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Lost world of the Kimberley extraordinary glimpses of
Australia s Ice Age ancestors 1. publ Edition Wilson
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Wilson, Ian
ISBN(s): 9781741143911, 1741143918
Edition: 1. publ
File Details: PDF, 12.50 MB
Year: 2006
Language: english
LOSTWORLD 22/8/05 4:04 PM Page 1
Australia’s Kimberley was the cultural hub of the Ice Age world.
Today it holds within its bounds the world’s largest collection of
Ice Age figurative art, giving us vital clues to the origins of other
cultures and civilisations right across the world.
Back at a time when most of Europe lay deep beneath ice sheets, a
people in the remote and rugged Kimberly Ranges of north-west
Australia created figurative paintings of such verve and talent that
they surpass all other of the world’s rock art.
Known as ‘Bradshaws’, after pioneer farmer Joseph Bradshaw who
chanced upon the first examples in 1891, the Kimberley paintings
feature lithe, graceful human figures depicted in a fashion altogether
different from that of even the oldest traditional art, providing
extraordinary visual insights into the everyday lives of Ice Age people.
So who were these Bradshaw people? When did they live? What
happened to them?
Ian Wilson describes the early research on the Bradshaw paintings,
and explains how advanced dating techniques have shed new light on
the findings. He explores the theories put forward on the origins of
these seafaring people; one possibility is that they arrived from the
Andaman Islands, where pygmy-like tribes still survive. Farther afield
still, the author draws connections with Saharan peoples, and he even
unearths startling similarities with South American tribes.
Lost World of the Kimberley is a wide-ranging and provocative look
at the very Australian, yet also potentially international, mystery of the
Bradshaw paintings of the Kimberley—one of Australia’s least known,
yet most extraordinary, national treasures.
ALLEN&UNWIN
www.allenandunwin.com
Cover design: Zoë Sadokierski
AU S T R A L I A N H I S T O RY
Lost World 1-4 12/1/06 4:17 PM Page i
Lost World 1-4 12/1/06 4:17 PM Page ii
IAN WILSON has been a professional author since 1979 and has published
more than twenty books, including The Turin Shroud, Jesus: The Evidence,
and The Blood and the Shroud. He emigrated to Australia in 1995 and lives in
Brisbane.
Lost World 1-4 12/1/06 4:17 PM Page iii
Lost World 1-4 12/1/06 4:17 PM Page iv
First published in 2006
Copyright © Ian Wilson 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter
or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational
institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body
that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL)
under the Act.
Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Wilson, Ian, 1941- .

Lost world of the Kimberley.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 1 74114 391 8.
1. Rock paintings - Western Australia - Kimberley. 2.

Aboriginal Australians - Western Australia - Kimberley -
History. 3. Kimberley (W.A.) - Antiquities. I. Title.
759.0113099414
Set in 12/15 pt Bell MT Regular by Midland Typesetters, Victoria

Printed by South Wind Production, Singapore
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Lost World 1-4 12/1/06 4:17 PM Page v
CONTENTS
Author’s preface vii
Chapter 1 Drop-in at Reindeer Rock 1

Chapter 2 Early rock art encounters 10
Chapter 3 Modern-day encounters 28
Chapter 4 Twenty-nine in a boat 45
Chapter 5 Hands of time 55
Chapter 6 ‘Mother’ and her ‘dogs’ 66
Chapter 7 ‘Breadbaskets’ and puppets 84
Chapter 8 Boat design pioneers 102
Chapter 9 Time of the spears 115
Chapter 10 Odes to the boomerang 135
Chapter 11 A Bradshaw ‘Lost City’? 148
Chapter 12 Follow that river 171
Chapter 13 Putting people to the paintings 186
Chapter 14 Putting dates to the paintings 205
Chapter 15 Putting genes to the paintings 221
Chapter 16 Tracing where they went 241
Chapter 17 Window on the world’s oldest culture 257
Picture credits 279

Notes 281
Bibliography 299
Index 308
Lost World 1-4 12/1/06 4:17 PM Page vi
Lost World 1-4 12/1/06 4:17 PM Page vii
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
I n 1994 my wife Judith and I visited Australia for the first time at the
invitation of the Sydney Writers’ Festival. In the course of a brief but
unforgettable tour we so fell in love with the country and its lifestyle that we
applied to emigrate, and after due process moved house from Bristol,
England to a pleasant suburb of Brisbane, Australia.
It was a decision that many of our friends and acquaintances greeted
with near disbelief. ‘But you’re a historian!’ they exclaimed. ‘What on earth
are you doing going to a country that has no history?’ Now, ten years on,
perhaps this book will help set to rights some of those all-too-prevalent
misconceptions.
This said, the extremely ancient, enigmatic and so talented paintings
that form my subject are not of the stuff immediately to be put on every
future tourist itinerary. Even by Australian standards the still scant-explored
Kimberley region where the paintings are located is remote, vast, and almost
completely lacking in any of the normal tourist amenities. And as anyone
who manages the trip quickly appreciates, that is the way it also needs to stay.
But these paintings exist in literally tens of thousands across an area
almost the size of Spain. And an awareness and even partial understanding
of them is arguably fundamental to our understanding of the whole history of
humankind in its Ice Age infancy. Unless there is some fatal flaw to the
dating of these paintings, back at a time when most of Europe lay deep
beneath ice sheets a people in Australia were creating elaborate garments for
themselves, building ocean-going boats, cultivating root crops and enjoying
a rich ceremonial life. Not least, they were creating figurative paintings of
verve and talent that surpasses all other of the world’s rock art, and would
not be seen again until the rise of the ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern
civilisations. Though in tackling this subject I have strayed into the field of
the prehistorian, rather than the historian, in this particular instance I make
no apology. The paintings in question are so full of details of the remote era
from which they derive that they actually represent a far more vital and vivid
documentary source than could any dry or dusty chronicle.
Lost World 1-4 12/1/06 4:17 PM Page viii
LOST WORLD OF THE KIMBERLEY
Two most redoubtable women qualify as equal first among the individ-
uals to whom this book is indebted. My wife Judith has been at my side
through 38 years of marriage and 28 years of my book writing, but this par-
ticular book has undoubtedly demanded more from her than anything
previously. Hanging out of helicopters and crawling beneath narrow rock
overhangs to photograph paintings in wild terrain is not for the faint-
hearted. But Judith coped magnificently to create the great majority of
photographs reproduced in this book, as well as making interpretative
drawings, checking the text, and innumerable other chores. No less invalu-
able has been the help of archaeologist Lee Scott-Virtue of Kimberley
Specialists, Kununurra. Most cheerfully and capably she took on the tasks of
being our expedition leader, guide, cook, bush lore specialist and driver
throughout the full-scale four-wheel drive expedition that was demanded
by our need to view the remotely located paintings at first hand. She has
similarly been a tower of support and strength throughout.
Amongst others to whom I am indebted are Joc Schmiechen for
checking the book manuscript, directing me to important sources that I had
missed, and very freely volunteering his wealth of first-hand knowledge and
photographs; Russell Willis of Willis’s Walkabouts for generously allowing
use of his photographs and data in Chapter 12; John Bradshaw for supplying
the photograph of his great-uncle Joseph Bradshaw, and for checking the
chapter describing Bradshaw’s discovery; Adrian Parker for supplying
the photograph of the panel discovered by Bradshaw; Slingair helicopter
pilot Tim Anders for introducing us to the previously undocumented rock
painting sites of Reindeer Rock and Wullumara Creek; Bruce and Robyn
Ellison of the Faraway Bay Bush Camp for making it possible for us to access
hitherto undocumented rock art sites on the Kimberley’s north-west coast;
Steve McIntosh of Faraway Bay for guiding us to these sites; and Pawel
Valde-Nowak of the Institute of Archaeology, Kraków, Poland, for providing
difficult-to-obtain data on Poland’s unique Ice Age boomerang. My warmest
thanks, also, to the following people for innumerable other crucial points of
assistance: sculptor John Robinson of Yeovil, Somerset, England; Len Zell,
author of the excellent Guide to the Kimberley Coast; Ian Levy; Christopher
Chippindale; John Taylor of Tasmania; John Presser of Tasmania; David
viii
Lost World 1-4 12/1/06 4:17 PM Page ix
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
Owen, author of Thylacine ; Dr Stephen Wroe of the University of Sydney;

