Friday essay: ‘You can do graffiti … by breathing’ – I visited Adnyamathanha rock art as old as the Lascaux cave paintings

One sun-bright morning in the last weeks of winter, I found myself in the passenger seat of an ancient Toyota Troopie, rattling down a dirt track on the way to a sacred engraving site four times older than agricultural civilisation.

Behind the wheel was Cliff Coulthard, a wiry Adnyamathanha guy with a bristly, grey-streaked beard and an Akubra tugged down over sharp eyes. His family owns and operates Iga Warta , an Indigenous cultural tourism centre where I’d come to volunteer.

It had been a couple of months since I’d first ventured into the Flinders Ranges, and in the city I couldn’t get them out of my head. They pulled me back here, further north into the mountainous corridor between the great salt lakes of Torrens and Frome. It was unforgiving but sharply beautiful country — a place where, as you drove west to east, plains sloped into hills and hills built up into peaks, each sculpted over hundreds of millions of years.

This time, I had returned hungry for knowledge beyond anything I could gather on my own.

The Flinders Ranges are the traditional Country of the Adnyamathanha (Ad-nya-mat-na) people, stretching from Arkaroola in the rugged north down the spine of South Australia to Mount Remarkable. It’s a huge swathe of land that encompasses several different clan groups – the Wailpi, Kuyani, Yadliaura, Biladappa and Vanggarla – but, since European invasion, they are collectively known as Adnyamathanha: the people of the hills or rocks.

I wanted to learn what the land means to people who have been here for tens of thousands of years. How did they change it, and how has it changed them?

Rocky outcrop ‘guardians’

After half an hour of driving, Cliff eased us onto an even rougher dirt track into a sheep station. At a designated meeting spot we picked up the cheery pair of paying tourists – the reason I could tag along on this tour – and headed deeper into the property, past sheep, feral goats, water bores and drought-plagued gums.

I paid my way by opening and shutting a series of gates, then we crossed a dry creek and rounded a bend to see two spectacularly eroded peaks thrusting up from the landscape. Their rocky outcrops reached skywards, while the earth was smoothed down around their bases like clay.

“They’re guardians,” Cliff told us. “They watch over Red Gorge – there it is, see?”

Opposite the two sentinels, a hillside spilled into a gorge of red and grey rock. We wound our way towards it — at one point tilting sideways on a heavily rutted section of track — and rumbled into the wide creek bed at the mouth of the gorge. It was lined with pastel rocks and river red gums in varying states of health: some flourishing, some teetering, some dead. Cliff parked the Troopie in the shade of a healthy one and we tumbled out into the cool sunlight.

“If youse are up for a walk, we’ll head right up to the upper gallery,” Cliff said. “Then we’ll come back to the one nearby.”

He took off up the creek, sure-footed on the sliding pebbles. I strode to keep up, followed by the camera-clad couple from Adelaide. We hiked past a succession of blocky cliffs climbing up out of the gorge and through an arid patch of saltbush and tea trees squashed flat by raging summer floods.

Massive gums rested in the middle of the creek bed, stretching their convoluted branches up to the sky, their bark streaked ochre-red. We climbed over parched banks crisscrossed with kangaroo tracks, then descended back into the creek.

“Here we go,” Cliff said as we caught up to him. “Look up, see what you find.”

Standing on the clinking pebbles, I squinted up at the cliffs. My gaze snagged on a dark mark chipped into the rock – head, legs, pointed tail – and a picture emerged.

“That’s a goanna,” Cliff said calmly. “And a human footprint next to it.”

‘I’m a servant for my people’

A new depth to the world snapped into focus as my eyes flicked from rock to rock. What a moment ago had seemed an inert landscape now came to life – lizards and emu footprints, echidnas and snakes, kangaroo tracks stalked by human prints. The shallow engravings multiplied the longer I looked, extending all the way up to rock faces 20 metres above our heads.

“The engravings down by the creek bed are thought to be younger than the ones up top,” Cliff told us. “Those are predicted to be up to 45,000 years old.”

Each image had been chipped out of the rock by a chisel-like tool, revealing a darker layer of rock beneath. Leading us slowly down the creek, Cliff showed us medicine men and women depicted with huge eyes and staffs, and suns as circles with long rays reaching out in all directions.

