and colleagues in southern Africa had set off numerous studies world-wide into the relationship between the production of rock art images and altered states of consciousness and the role of shamans in image-making practices. But this was not the direction or focus of rock art studies in Australia, and McDonald’s original work would not be tempted either. Rather, she carried out an extensive project of contextualizing the rock art in question, and in two different ways. First, she wanted to give us an understanding of the rock art in its archaeological contexts—sheltered or open, dates and chronologies, site types and, in general, what the archaeology could inform on in terms of social and cultural lives associated with the image-making. This dimension is thoroughly expanded in this present monograph, a genuine testimony to precisely why so many insist on a true archaeology of ‘rock art’. Second, she wanted to try out a model that suggested the ways in which visual culture—such as rock art-making and its images and forms—could perhaps be understood as a system of communication, as a way of signaling, so–to–speak, among and between various social factions and groups. Could we gain some insight into the ‘why’s’ and ‘how’s’ by stretching our notion of context, meaning, and function? Was the image making itself part of the stretching—and marking—of social relations, which we knew were so crucial to the on-going-ness of Aboriginal society? These were solid and provocative questions of the mid 1990’s and McDonald rose to the challenge with an admirable array of data and a compelling conceptual framework that drew on the social communication/ information exchange models of the time. It is now nearly fifteen years later. Much has changed in archaeology and the study of the so-called rock arts; the landscape is ‘in’, the spirit world and shamanic practices are still with us, rock art has been attributed to even earlier time ranges of the Pleistocene in many parts of the globe, and more theoretical frameworks circulate widely—structuration, practice theory, agency, social memory, costly signaling, post-colonialism, to name but a few. Even the term ‘rock art’ itself has been subjected to critique and scrutiny, and it can be heard, from time to time, that there is not much to be gained from an archaeology of rock art: what, after all, might stone tools have to ‘say’ about the making and meanings of rock imagery? terra australis 27 vi Dreamtime Superhighway: an analysis of Sydney Basin rock art and prehistoric information exchange It is refreshing to read here that McDonald has not decided to publish her monograph by picking one from the list of the ‘new’ approaches. Nor has she tried out, as Chris Tilley has done in a unique and innovative comparative study of Scandinavian rock art, how the materials might be understood using several different interpretive frameworks to find out which one works the best–at least for now! Rather, this is a revised and updated study that draws forcefully on much richer data and interpretive source materials because so much fine and extensive new research has been carried out and made available—much of it by McDonald herself.