Tim McIntyre of the University of Queensland; Dr Michael D. Coe of Yale
University; Jean-Michel Chazine of the University of Marseille; Dr John
Prag from Manchester Museum; Dr Robert Paddle of the Australian
Catholic University; Dr Lawrence Blair; Dean Goodgame; Barrie Schwortz;
Ju Ju ‘Burriwee’ Wilson; photographer Peter Eve; Aboriginal artist Warren
Djorlom; Helen Bunning; Grahame Walsh; Nadia Donnelly of Kununurra
Visitor Centre; Sheryl Backhouse; Barry Hart; James Sokoll; Ian Thomson;
Vrony Kern; Ian Holmes; Philip Courtenay of ADFAS; Adriennne
Alexander; Natasha Pearson of Lord’s Kakadu and Arnhemland Safaris;
Conrad Stacey; Jean-Claude Bragard; Petra Collier; Brisbane City Library (in
particular the ever-helpful staff of our local mobile library); University of
Queensland Library; the Mitchell Library, Sydney. And not least among all
these, Patrick Gallagher, Managing Director of Allen & Unwin, Sydney, for
giving the project the vital push-start of a book commission, and for being so
patient and understanding during its long gestation.
Authors can make all kinds of gaffes and mistakes in putting together a
book manuscript, and this author is certainly no exception. A good publisher
provides a suitably literate and eagle-eyed copy editor to spot these errors. In
fulfilling this all too often unsung task, Karen Ward has not only been one
of the very best whom I have come across, she has also made a number of
helpful constructive suggestions. I am deeply grateful to Karen and to Allen
& Unwin editor Jeanmarie Morosin for all their care and their patience
steering this book towards publication.
In the case of my attempted interpretations of the Bradshaw paintings,
whatever errors these may contain will be entirely from my own shortcom-
ings, and I will welcome all suggested corrections to these. The intention of
this book is not in any way to provide some sort of definitive authority on the
subject. Rather, it is to open it up to the widest possible, intelligent debate.
Ian Wilson
Moggill, Queensland
July 2005
ix
Lost World 1-4 12/1/06 4:17 PM Page x
The Mitchell Falls during the late Dry season

Lost World 1-4 12/1/06 4:17 PM Page 1
CHAPTER ONE
Drop-in at Reindeer Rock
I dly watching the shadow of our helicopter’s rotors spinning across the
parched and unpopulated landscape a hundred feet below, it struck me that
whoever invented the boomerang has to have been the discoverer of the same
gyroscopic principle by which our helicopter was staying aloft. Yet has
anyone ever credited Australian Aboriginal people with pioneering the
science of aerodynamics?
There were four of us crammed that day into the tiny Bell JetRanger
helicopter—our guide, Lee Scott-Virtue, an archaeologist in her mid-fifties;
our pilot, Tim Anders; and my wife Judith and I. We had been travelling at a
little over 100 knots above the Mitchell Plateau in the remote and rugged
Kimberley region of north-western Australia. The helicopter’s doors had
been removed to give us extra visibility, and as we banked steeply, held in
only by our lap belts, we were viewing immediately below us the Mitchell
Falls. When swollen to full force by ‘Wet season’ rains these falls rank as one
of Australia’s most magnificent natural wonders, cascading spectacularly over
a large ledge, then disappearing through a sinkhole in the rock, to reappear
down five giant steps to a large pool at the bottom of the gorge. During the
four months of the year when it is possible for campers with the hardier kind
of four-wheel drive vehicles to reach this part of the Kimberley, Tim Anders
bases himself, his young wife and baby in a very makeshift tent ‘heliport’,
providing scenic helicopter flights to and from the otherwise unmanned
camping area.
But it was now Friday 17 September 2004, one of the very last days of
Tim’s season, by which time the Kimberley’s notorious ‘Dry’ had reduced the
falls to the merest trickle. For us this was in no way a disappointment. Our
plan was to walk back down from the 3000-metre elevation, studying some
of the ancient rock paintings that are to be found along the route. Our
interest particularly centred on a type named ‘Bradshaws’ after Melbourne-
born land speculator Joseph Bradshaw, who quite accidentally discovered the
first examples in 1891. Though even today no-one knows exactly how many
of these paintings are scattered across the Kimberley, according to some esti-
mates there are at least 100 000.1 And although no-one can be sure exactly
how old they are, their very plenitude in a region that today, as for tens of
millennia, stays uninhabitable for much of the year, argues for their dating
from an earlier time when the Kimberley’s tropical climate was considerably
more equable. That time was during the Ice Age, that is, something in excess
of 20 000 years ago. This would set them in the same era as the very oldest of
Europe’s cave paintings. Potentially, therefore, they are of incalculable signif-
icance for our understanding of how, when and where the world’s earliest
cultures originated.
The Bradshaws differ from their European counterparts in being painted
mostly on open rock features, rather than in caves, and representing human
figures, rather than animals. But what human figures! Depicted with almost
Michelangelesque virtuosity, many wear elaborate paraphernalia that include
sashes, string skirts, anklets and armlets, a far cry from the crude animal skins
normally associated with the Ice Age. Some sport elaborate, exaggeratedly
long, wizard-like headdresses, raising interesting questions concerning the
origin of the concept of wizards. Many carry boomerangs, some quite styl-
ishly shaped, raising the issue of where and how far back in time the world’s
first boomerangs originated. If the paintings really do date from the Ice Age,
they are much advanced than even the very best western counterparts
for their visual insights into humankind’s everyday lives at such an early time.
2
DROP-IN AT REINDEER ROCK
Particularly intriguingly, a few are depicted in boats that—subject to the

paintings genuinely dating back to the Ice Age—hold serious claim to being
the oldest depictions of boats known from anywhere in the world. At a
lecture held in Brisbane, four months before this Kimberley adventure,
Grahame Walsh, Australia’s foremost expert on the Bradshaws, had shown a
slide of a high-prowed and thereby potentially ocean-going vessel carrying
no less than 29 crew and passengers. Despite this painting’s importance from
a number of perspectives, Walsh steadfastly declined to disclose its location,
and in this same vein refused to provide a photograph or even a working
drawing for comparative research purposes.
As we hovered above the Mitchell Falls that September day the question
that Lee Scott-Virtue suddenly put to pilot Tim was therefore rather more
loaded than it might have appeared. Even though Lee was seated right next
to Tim, she had to press her intercom button in order to be heard above the
clatter of the rotors.
‘Tim, has anyone come across any boat paintings around here recently?’
As we were all wearing headphones, Tim’s response came over loud
and clear.
‘Sure, Lee, there’s been a boat painting found not very far from here.’
‘Is it a site that Grahame Walsh has visited?’
‘No.’
This immediately ruled out that the painting could be the one Walsh had
presented in his Brisbane lecture. Even so, the rarity of any Bradshaw depict-
ing a boat made any opportunity to view a fresh example highly appealing.
‘How long would it take for us to get there?’ enquired Lee.
‘About ten minutes. We’ve got enough fuel, but I must be back at the falls
for another booking at 3 p.m.’
We quickly calculated that that would give us only about twenty
minutes on the ground. After momentarily weighing up the sizeable extra
dollar sum needed to cover the further kilometres, Lee took my breath away
with a decisiveness that I had not seen from her before.
‘I’ve made an executive decision. Let’s go for it,’ she pronounced.
Tim lost no time radioing his change of destination, then set a course
northward. After a few minutes of following the meandering Mitchell River we
3
found ourselves descending over a buff-coloured, oval-shaped area about the size
of a football field. At its western side a typical Kimberley sandstone rock outcrop
could be seen curving round the oval to form a natural half-amphitheatre.
Carefully selecting a suitable patch of clear, level ground, Tim brought the
helicopter gently down. Within seconds of clearing the rotor blades, all four of
us were dashing over about 50 metres of rough, rocky ground that was liberally
covered with stands of sorghum grass taller than ourselves.
A minute or so later we arrived at the rock outcrop that we had seen
from the air. Facing us was a vertical and surprisingly regular slab of King
Leopold sandstone, around eight metres long and topped by a narrow,
lengthwise overhang, just the sort of wall surface and accompanying
weather protection that we knew the Bradshaw artists to favour for their
paintings. Quite typically, and consistent with the Bradshaws’ theoretical
great age, it was difficult at first for us to make out much more than some
discolourations. On this particular huge boulder, the protective overhang
was too narrow to keep the wall surface dry during the Kimberley’s notor-
iously intense ‘Wets’. And because it faced east, it inevitably had received
4
thousands of years of direct exposure to the Kimberley’s equally intense