Further down the creek, he pointed out five parallel lines gouged into the rock.

“These represent when people came in to trade – five men,” he explained. “They’d come to get red ochre, and they’d bring us stone tools and other things from their Country.”

“How do you know that the lines relate to that?” I asked.

“The old people told me. What I’m teaching youse now is what they told me.”

Back in the 1970s, he explained, he was honoured to be selected as one of three Adnyamathanha rangers for a research project funded by the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. The department collaborated with Indigenous groups across the state to create a register of sacred sites, intended to protect them in the event of applications for development or mining. As part of the project, Cliff and his colleagues took Elders out on Country.

“We took out old women, old men, and they were showing us everything,” he said. “We’d organise to take a cookout, make sure they’d get fed, and we’d move on from one place to another. As they were telling us the stories and the history, we’d write them down.”

The ranger team mapped and recorded sacred sites, but took in everything else, too: stories, histories, plant knowledge and even genealogy to determine the original population numbers of the Adnyamathanha people at the time of European contact. But for Cliff, this project was much more than a job. It was an opportunity to learn the stories of his people reaching back generations.

“I suppose I’m a servant for my people,” he said. “They expected us to pass this message on, and I’ve been doing it now for 45 years.”

I didn’t wonder until later why it took a government-funded project for Cliff – an Adnyamathanha man who grew up on Adnyamathanha land — to collect this knowledge. In the weeks I spent in the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges , I learned of its recent history: the European invasion from the south in the mid-1800s, the forced eviction of the Adnyamathanha people from their lands and eventually into a settlement at Nepabunna , the strong missionary presence in the town throughout the 20th century. The chain of knowledge – the histories, the language, the Muda (the stories that contain spiritual knowledge of the land and people) – was fractured but survived.

According to Adnyamathanha and Ngarrindjeri archaeologist Jacinta Koolmatrie, the Muda connect all places through story, forming the foundation of Adnyamathanha knowledge systems and deciding how people understand and interact with place. These stories of how to live with the land, she writes , are “integral to maintaining and transferring knowledge through generations” – potentially reaching all the way back to the first humans to set foot on this continent.

‘Magical work’ and 49,000-year-old evidence

On the drive back from Red Gorge, Cliff told me of Warratyi , a cave shelter he’d helped discover and excavate in 2016 as part of an archaeological survey. The shelter is located in a gorge on a pastoral property at the northern end of the ranges. Inside they found artefacts dating back 49,000 years.

“I went to work on that sheep station when I was 15,” Cliff told me over the car’s rumble. “There were two old blokes that were working with us, and they kept saying that our people used to live in [a nearby] cave shelter.”

As a young man, he never investigated. But many years later, he ended up working with Giles Hamm, an archaeologist from La Trobe University, to find and date the oldest occupied sites in the Flinders.

“We tried in the southern Flinders and we were getting carbon dating of 35,000,” Cliff said. “We weren’t satisfied. So I said to Giles, why don’t we go to the top end of the Flinders? And then I remembered that shelter.”

High off the ground and protected from water damage, the shelter was exactly what they’d been searching for. The initial sampling was astounding, revealing a cache of artefacts three metres deep.

“And Giles said to me: this is it,” Cliff said. “So we got a couple of Aboriginal people from Nepabunna, a couple from Iga Warta, a couple from Adelaide Uni, and spent three weeks on the dig. It was pretty magical working there.”

His dark eyes alight with the memory, he told me they had found evidence of human occupation in the cave over a period of tens of thousands of years, including the earliest known use of ochre in the country – dated to 49,000 years ago – as well as a wide range of tools, from small blades to animal bones shaped into needles. Many of these date to 10,000 years earlier than similar artefacts found elsewhere in Australia.

These dates imply that if humans first reached the continent 60,000 years ago, they must have moved south without delay. In just a few millennia, they settled the arid centre, likely developing technologies and practices along the way to survive on the harsh new land. Those who ended up on what is today Adnyamathanha Yarta would have been seasoned explorers able to adapt to difficult conditions – just like their ancestors who made the journey out of Africa.

