Subjects and styles

Aborigines made pictures of a wide variety of subjects including mythical beings, humans, birds, animals, fish, reptiles and animal tracks as well as more abstract designs. As we have seen, many of these works were connected with religion, ritual and ceremony. The abstract designs often contained coded' information - the meaning of the symbols might be known only to those who had gone through special ceremonies.

However, painting and engraving could be a secular as well as a religious activity. Many painted sites, in particular, contain a vivid record of the daily life of the people who created them. The rock walls form a sort of 'pictorial history book' which can include pictures of extinct giant marsupials or the story of contact between Aborigines and other peoples. For example, there are paintings showing the visits of Macassan fishermen and their boats to Australia's northern shores hundreds of years ago. There are also images of European sailing ships, as well as drawings of weapons, tools and animals the white settlers brought with them. In Central Australia guns, axes, cattle and horses are pictured along with ceremonial ornaments, boomerangs, clubs, shields and the more abstract designs of the Western Desert.

Styles of rock painting vary from region to region. Stencils, however, are found almost everywhere. They are mostly of hands ranging in size from baby to adult. These images were made by holding an object, whether a hand or foot or utensil or weapon, against the surface of the rock and spraying liquid pigment from the mouth over and around it so that its clear outline was left on the rock.

Western Arnhem Land is the home of the painting style known as X-ray, a name given to it by Europeans because the pictures show internal features such as the skeleton, heart, lungs and other organs of the creatures represented as well as their external shapes. Many of these paintings are of food animals such as turtles, kangaroos and fish, and are thought to be a form of hunting and fishing magic.

The cave and rock imagery of the desert also has its own distinctive style. The principal motifs are a variety of circles, semicircles, spirals, dots and lines. Totemic ancestors are portrayed in simple lines, tracks and geometric designs. However, contact paintings - usually illustrating animals and objects that are not part of the Aboriginal mythological universe - are generally naturalistic rather than abstract in form.