morning sun.
Yet somehow the slab still bore some vestiges of ancient painting.
Almost immediately, one word—‘Reindeer!’—from the direction of Lee and
Tim sent me scurrying over to where they were pointing. There, running
from the slab’s northern end, was a vanishingly faint painted row of at least
eighteen four-legged animals, each of these essentially identical to the other,
and set along a regular, almost straight line as if they were looking over the
brow of a ridge. Unbelievably, the creatures’ heads were ornamented with
what certainly appeared to be reindeer-like horns. The straight line running
beneath them associated them with examples of a late phase of Bradshaw
paintings that Walsh called ‘Clothes Peg’, still purportedly dating from
before the end of the Ice Age.
‘Reindeer in Australia before European settlement—impossible!’
was my immediate snort, only to receive Tim Anders’ typically laconic
rejoinder.
‘If it looks like a reindeer, it probably is a reindeer.’
The huge slab of Reindeer Rock with (detail) a section of the intriguing line of ‘reindeer’
5
Little did we know how prophetic his words were to be, nor how
important a find this was to our whole understanding of the Bradshaw
enigma.
As there was no known traditional Aboriginal name for this particular
rock outcrop, and as there were probably no more than half a dozen
Europeans who had ever seen it before aside from ourselves, it seemed
natural for us to label it ‘Reindeer Rock’, whatever might be the true species
of the creatures that are depicted on it. Because Judith was the only bearer of
a camera on this particular day, she began the difficult but now vitally urgent
task of taking photographs. Meanwhile Tim pointed out what seemed to be
some shadowy human figures at the far right of the line of reindeers.
‘Do you think those are hunters?’
It was impossible to say.
Wallace’s line: hooved mammals to the west of this, marsupials to the east
6
For as we stood in no little perplexity in front of the painted panel we

were confronting a problem that will be encountered time and again in the
course of this book. That is, how to come to some reasonable understand-
ing of images that have a serious claim to having been painted tens of
thousands of years ago, and are often frustratingly faint, yet even so
retain sufficient tantalising detail to invite some intelligent speculative
interpretation.
In the case of the ‘reindeer’, zoologically the one certainty is that no
variety of deer, let alone anything as cold-clime as reindeer, is thought to have
made its way to Australia throughout the entire time that our human species
has walked this planet. Back in the nineteenth century the great natur-
alist Alfred Russel Wallace marked on the map a line separating the Old
World’s placental mammals from the marsupial or pouched varieties that
chiefly characterise the mammals found in Australasia.2 For placental
mammals such as deer, Wallace’s line stops at the Philippines, Borneo and
Java—broadly the furthest bounds of the South-East Asian continent back in
the Ice Age. Even though the sea levels then were significantly lower than
they are now, there has always been sufficiently wide a water barrier to
prevent the continent’s fauna from crossing into Australasia and vice versa.
And no deer bones have ever been found in any ancient context on the
Australasian side of Wallace’s line.
So the Reindeer Rock ‘reindeer’ pose just two serious alternatives.
Either they are not reindeer and represent some as yet unknown and uniden-
tified native Australian species still to be recognised by zoology. And that
seems unlikely. Or they are at least some variety of deer, in which case back
in the Ice Age there must have been much greater communications between
the deer-roaming parts of Asia and the then inhabitants of Australia than
might be expected for a people all too commonly dismissed as the most prim-
itive of hunter-gatherer savages. Such communications would have required
ocean-going boats capable of traversing at least 100 kilometres3 of open sea,
the minimum distance that has always separated Australia and Asia even
when sea levels were at their lowest.
Cue therefore for our obvious next question to Tim Anders: where was
this boat painting that he had brought us to this site specially to see?
7
The high-prowed boat with standing figures on the north side of the slab at Reindeer Rock
Tim quickly led us in a right-hand direction to what turned out to be

simply the north wall of the same massive slab bearing the ‘reindeer’. And
there, this time quite unmistakably, was an image of a boat, around a metre
high, its prow and its stern delicately curved in the manner suitable for nego-
tiating the open ocean. Disappointingly, unlike the 29 occupants of the vessel
that Grahame Walsh had shown during his Brisbane lecture, this particular
example had just four figures. These were standing rather top-heavily
upright, and like the line of ‘reindeer’ their style suggested them to be of the
late Bradshaw phase known as ‘Clothes Peg’, when the artists’ rendition of
figures lost a lot of their earlier naturalism.
Nonetheless, exactly as in the case of the reindeer, the panel was highly
important in its own right. In both cases their features suggested early links
with societies well beyond Australia. Throughout island South-East Asia
there survive to this day ancient cults that are centred on depictions of ‘boats
8
of the dead’. In these depictions,

four or five figures typically stand
rather impractically upright on a
vessel with upturned ends at prow
and stern. And their origins stretch
way back before the coming of reli-
gions like Islam and Hinduism—
back to South-East Asia’s remotest Egyptian tomb painting of ‘Boat of the Dead’. From the
tomb of pharaoh Tuthmosis III at Thebes
antiquity.
The ancient Egyptians, whose
own origins are mysterious, likewise repeatedly depicted four or five figures
standing up in crescent-shaped boats among the scenes of the ‘Book of the
Dead’ painted on the walls of the tomb of every pharaoh. Again, the origins
of these paintings stretch back well before ancient Egypt’s first dynasties. So
should such parallels be dismissed as mere coincidences? Or could we be
looking at something of real significance for how, when and not least where
all the old civilisations—European, Near Eastern, Far Eastern, even possibly
American—may have originated? Rather than Australia having been a
remote backwater unconnected with the rest of the world, back in Ice Age
times might its role and its intercontinental connections have been markedly
more advanced than currently supposed?
As a historian with a lifelong enthusiasm for art and art history, I was
certain that these enigmatic Bradshaw paintings, little known as they are,
and located in such a sparsely visited region of Australia, posed the most
tantalising mystery. They positively cried out to be better understood. Each
of them, in its way, offered a window back into a remote time in our past
when documents as such did not exist. The very medium that the artists
used, a ‘canvas’ of solid rock, bespoke their far-sightedness in their wishing
to communicate something of themselves to later generations.
So who were these Bradshaw people? When did they live? What
happened to them? In order for us even to begin to be able to ‘read’ what
these paintings might have been trying to tell us, first it was important to
determine what has been discovered about them so far.
9
CHAPTER TWO
Early rock art encounters
T he Kimberley is the region of north-west Australia in which the

Bradshaw paintings are located. Outstandingly beautiful, it is so
remote and so difficult to reach even for adventure-loving Australians that
far more of them have visited far-flung Europe than this part of their own
‘backyard’. Officially extending some 422 000 square kilometres, one-third
greater than the entire United Kingdom and only a little smaller than Spain,
its bounds are broadly the Ord River to the east, the Timor Sea to the north,
the Indian Ocean to the west, and the Great Sandy and Tanami deserts
to the south.
The Kimberley’s coastline is extremely rugged, with many deceptively
beautiful bays, inlets and islands that are notorious for tides with treacherous
currents and whirlpools. Anyone venturing into the sea seriously risks their
life from attack by sharks and by enormous estuarine crocodiles. The months
from June to October are the Kimberley’s Dry season, when daytime temper-
atures reach the mid-30sº Celsius (90º Fahrenheit) even at the height of
winter, and there will be not a drop of rain. November to May, by contrast,
are the monsoonal Wet, with some parts receiving rainfall exceeding 1400
millimetres. Tropical cyclones, accompanied by 300 kilometres/h winds, are
EARLY ROCK ART ENCOUNTERS
prevalent between January and March, making even the few dirt roads
impassable. As one early explorer described a typical January day:
. . . there came on a tremendous squall of wind, rain, thunder and most

vivid lightning. The pealing echoes of the thunder as they bounded from
height to height and from cliff to cliff, was awfully magnificent; whilst the
rugged mountains which had just before looked golden in the bright light
of the setting sun were now shrouded by gloomy mists and capped with
dark clouds, from which issued incessant and dazzling flashes of lightning.
During this grand and terrific elemental convulsion our little boat was
driven powerless before the blast.1
Not unexpectedly, therefore, European exploration in the Kimberley got off