But the Warratyi shelter is also evidence that these voyagers shaped the landscape around them. The excavation turned up thousands of bones from 17 different species, discarded over tens of thousands of years. A few remains belonged to two extinct Australian megafauna: a small bone from a rhino-sized herbivore called Diprotodon, and a possibly charred eggshell from Genyornis, a hefty flightless bird over two metres tall. Neither would have found their way naturally into the high cave. Humans must have brought them there.

The fossil record shows that the majority of megafauna vanished from the Australian continent after the first humans landed on its shores, more than 60,000 years ago. Early encounters between humans and megafauna would have been quite literally world-changing for all species involved.

‘Primordial flash’ of the human spirit

After Cliff told me of his time on the Warratyi dig, we fell quiet. My brain spun as it absorbed tens of thousands of years of history. Corrugations shook us noisily through the suspension; Cliff shifted through gears as we dipped in and out of dry creek beds.

“Did you know,” he began eventually, “that in 1982 I got a scholarship and went to the South of France?”

“What?” I said, still in my own head. Then it clicked and I drew a sharp breath. “Oh, to see the cave paintings? At Lascaux?”

“I spent three months there,” he said, nodding. “I went to Lascaux, to the original cave. The Australian Government sent me and another Aboriginal lady there to study it, compare it with the Australian Aboriginal art. We came back and wrote reports on what we’d discovered, and it’s similar – but the art here is older.”

The oldest reliably dated rock art in Australia is a large kangaroo painting in a shelter in the Kimberley region, dated to around 17,300 years old. This is roughly the same age as the Lascaux paintings. The timing is a coincidence – there are likely older sites that modern dating techniques haven’t caught up to yet. Rock engravings like those at Red Gorge may be much older, but it’s difficult to date them.

The oldest known rock art in the world is on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, where a life-sized image of a wild pig is etched into the walls of a limestone cave in dark-red ochre pigment. Its crest of upright hair and horn-like facial warts were painted more than 45,500 years ago. Rock paintings have been found across the world, from the Cueva de las Manos in Argentina to the Creswell Crags in Britain, and in the Flinders, too.

A couple of hours south of Red Gorge is Arkaroo Rock, one of a collection of enormous boulders scattered across a hillside in the Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park. This boulder looks like it’s been half-scooped out by a giant hand, leaving an overhanging lip protecting a canvas of pale rock. Human footprints, kangaroo and emu tracks and slithering snakes are painted in white, yellow, black and iron-red ochre, along with trees and crosses and suns painted into shallow circular depressions in the rock. Together they depict the Muda of the creation of Ikara – a massive, craterous rock formation also known as the gathering place.

Arkaroo Rock has been blocked off by a sturdy cage, and I understood why when I hiked in to see it. The desire to reach out and touch the deft strokes of the paintings was overwhelming. I found myself hanging my arms through the wire, pressing my face in to get an unobstructed view.

Cliff expressed these same feelings of Lascaux, speaking reverently of the time he spent below the earth.

“We were only allowed to stay for half an hour at a time, because our breathing and body temperature changed the atmosphere of the cave,” he explained. “A lot of the paintings in the first gallery were completely stripped … You can do graffiti by just being there – by breathing.”

In fact, at Lascaux the influx of visitors began to degrade the paintings, prompting the construction of an entirely new cave of precisely painted replicas for tourists. But in short increments over several months, Cliff stood in the isolation of the original caves and examined the artistic imaginings of a people who had spread across the world and irrevocably changed the landscapes they set foot on. As they left ecological marks, so too did they leave cultural and artistic ones.

They ventured into the underland, mixed pigments from red ochre, black manganese, iron oxide and charcoal and worked with the contours of the pale rock walls to breathe life into bison and horses, aurochs and rhinoceroses, lions and bears. Some of these species are now long extinct but live on in this art, creeping out of crevices or galloping across the walls.

Archaeologist Izzy Wisher writes that such paintings may have been “crucial to the function of society and to survival within the harsh, unforgiving environment of the last Ice Age” – that the realistic and dynamic depictions of animals may have allowed people to pass on knowledge about their behaviours and migration, by weaving the information into a story animated by paintings. “The art,” she writes, “becomes a cultural memory of vital information passed from generation to generation.”

Studying the diversity and complexity of artistic behaviour may also tell us something about the rise of the human imagination. Wade Davis writes in The Wayfinders that Lascaux is a place to witness the “primordial flash” of the human spirit.