to a slow start. The first serious coastal mapping was by a Napoleonic-era
French captain, Nicolas Baudin, to whose nervous 1801 expedition the
Kimberley’s coastline owes such names as Bonaparte Archipelago and Joseph
Bonaparte Gulf. Once the British had well and truly trounced Napoleon a far
more thorough coastal survey was undertaken by Australian-born rear
admiral Phillip Parker King. Patriotically, he saw to it that two major
Kimberley peaks were given the names Mount Trafalgar and Waterloo, with
two equally impressive rivers named the King George and the Prince
Regent. Then with the growth of the first small townships these were
likewise given British names—Derby, Broome and Wyndham—while later
still, during the 1880s, the Kimberley itself became named after the then
British colonial secretary, John Wodehouse, first Earl of Kimberley.
Even to this day, however, the Kimberley’s c.29 000 population—half of
them white, half Aboriginal people and in total no more than that of one
small town—remains almost entirely clustered around still very modest-
sized townships at its eastern and western extremities. There are just a few
others scattered at cattle stations and Aboriginal communities elsewhere. Rio
Tinto operate an open-cut diamond mine, the world’s largest single producer,
at the Kimberley’s eastern extremity. Otherwise, almost the entire region
consists of a vast empty wilderness of sandstone and basalt rocks that were
laid down some 1.8 billion years ago. This has been scoured into stunning
11
Typical Kimberley rock outcrop embellished with painted figures, Gumboot Creek
gorges and cascades by numerous rivers and creeks that are lively during the
Wet season, but dwindle to intermittent lengths of still water during the Dry.
All major volcanic activity has happened along tectonic plate lines that lie
comfortably to Australia’s north, in Indonesia and New Guinea, so the
Kimberley’s geological landscape has undergone remarkably little change
throughout that long period, making its surface rocks amongst the oldest to
be seen anywhere in the world.
Everywhere those surface rocks are littered with thousands of rock
outcrops similar to Reindeer Rock, ranging widely in scale from hut to hyper-
market proportions. Many of them are bizarrely shaped and in a wide palette
of colours, so that the human imagination almost instinctively forms them
into huge prehistoric creatures. And not just one, but several culturally differ-
ent human groups who early wandered the Kimberley undoubtedly regarded
them with similarly imaginative fascination. Whether on a rock outcrop, on
a canyon side’s vertical ‘wall’, or on some overhanging boulder’s ‘ceiling’,
wherever the surface provided a suitably flat, light-coloured ‘canvas’, early
artists felt impelled to decorate them with dramatic painted embellishments.
Such is the Kimberley’s isolation, however, that not until several decades
after the cities of Sydney and Melbourne were already flourishing did the
first European come face to face with these paintings. In any event, the sites
he found were far from the oldest of those that would later come to light. It
was during the Wet of 1838 that a young British army lieutenant, George
Grey, was leading a small party of troops on one of the very first inland
surveys of the Kimberley, when the group found their progress halted by a
precipitous range of sandstone rock not far from the Glenelg river that they
had just discovered. Grey, who was in great pain from a spear wound inflicted
during an attack by local Worrora tribesmen, was anxiously scrutinising the
broken rocks for any viable through-route when in his own words:
I suddenly saw from one of them a most extraordinary large figure peering
down upon me. Upon examination, this proved to be a drawing at the
entrance to a cave, which, on entering, I found to contain besides, many
remarkable paintings . . . It would be impossible to convey in words an
adequate idea of this uncouth and savage figure . . . Its head was encircled
13
George Grey’s 1838 expedition to the Kimberley at the site where they discovered their first example of the
region’s ancient rock paintings. From a contemporary engraving
by bright red rays something like the rays which one sees proceeding from
the sun, when depicted on the signboard of a public house . . . the face
was painted vividly white and the eyes black . . . ; the body, hands and
arms were outlined in red,—the body being curiously painted with red
stripes and bars.2
Three days later Grey’s party came upon another cave with similarly
extraordinary figurative art works:
The principal painting . . . was a figure of a man ten feet six inches in
length, clothed from the chin downwards in a red garment, which reached
to the wrist and ankles; beyond this red dress the feet and hands
protruded, and were badly executed. The face and head of the figure were
enveloped in a succession of circular bandages or rollers, or what appeared
14
to be painted to represent such. These were coloured red, yellow and

white; and the eyes were the only features represented on the face. Upon
the highest bandage or roller, a series of lines were painted in red, but
although so regularly done as to indicate that they had some meaning, it
was impossible to tell whether they were intended to depict written char-
acters or some ornament for the head.3
Grey made several on-the-spot colour sketches of the paintings which he

included in his journals of his adventures, remarking in a footnote that they
most reminded him of the Biblical prophet Ezekiel’s account of the art of
ancient Babylon and Assyria.4 This was particularly because the figures
appeared to him to be wearing full-length clothing, quite unlike the ‘perfect
state of nature’5 of the contemporary Aboriginal people whom he was encoun-
tering. Grey added: ‘Whatever may have been the age of these paintings, it is
scarcely probable that they could have been executed by a self taught savage.
Their origin therefore must still be
open to conjecture.’ George Grey’s sketch of the second figure his party found
Grey’s journals were published in March 1838
in London in 1841, complete with
his sketches, and although more than
a century would elapse before any
westerner would again reach his
sites,6 his drawn indications of
writing on the second figure’s head-
dress aroused some particularly
intense further speculation. One
late-nineteenth-century expert,
Thomas Worsnop, recognised this
as the script of ancient Red Sea
traders, the lettering reading, ‘I am
a great personage’.7 At much the
same time Canadian Professor John
Campbell interpreted the letters as
archaic Japanese characters meaning
15
‘hopeless number is . . .’. When combined with the 62 circles drawn alongside
the figure the message read ‘the number of the hopeless ones is 62’, clearly
some early shipwrecked Japanese trying to communicate their plight. In the
early 1970s, when space travel was at its most topical, best-selling author
Erich von Daniken trumped all previous interpretations by identifying the
figures as extraterrestrials.8
Sadly, it is all an object lesson in the pitfalls that can await anyone attempt-
ing a too quick interpretation of the rock art of pre-European Australia. For
the 15 000 or so Aboriginal people in the Kimberley today—most of them of
the Worrora, Ngarinyin and Wunambal peoples whose forefathers were
dispossessed of their original lands—the paintings that Grey came across are
their ‘Wandjina’9 spirit ancestors. These are said to have come from the rain
clouds, and to have returned to them at the end of their lives, at one and the
same time metamorphosing into the paintings that represent them. Painted
Wandjina faces invariably lack mouths, Aboriginal people believing that any
depiction of a mouth would destroy the painting’s potency and bring on unre-
lenting rain.10 Literally thousands of Wandjina and Wandjina-related paint-
ings are to be found scattered on rock outcrops right across the north-west
Kimberley, the Worrora people’s versions even being represented amongst the
giant figures that were held aloft in the ‘Awakening’ segment that was part of
the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games opening ceremony. What George Grey had
interpreted as the figures’ ‘clothes’ and their white faces were merely decor-
ative body and face paints. Likewise what he had perceived as writing were the
Wandjina artists’ attempts at representing leaves.
The real irony of such undue focus on the Wandjinas, however, is that
these figures are relatively recent, and by western artistic standards rather
less advanced than those of another major style to be found in the Kimberley,
the Bradshaws. The Joseph Bradshaw after whom these paintings came to be
so inappropriately and insensitively named was born in Essendon, Victoria,
Australia in 1854. Though the stories told about him include that he served
as first mate on a British India sailing ship,11 research by his great-nephew
John Bradshaw indicates that his true water experience extended to little
more than rowing a dinghy on his local river. During the late 1800s, however,
by which time Bradshaw styled himself as an ‘investment agent’,12 he was
16
Typical Kimberley Wandjina paintings, similar to the kind found by George Grey
one of a number of profit-hungry investors being lured by the Western

Australian government to part with 500 pounds in return for ‘blind’ leases
entitling each to a million acres of the Kimberley for setting up sheep or
cattle stations. Because such arrangements meant dispossessing Aboriginal
people of their traditional lands, it was fully understood that leaseholders
would enter their territories suitably armed, ostensibly for self-protection,
but tacitly to enforce their ‘rights’. And Joseph Bradshaw was certainly an
individual of this mould, as all too evident from a vivid description of him and
his companions written by his cousin Aeneas Gunn:
Our party was armed to the teeth. Every man had his cartridge belt filled
with death-dealing polished brass cases . . . Revolver pouches, with blue
steel butts protruding from their flaps, lay on the hips . . . and rifles were
stacked by the table . . . He [Bradshaw] had at one time faced a mob of
blackfellows, single handed, with a small bulldog revolver . . . and in a
hundred sinister situations he had proved himself a block of resolute
courage.13
17
In October 1890 Bradshaw received the

appropriate official paperwork for his particu-
lar million-acre section of the Kimberley,
and in March of the following year he and
his brother Frederick arrived by boat at
Wyndham, the north-west coast’s main port,
with the aim of hiring helpers, a team of
horses, and suitable supplies, in order to reach
their property and make their first visual
appraisal of it. On the brothers’ arrival they
found that Wyndham, where they had
intended to spend a few days procuring horses
and provisions, had just been devastated by
one of the Kimberley’s notorious cyclones.
Even so, they managed to gather together
sufficient provisions for their needs, and rode
off westwards accompanied by four hired
Joseph Bradshaw (1854–1916), discoverer of helpers. Exactly as Grey had experienced four
the first paintings bearing his name decades before, the ruggedness of the
Kimberley’s terrain and its notorious stands of
tall, prickly spinifex grass proved exceptionally difficult for both men and
horses. In a small, black-covered diary that Bradshaw kept of his expedition’s
progress he recorded in his neat handwriting, ‘The grass seeds from the tall
spear grass were something frightful. I was literally stuck full of them from
head to foot.’14 Adding to the party’s unease were some distinctly unfriendly
looking local Aboriginal people who insisted on shadowing them throughout.
However, on the afternoon of 16 April 1891 Joseph and his brother were
following the line of what they had wrongly deduced to be the Prince Regent
River when they found this to open out into a gorge with a large rocky pool.
On the gorge’s west side, according to the description that Bradshaw gave in
a lecture to Melbourne’s Royal Geographical Society later that year:
The walls . . . were adorned with native paintings, coloured in red, black,
brown, yellow, white and a pale blue. Some of the figures were life-size,
18
the bodies and limbs very attenuated, and represented as having

numerous tassel-shaped adornments appended to the hair, neck, waist,
arms and legs; . . . The most remarkable fact in connection with these
drawings is that wherever a profile face is shown the features are of a most
pronounced aquiline type, quite different from those of any natives we
encountered. Indeed, looking at some of the groups, one might almost
think himself viewing the painted walls of an ancient Egyptian temple.15
Like Grey before him, Bradshaw made on-the-spot drawings of what he had
found, one of these being reproduced as an accompaniment to the text of his
lecture when the Australian Royal Geographical Society published this in
1892.16 This drawing, together with Bradshaw’s description of the terrain
in which the paintings were located, made possible the rediscovery, as recently
as 1997,17 of the original site found by him. It was not, as he had supposed
(and never sought to correct), on the Prince Regent River, but instead on the
Roe River further to the east. In an era lacking not only satellite technology,
but even basic maps for the Kimberley, Bradshaw had made a 50-kilometre
miscalculation. Now, however, thanks to the availability of photographs of the
site, it is possible to check
Bradshaw’s recording
Joseph Bradshaw’s original sketch of the ‘native paintings’ that he and his
standards as well as his companions found, thereupon becoming the first European discoverers of
navigational capabilities. the style of paintings that bear Bradshaw’s name
On one of these
panels—which quite typi-
cally had been embellished
by different groups im-
posing their own images
to supersede what had
been done before them—
can be discerned at least
four figures that are quite
unmistakably of what has
become described as the
Bradshaw type.
19
The first figure, at furthest left in Bradshaw’s copy, is of an individual

with a long, feminine-looking hairstyle or headdress tapering towards the
right. He or she seems to be looking towards the left, though what survives
of the paintwork makes it impossible to be sure whether the face is in profile
or front-facing. The headdress ends in what Bradshaw referred to as ‘tassel-
shaped adornments’, a pair extending rather oddly back inwards, that is,
towards the head. The body seems to be facing mainly frontwards, with arms
extended at either side and the legs slightly apart. Two or three more
‘tassels’ dangle from each elbow, likewise from the waist down to the ankles,
though rock surface erosion has destroyed whatever may have existed of the
feet.
Two similarly coiffured but slightly smaller figures stand immediately
to the first individual’s right, their hair likewise tapering to the right though
lacking discernible tassels. However, the most remarkable figure is the one at
furthest right, nearly twice the height of the others, and seemingly imposs-
ibly propelling himself or herself through the air, arms to the sides, in what
The first Bradshaw painting discovered by Joseph Bradshaw and rediscovered within the last decade
20
can only be construed as a ‘floating’ pose. Superimposed on these figures are

later, large depictions of animals, the most prominent being an apparent
kangaroo looking almost as if it is riding on the back of the ‘floating’ figure.
Bradshaw rightly recognised it as ‘drawn in fresher colours’ and thereby
‘more recent’ than the human figures.
More puzzlingly, Bradshaw also drew in a fifth human figure, an
aquiline-nosed old man with a high hat and long beard standing immediately
to the left of the ‘floating’ individual. This is one that if it ever existed in
Bradshaw’s time, is today impossible to make out in photographs. He also
included what he described as certain ‘alphabetical characters, somewhat
similar to those seen by Sir George Grey . . . many miles westward on the
Glenelg River’. And it is seriously questionable whether these ‘alphabetical
characters’ were real blemishes to which he gave his imagination rather too
free a rein, or whether perhaps he resorted to deliberate invention in order to
match his discovery with that by Sir George Grey.
What is certain, from the known course of subsequent events, is that
back in 1891 Bradshaw had some rather more pressing personal objectives
than rock paintings, however unusual these latter might be. Within a few
weeks of his return to Melbourne he married a 30-year-old musician, Mary
Guy, and little more than a month later was whisking her aboard the
steamer Catterthun on a one-way voyage to Darwin. On their arrival, a newly
acquired schooner, The Twins, was waiting loaded with all necessary
supplies, including Mary’s beloved organette (a small harmonium), to take
them westwards to the coastal inlet where their Kimberley property’s
homestead was to be built—on Mount Waterloo’s slopes at the mouth of the
true Prince Regent River. To Joseph Bradshaw’s credit this homestead was
indeed built, and named ‘Marigui’ in Mary Guy’s honour as the first white
woman ever to have dared set foot in such a remote part of north-west
Australia.18 However, such were the difficulties of the Kimberley’s climate
and isolation that in less than three years the enterprise was abandoned and
the homestead dismantled. Bradshaw turned to better prospects in the
Northern Territory, ultimately to die of gangrene in Darwin in 1916, never,
it would appear, having devoted any further attention to the paintings which
carry his name.
21
Throughout the first three-quarters of the twentieth century the

amount of research into the type of paintings that Bradshaw had discovered
was negligible, the rare exceptions mostly being on the part of priests
working at the Kimberley’s various mission stations. Letters written in 1905
by a Trappist monk, Nicolas Maria Emu, who died in 1915, show that he
must have come across some paintings similar to those found by Bradshaw,
but he never left any proper record of these. Another missionary, Father
Nicholas of the Benedictine monks’ Pago Pago mission station on the
Kimberley’s northern coast, apparently made sketches of some local
Aboriginal rock paintings amongst which can be discerned some ‘Bradshaw’
type figures. But his album containing these was never published, nor did it
even reach a public collection. Around the year 1919 a Melbourne-based
entomologist, Gerald Hill, came across a few examples in the environs of
the same mission. But Hill’s watercolour sketches, mixed indiscriminately
amongst more conventional records of Aboriginal rock art, disappeared into
the vaults of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide.19
In the 1930s a German rock art hunting expedition, even though liber-
ally funded by the Hitler regime, and inspired by the writings of veteran
anthropologist Leo Frobenius, was scarcely a whit more productive.
Admittedly its avowed purpose was to study the Wandjina paintings, but of
the other paintings that they came across, Agnes Schulz, one of the two
women illustrators, merely remarked that towards the end there were some
which were ‘smaller, of human shape, not white-grounded, monochrome in
red ochre, sometimes with a light contour’.20 Only thanks to the second
woman illustrator, Katharina Lommel, who sketched some examples, can we
be sure that these were Bradshaws. But in fairness to the Germans, their
Aboriginal guides positively discouraged them from taking an interest in
any such figures, dismissing them as worthless.21 And it was precisely
because Aboriginal people offered no meaningful name for the paintings that
Schulz adopted the name Bradshaws,22 one which, for all its Anglo-Saxon
inappropriateness, has stuck, and has therefore reluctantly but realistically
been perpetuated here.
Also in fairness to the Germans it was another of their ilk, Father Ernest
Worms, who after the Second World War went further than anyone before
22
him in focusing attention on the Bradshaws.

Awarded the Iron Cross for his bravery during
the First World War, Worms subsequently took
up a vocation as a Pallottine priest, one of his
tutors during his training being Professor
Herman Nekes, a priest with an unusually strong
enthusiasm for anthropological studies. When in
1931 the Pallottine fathers sent Worms out to
the Kimberley the region already had a number
of pioneering missions—Pago Pago, Kalumburu,
Kunmunya, Watjalum and Forrest River.
However, whereas the great majority of other
missionaries, whether Catholic, Pres-byterian or
Anglican, were determined to impose their own
‘superior’ western culture upon Aboriginal
people, Worms, to his considerable credit, was of
a different mould. Recognising that the old, tradi- Father Ernest Worms, a pioneer in serious
study of the Bradshaw paintings
tional Aboriginal culture was in his own time
disappearing at an astonishing rate, Worms
applied himself to learning all he could from those who had lived its ways,
before their memories became lost forever.
A natural linguist, Worms quickly learned several Aboriginal languages,
commanding such respect among Aboriginal people that he was accorded the
title Ibala or great elder. There are apocryphal stories of his attending some
of the most ‘pagan’ of Aboriginal ‘bora ring’ or stone circle rites. Likewise he
would reportedly go walkabout in the bush to return weeks later half-naked,
deeply sunburnt and breathless with excitement, having given away most of
his clothes in return for the hospitality and the anthropological insights that
had been extended to him.
Having in the course of such journeys come across sufficient of the
Bradshaws to whet his interest, in 1953 and 1954 Worms undertook
successive expeditions specifically to search for those paintings located in
the most central and extreme northern parts of the Kimberley. At this
stage there was not even a single dirt road into the interior, so he flew by
23
light plane to the centrally located Gibb River Station, and from there
proceeded to explore northwards on foot. Quickly he learned where to find
the paintings:
. . . in caves and on ledges, in lonely sandstone recesses hidden behind