He argues that the technical skills of the artists – the exploitation of pigment colours, the use of scaffolding, the application techniques – suggest a high level of social organisation. “The use of negative space and shadow, the sense of composition and perspective, the superimposition of animal forms through time indicates a highly evolved artistic aesthetic that itself implies the expression of some deeper yearning,” he writes.

Perhaps such art is the first indicator of the unfolding of an only-human consciousness, of our separation from the animal world. Perhaps we already felt separate when we descended into the darkness — perhaps when Lascaux was painted, humans were glancing over their shoulders to the animal world with a sense of disquiet.

Wisher writes of the El Castillo cave in Spain where – unlike Lascaux’s sprawling cinema – the art is hidden, tucked away into crevices and natural features where perhaps only the artist viewed it. These paintings were made over a staggering span of time, from 40,000 to 15,000 years ago. The importance, Wisher infers, was likely more in the making of the art than in its final form, allowing the artists “to build relations between themselves, the animals around them and their ancestors” – the very act of making art, she hypothesises, was a “tactile, joyous exploration of the world”.

At painting and engraving sites on Adnyamathanha Yarta, I felt like I could reach back through time to, as Davis puts it, “touch the essence of these earth wanderers, these ancestral beings who found their way to every habitable place on the planet”.

But this is an illusion borne of my Western upbringing. Archaeologists like Koolmatrie view rock art not as the product of a disappeared people unreachable across the millennia, but as a current source of connection to a living land and to an unbroken stretch of time.

The Adnyamathanha people are a part of the oldest continuous living culture on Earth, and their art lives on in them and through them. Places like Red Gorge are a means to expand the consciousness of contemporary people, reminding them of their place in the layering of ages, their ongoing connection to ancestors and their belonging in this world.

Humans have lost direct links to the sites in Lascaux, El Castillo, the Creswell Crags; the cultures in these places have been transformed beyond recognition in the intervening years. But in Australia there is a chain of knowledge extending back to the very first peoples, a chain damaged in the past 200 years, but still, in many places, surviving and being remade.

When Cliff and I spoke about Warratyi, he told me that his people still have a word for the Diprotodon, the herbivorous megafauna.

“But those creatures haven’t been around for a very long time,” I said slowly.

“Yeah,” he acknowledged. “The name of the animal came down over thousands of years. Some of the language is still here.”

Koolmatrie hypothesises that the Diprotodon is still present in Adnyamathanha stories of Yamuti , a large animal whose physical description is strikingly similar to what we know of the ancient marsupial. “If the Yamuti and the Diprotodon are the same animal, this shows an incredible depth of knowledge that has flowed through thousands of Adnyamathanha generations,” Koolmatrie writes.

The written language only goes back to cuneiform script in 3200 BCE; this knowledge had potentially been passed down orally for 30,000 or 40,000 years, through the culture-making technology of story.

Whatever happened to the megafauna, it seems that humans worked back into co-evolution with the land. Over the millennia they grew intimately familiar with this arid and changeable place, learning its seasons and its rhythms and its ecological pulse, feeling the shape of it beneath their feet. Once they were explorers, new to this land, but the years circled around and brought them back to Country again. What happens to the land happens to the people, and what happens to the people happens to the land.

This is knowledge that today we cannot do without.

A hand extended

Among the warm dry rocks of Red Gorge, one of most stunning engravings is a trail of human footprints, chiselled into boulders on the banks of the creek. They trace the path of an invisible figure leaping up the rocks – light, agile, completely at ease in this place.

But it was when I spotted a human handprint that I felt time contract and circle back around. The engraving is just a shallow imprint in the iron-coloured stone, surrounded by depictions of snakes and kangaroos, but the fingertips are outstretched as though someone is pressing into the rock from behind. Instinctively, I lifted my own hand and gently fitted my fingers into the grooves.

It didn’t feel like I was touching thousands of years of inert history. It felt for a moment as if the person stood here with me in this gorge, as present as ever, hand extended to help.

This is an edited extract of Voyagers: Our Journey into the Anthropocene by Lauren Fuge (Text Publishing), published 30 July.

Lauren Fuge does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.