hedges of tropical vegetation, on scattered rock pillars in silent groves of
cypress pines (Callitris verrucosa) and on high outcrops of rock with
magnificent vistas, across coloured gorges, of the blue stretches of the
glittering Timor Sea.23
From the examples that he came across he quickly recognised the need to
redefine understanding of what ‘Bradshaw’ paintings actually were, Joseph
Bradshaw himself having been more than a little slapdash and inventive in
his reporting.
Thus whereas Bradshaw had spoken of the paintings being executed in
a number of colours, Worms rightly insisted that the overwhelming majority
were in monochrome—‘only . . . dark ochre’. Whereas Bradshaw had
reported some of the figures as ‘life-size’ Worms noted the great majority,
albeit with certain exceptions, measured as little as 20 centimetres. Likewise,
the ‘features of a most pronounced aquiline type’ which Bradshaw had made
so much of in order to emphasise that the paintings could not be Aboriginal
work, Worms conscientiously reported he found ‘in only two groups, perhaps
because the facial lines of others had grown indistinct’.24 Particularly note-
worthy to Worms was the extreme delicacy with which the Bradshaws had
been executed. Instead of the giant forms that so characterised the Wandjina
figures, the Bradshaws were:
. . . rather elflike creatures, tiny, delicate and fragile. The crude method of
finger daubing could not possibly have been employed in drawing these
elegant and minutely finished fairies. Only fine brushes, made of crushed
or chewed grass stalks could have produced the trim curves of the muscles,
the fluttering pendants dangling from the armpits and loins, and the
feathery armlets.25
24
In 1955 Worms wrote an

authoritative article for the anthro-
pological journal Anthropos in which
examples of Bradshaw paintings
feature prominently.26 Like all others
before him, he seems to have decided
that the paintings were too faded, too
indistinct, and too interfered with by
later overpaints to reproduce clearly
via the then prevailing black and
white photography method, so he
made his own sketches. Also in his Father Worms’ sketches of two of the Bradshaw figures
verbal descriptions he declined to he came across during his ‘walkabouts’
use the label Bradshaws, preferring
instead giro giro, the term used by his Aboriginal informants. But as he was
careful to point out, these same informants, just like those who had acted as
guides to the Frobenius expedition, disregarded the Bradshaws completely:
My companions on the first expedition were East Ngarinyin27 men; on the

second, some Kwini28 and Gulari. The Ngarinyin showed an active interest
in their numerous Wandjina paintings, which they had continued to
retouch . . . As for the bushman-like miniature rock paintings [i.e. the
Bradshaws] for which I was searching, none of the three groups evinced
the slightest interest in them.29
During the 1960s Dacre Stubbs, an England-born professional photog-

rapher who with his wife Pauline and young son had migrated to Australia
shortly after the Second World War, encountered much the same disinter-
ested reaction from Aboriginal people in the Kimberley. A former racing
car enthusiast who had become fascinated by Australian rock art, the
adventure-loving Stubbs took his family on expeditions to the Kimberley
where, on coming across examples of the Bradshaws, they tried to find
anyone who might be able to shed some light on the paintings’ origins. As
he told a journalist:
25
We have done a lot of enquiring among Aborigines living around the sites,
and all of them refuse to admit any connection with these drawings. They
don’t even refer to them, as they do to some of their own earlier types, as
Dreamtime drawings. They say they are drawings which have just existed
there and they don’t account for them in any way whatsoever . . . In many
cases Aborigines don’t seem to see the Bradshaws . . . We’ve actually
taken the hand of an Aboriginal observer and traced out the Bradshaw
painting we’re speaking of with his finger, but the Aboriginal has often
seemed confused, as if he wasn’t aware that this is actually a drawing. It
does not belong to him. It’s out of his consciousness.30
Noting how the Bradshaws repeatedly lay beneath other paintings, Stubbs,
like Worms before him, recognised that the Bradshaws had to be extremely
old. In a book that he wrote on the generality of Australian prehistoric art,
published in 1974,31 he remarked that ‘undoubtedly they represent the oldest
paintings to be found on the continent’. But just how old were they—even to
the nearest few millennia? As late as the early 1970s there remained consid-
erable ignorance and uncertainty regarding when the first human settlers
had arrived in Australia. But as the twentieth century entered its final
quarter, a new and very different researcher was about to apply his consider-
able energies to these same issues.
26
Some of the stencilled imprints of hands and boomerangs, as created by early Aboriginal peoples at
Queensland’s Carnarvon Gorge, which so fascinated the young Grahame Walsh
CHAPTER THREE
Modern-day encounters
T hroughout the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, the tech-

nology to make any accurate dating of the Bradshaw paintings simply
did not exist. The general understanding was that the very earliest any
humans could have arrived in Australia was around 7000 BC when the
western world’s earliest known towns, such as Jericho, and Çatal Hüyük in
southern Turkey, had already been founded. This would make the
Kimberley’s Bradshaw paintings younger than the end of the Ice Age, and of
little special significance.
During the 1960s and early 1970s knowledge of the chronology of prehis-
toric societies around the world began to be revolutionised by radiocarbon
dating, the scientific method of determining the age of organic materials by
measuring the decay of their mildly radioactive carbon 14 component. Even so,
the method as then available demanded large quantities of sample, and with
Australian archaeologists being few in number, its usage was comparatively
light. As a result, Australia continued to be widely perceived as a ‘young’ conti-
nent supposed to have received its human colonisation later than everywhere
else, including even America. This belief was such that when in 1979 Welsh-
born immigrant archaeologist Rhys Jones1 began predicting that the first
MODERN–DAY ENCOUNTERS
human settlement in Australia would eventually be dated to as far back as

50 000 years ago, most of the world’s archaeological fraternity, including
Australia’s, shook their heads in disbelief.
But for more than a decade now Rhys Jones’ estimate has been
recognised as a near certainty, even erring on the side of caution. In 1990
traces of human occupation found at Malakunanja, a rock shelter in
northern Australia’s Kakadu National Park, became firmly and reliably
dated to between 50 000 and 60 000 years ago, at which time most of Europe
consisted of empty icefields. Very significantly, all levels of Malakunanja’s
occupation, even the very earliest, showed evidence of the use of painting
pigments, quantities of ochres being found, some with unmistakable indi-
cations of their having been ground for use as paints.2 Quite independently,
the latest genetic studies reconstructing our first human ancestors’ mi-
grations after leaving their African ‘cradle’3 have suggested the same
c.60 000 BC period for the arrival of the first humans in Australia. Inevitably
this raises the question: if the fact that Wandjina paintings are invariably
found superimposed over Bradshaws necessitates that the latter are older,
exactly how old are the Bradshaws in the suddenly very lengthy overall
scheme of Australia’s prehistory?
In the late 1960s, Western Australian Museum professional archaeolo-
gist Ian Crawford came across some paintings of the Bradshaw type amongst
Wandjinas that he was studying in the environs of the Kimberley’s King
Edward River, also around the Kalumburu mission to the north.4 Crawford
made some careful sketches, and suggested that the distinctive, multi-barb
variety of spear seen depicted in some examples strongly indicated them to
date before the introduction of quite different, leaf-shaped stone spears into
Australia, a development which archaeologists estimate to have happened
before 2000 BC. But how long before that date were the Bradshaws painted?
As a hard-pressed, working academic Crawford opted to concentrate his
energies more on the Wandjinas, while direct initiatives by other archaeolo-
gists have all too often been frustrated not only by the Kimberley’s terrain
and climate, but also by some fearsome political obstacles. Whereas Western
Australian politicians may obligingly ease the red tape for a mining company
wanting to exploit the Kimberley’s mineral resources, they can be altogether
29
more bureaucratically obstructive when a vote-penniless archaeologist

is making the exploration application.
Accordingly it would be an individual without any university education,
the earlier-mentioned Grahame Walsh, who more than a quarter of a century
ago boldly stepped forward to take up the research of the Bradshaws—a
subject that almost the entirety of Australian academics had relegated to
their ‘too hard’ basket.
Born in 1944, Grahame Leslie Walsh grew up with two sisters twenty
years older than himself on a cattle station between the west Queensland
towns of Roma and Injune. Even today this area is very ‘outback’ compared to
the ribbon of trendy urban sprawl that hugs the southern Queensland coast.
Acquiring an early enthusiasm for archaeology from his mother, who read to
him books on the subject, Walsh was thirteen when an elderly cattle-hand
took him to see some ancient Aboriginal paintings, including imprints of
hands and boomerangs, located on a sandstone rock face in Queensland’s
beautiful Carnarvon National Park. The experience so enthralled him that it
continued to burn in the back of his mind as a subject that he would one day
take up more fully.
Then at the end of June 1977 he resolutely gave up what had been a
promising enough early career as a newspaper photographer, and took on the
lowest grade of job in Carnarvon National Park—in his words ‘mark one
zamia5 nut raker’—specifically to be able to work in the same environment
where he had been shown the rock paintings. Before actually starting at
Carnarvon he also undertook his first rock art hunting photographic
expedition into the Kimberley, a journey which by road from Queensland
necessitates five full days of hard driving even to reach the area, quite aside
from the gruelling on- and off-road conditions to be tackled on arrival. When
he was setting off on one such expedition in 1988 his vehicle was involved in
a head-on collision with another travelling on the wrong side of the road. He
suffered extensive injuries and had to spend months in hospital. But,
undaunted, he continued to make the Kimberley venture an annual one, and
for up to three months at a time, continuing to this day.
In the course of these annual expeditions Walsh, like Worms before him,
sought out and questioned a number of elderly Kimberley Aboriginal people.
30
Among these was Billy King, elder of the West Kimberley Kupumgarri
Aboriginal Community, who reaffirmed what both Father Worms and the
Frobenius expedition members had been told, that Aboriginal people living
in the same area as the Bradshaw paintings simply do not recognise them as
anything to do with their own culture. As King would later state for the
record:
We would like to know the truth of where the Bradshaws came from, all
of us old people, so we are very happy that Grahame and his people are
finding out. We don’t go near them ourselves. It does not break our law,
because Bradshaws are not part of our law, we don’t know nothing about
them . . .6
But faced with the very considerable fuel, vehicle and photographic materi-
als costs accrued by his expeditions, Walsh also did not neglect to court those
in white society who might be well-heeled enough to help his cause. In 1989,
when photographing at a rock art site in the upper Hann River region to the
Kimberley’s south, he happened
to strike up a conversation with Grahame Walsh on location.
a group of visitors from Eng- He has been conducting annual expeditions to the Kimberley
since 1977, amassing an unrivalled collection of photographs of
land that included Australian- Bradshaw paintings
born sculptor John Robinson.
As an artist, and with an already
established affection for the
Kimberley, having worked there
as a young cattle drover,
Robinson needed little persua-
sion of the Bradshaws’ appeal.
He and his wife Margie had
some influential international
contacts, as a result of which in
1991 and again in 1992 Walsh
found himself guiding to
Bradshaw sites groups that
31
included not only the Robinsons but UK Economic Research Council

chairman Damon de Laszlo, American Robert Hefner III, prominent
Melbourne stockbroker Bruce ‘Dasher’ Dyson, and others. These were so
impressed by what they saw that they decided to put up funds for a special
Bradshaw Foundation which would publish Walsh’s first full book on the
subject, inclusive of the best of his photographic labours.
Fired by such support, Walsh continued his annual expeditions while
preparing that volume. On each of the expeditions between 1989 and 1993
he was accompanied by one or more field assistants, who no doubt were
provisioned with Walsh’s trademark expedition food choices. As he himself
gains some satisfaction from telling, when provisioning a three-month field
trip he buys from the local supermarket a bulk supply of the cheapest brand
of canned tuna, then consumes these straight from the tin, with little more
than rice and Weet-bix to supplement such a diet.
And while dull food may have been just one of the discomforts to be
expected from a Walsh-led Kimberley expedition, another was the very real
hazard that any suitably exhaustive exploration of the region necessarily
entails. Behind the trusty Toyota Land Cruiser which is the one type of
vehicle that those ‘in the know’ recognise as tough enough to stand up to
Kimberley conditions, Walsh tows a trailer carrying two quad 4✕4 motor-
bikes by which to rove across terrain that would otherwise be accessible only
by arduous foot-slogging. These also double as power generators and
provide a vital emergency transport backup.
However, as Judith and I would experience during our 2004 expedi-
tion, there are certain circumstances in which travel by helicopter or by
light plane is the only viable option, despite its expense, and in the
Kimberley such means of transport are never without their attendant risks.
In August 1990, when Walsh and his field assistant for that year, Nic
Parrot, were taking off in an amphibious aircraft to cross the Admiralty
Gulf on the Kimberley’s north coast, the pontoon flipped in a heavy swell,
sending the plane crashing into the sea. Walsh, who is a non-swimmer, was
unconscious when Parrot and the pilot managed to drag him from the
sinking craft, a rescue which Walsh acknowledges ‘unquestionably saved
my life’.7
32
Despite having incurred some damage to the left side of his brain, Walsh
recovered to go on three more of his annual expeditions, then in 1994 expec-
tantly awaited the Bradshaw Foundation’s publication of his magnum opus
Bradshaws: Ancient Rock Paintings of North-west Australia, the first-ever full
book on the subject.8 Even though only 1500 copies were printed, these were
on high quality paper, with 99 full-colour plates, and were quickly snapped
up by art aficionados, wealthy collectors and the more exclusive libraries. But
on publication, the previously cordial relationship between Walsh and
Robinson abruptly and acrimoniously ended, though he continued to accept
favours from other of the foundation’s benefactors. Among these was Dame
Elisabeth Murdoch, mother of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and a still
feisty octogenarian immensely wealthy in her own right. On being told that
Walsh’s quad motorbikes were breaking down during his expeditions, she
immediately bought him a new pair.
Another highly influential woman to enter Walsh’s life during this phase
was Maria Myers, socialite wife of top Melbourne QC Allan Myers, one of
Australia’s leading barristers. Like others before her, Myers had found
herself positively amazed on seeing examples of Bradshaw paintings at first
hand in the Kimberley.
On that first visit I saw the Bradshaws, I thought to myself that we don’t
understand this country at all—who’s been here, what its history is. The
sophistication of the art was evident, but how unfamiliar the adornment is,
at least in the Australian tradition. I felt an explanation that was new to
what we’ve always understood as Australian history was hovering just
before us.9
A third supporter to surface at much this same time was Susan Bradley, a
high-profile Kimberley politician who in 1998 formed a ‘Kimberley
Foundation’ to channel all future funding on Walsh’s behalf following his
disagreement with the Bradshaw Foundation. With the luxury of such a
galaxy of Australia’s rich and powerful backing him, Walsh was able to put
together a new 464-page full colour volume, Bradshaw Art of the Kimberley, for
the production of which he was subject to none of the normal commercial
33
publishers’ editing constraints, and thereby able to act with virtually a free
hand on every detail.
This book was published in the year 2000, in a special landscape format
edition again limited to 1500 copies, with over 600 colour photographs, an
equivalent number of text figures, and suitably embellished with silver and
gold ‘watermarks’ and imitation crocodile skin binding.10 Its price of A$295,
though small change for the world’s wealthy ‘limited edition’ aficionados,
instantly put it beyond the reach of most book buyers, even had it been made
available through the standard retail trade, which it had not. Such a high
purchase price likewise made it too expensive for most public lending
libraries, the university library in Walsh’s own home state of Queensland
purchasing just a single copy, and that for its strictly reference-only section
housing books that are too rare or costly ever to be allowed on general loan.
It is an extraordinary irony, therefore, that Grahame Walsh, even
though he is the very antithesis of any head-in-the-clouds dilettante, has
almost exactly matched the geographical inaccessibility of the Bradshaw
paintings by making his superb photographs—the unrivalled fruits of his 25
years of hunting Kimberley rock paintings—almost equally inaccessible to
any average citizen.11 This is a tragedy not only for all Australians, for whom
the Bradshaws form a priceless part of their country’s national heritage, but
also for the international community at large, to whom the Bradshaws
deserve to be altogether better known than they are at present.
So exactly what insights have Walsh’s books revealed concerning the
Bradshaws? First, they have established that rather than just ‘Bradshaws’
and ‘Wandjinas’, the Kimberley has undoubtedly witnessed a series of
distinctively different artistic styles that have successively waxed and waned
during its near forty millennia of known human occupation.12 To Walsh’s
considerable credit, he has methodically tried to sort these styles into a
reliable chronological sequence, using simple observation of which style
repeatedly superimposes which, no easy task when they are frequently
jumbled one atop another on a single rock face.
According to Walsh’s scheme the Kimberley’s very oldest artistic phase,
possibly, though not necessarily, that of the very earliest human arrivals in
Australia, bears the label Archaic Epoch. With this early epoch Walsh
34
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
experiments of Dr. Blacksmith on the Nervous System are in
course of exposition.
Even these startling announcements, however, are less surprising
than the following:—
SANITARY OFFICE.
Dec. 25, 1977.

The proceedings of this most high and solemn Court in the
Realm were, as usual, held with closed doors. There were present
five Lord Doctors, and sentences were passed, after due
deliberation, and (it is rumoured) the application of the Question,
ordinary and extraordinary, on nine obstinate heretics. Three of
these were members of that fanatical sect, the Peculiar People,
who refuse to consult physicians on the ground of religious
scruples—an instance of the survival of outworn superstitions
scarcely credible in this enlightened Age of Science. One of these
miserable delinquents, named John Nokes, alleged that his twelve
children had enjoyed unbroken health till his youngest little boy cut
his finger. The wretched father, instead of hurrying instantly for the
nearest surgeon, himself dressed the child’s wound (which appears
to have been superficial) with adhesive plaster, and gave the child
a fragment of toffee to stop his crying, in lieu of the proper
therapeutic remedies for the shock to the nervous system which
any medical attendant would have exhibited. The crime came
fortunately to the knowledge of the police, who immediately
brought the matter before the Sanitary Office. A second offender
of the same sect, named Styles, had, it seems, an attack of
Podagra, but took no advice, and having rather quickly recovered,
was in hopes (it is supposed) that his neglect to obey the law
would pass undiscovered. A crutch seen in his room raised the
suspicion of a visitor, and the offender was eventually arrested.
When interrogated by the Lord Presiding Doctor of the Sanitary
Court as to the motives of his crime, the man (as his sentence sets
forth) actually dared to reply by quoting a passage from an
obsolete book, wherein it is narrated of a certain King, “Now Asa
was diseased in his feet, yet in his disease he sought not to the
Lord, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers.”[1] This
narrative, as Styles had the audacity to argue, was an authentic,
and, indeed, inspired report of a fit of the gout—its diagnosis,
treatment, and the result. As he did not desire to “sleep with his
fathers,” he (Styles) had avoided consulting the physicians, and
had endeavoured to consult the Lord by following the dictates of
common sense, and the consequence was that he had recovered
with unusual rapidity. The Lord President was moved to great
indignation by the obduracy of this heretic. He remarked that the
book which contained such a passage—a volume which, he was
happy to say, he had, for his part, never read—ought to be burnt
before the doors of the London University; and as to the prisoner
Styles, it would be useless for him to hope to escape sharing in the
same combustion.
1. 2 Chron. xvi. 12.
After the Peculiar People, two Homœopaths were found guilty—
one of administering globules to an old woman, the other of
refusing to join in the processions on the 5th of November, when
the busts of Hahnemann are carried to be calcined. The remaining
four heretics avowed belief in as many different heinous errors.
One gave credit to Michel’s process for the cure of external cancer,
another thought new-born infants ought not to be dosed with
castor oil; a third placed confidence in bone-setters, and the fourth
(a very old lady) retained an infatuated preference for the
remedies which were in vogue a century ago—bromide of
potassium and chloral—which, of course, have been since
peremptorily condemned and pronounced highly injurious by the
supreme authority of the Faculty.
The aforesaid nine heretics, having been solemnly found “guilty,”
after due inquisition by the High Sanitary Office, were condemned
as contumacious by the Lord Presiding Doctor, and the Most
Eminent Doctors Pole, Gardiner, and Bonner, and were delivered
over last night to the Secular Arm. Piles are in process of erection
in Trafalgar Square. It is announced that Her Gracious Majesty
Queen Mary III. will preside at the execution, which will take place
on Sunday morning next, after hearing a Lecture on “True Medical
Belief,” to be delivered by Her Majesty’s Medical Confessor in
Ordinary, Dr. Torr Quemada, under the dome of St. Paul’s.
Such is a brief abstract of these most astounding Law and Police
Reports in the Age of Science. We make no comments upon them,
except the expression of our wonder at the similarity between the
office and behaviour of a Priest of Religion in the fifteenth century
and a Priest of Science in the twentieth. With complete citations of
four out of the twenty-five Leading Articles of the Age of Science, we
must conclude this imperfect but thoroughly reliable account of the
remarkable journal of 1977, whose discovery has been the glorious
first-fruits of the Prospective Telegraph.
Since the epoch, now nearly forty years past, when Smith made
his immortal discovery of the Army Exterminator, followed up so
rapidly by Jones’ invention of the Fleet Annihilator, international
policy has necessarily undergone a great modification. As war has
become impossible as an ultima ratio in any case, and the principle
of Arbitration, on which such hopes were founded, has proved
ineffective, in consequence of the general refusal of the working
classes to permit their governments to pay the amendes agreed
upon by the Arbitrators, a permanent state of discord between
nations seems to have become established. The dream of Free
Trade having also been exploded, following the example of the
American Empire, at that time a Republic, (prohibitive duties
having been placed by the different States on their own exports
and the imports of other countries,) commerce is undoubtedly, just
now, considerably hampered. The immense facilities for travelling
which we possess, thanks to the æro-magnetic propeller, have also
their disadvantages, since the abandonment of extradition treaties
allows the criminals of each country to take refuge immediately in
the neighbouring State, when they happen to entertain any serious
objection to detention in the Penal Hospitals. For all these
drawbacks to our progress, however, Science will no doubt soon
provide an efficient remedy.
We are on the high-road, it cannot be doubted, to a period of
prosperity and universal longevity (after all, the main object of all
rational ambition) such as the world has not hitherto beheld.
The foreign news of the hour is somewhat unsatisfactory. In
consequence of the generally lawless condition of the Southern
Russian Republics, the great corn districts of those regions have
for some years been falling out of cultivation; and no hopes are
entertained that we shall be able to import any more grain from
Odessa, or indeed from any quarter of the world. In a similar way,
the native rulers to whom we restored what was formerly called
our Indian Empire, and also China after its brief occupation, have
so far adopted American and European ideas as to place for this
next year such duties on rice and tea as will almost prohibit the
importation of those articles into the English market, while they
have positively forbidden the introduction of English cotton or iron
into their respective States. The bad and deceptive quality of the
goods furnished by our manufacturers is the alleged cause of
these unfortunate regulations. Science will, no doubt, ere long
enable us to supply the deficiencies thus caused both in our
Commissariat and the income hitherto derived from manufacture;
but, for the present, some anxiety is naturally felt in commercial
circles regarding these untoward events. Against all mishaps,
however, we rejoice to set the announcement—which will be
greeted with universal exultation—that the researches of the
learned Professor Coppervale respecting the animalculæ causing
the Vine Disease, the Silk-worm Disease, and the Potato Disease,
have resulted in the glorious discovery of a method of conveying
the infection with absolute scientific certainty from a plant or
insect which has been attacked to another still healthy. In this
manner the vineyards of Château La Rose and of Château Yquem
have both been effectively inoculated by the processes
recommended by the English Professor to the French Director of
Agriculture; and the result is perfectly satisfactory. Not a grape on
either ground was available during the last vintage for wine-
making. In the words, then, of an illustrious philosopher of last
century, “From this vantage ground already won we look forward
with confident hope to the triumph of science over all the loss and
misery which the human race has experienced.” Anyone who has
eaten a grape infected with the phylloxera according to Professor
Coppervale’s stupendous discovery, will have enjoyed a foretaste
of the triumph of Science in ages to come.
Considerable excitement prevails just now in many of our large

towns in consequence of the needful, but somewhat troublesome,
formalities required by law before any trade or handicraft may be
exercised. Blacksmiths’ apprentices, we are told, very generally
resent the necessity of passing their proper examinations in
Metallurgy before they are qualified to shoe a horse; and the
Artificial Flower Makers constantly evade attendance at the
lectures on Botany, given expressly for their benefit. The
candidates for licenses as Cabdrivers have more than once
exhibited signs of discontent, when rejected on the grounds that
they failed to answer some of the simplest examination questions
on the principles of Mechanics applied to Traction, and on the
correlation of Heat and Motion, as discovered by the illustrious
author of “Heat as a Mode of Motion.” A strike (it is even
rumoured) is impending among the stonemasons and bricklayers
and slaters in a certain large city, because the Police, at the order
of the Magistrates, having brought up several members of those
trade-unions to the Local Examining Board for inquiry, it was
elicited that none of them had acquired a competent knowledge of
Geology in general, nor even of the formation of the strata of
rocks wherewith their proper business is concerned.
These difficulties were to be anticipated in the progress of
Scientific knowledge among the masses, and we earnestly hope
that no proposal to relax the late very wise legislation will be made
in Parliament, but rather to reinforce the existing Acts by severer
penalties upon ignorance and inattention. Who can for a moment
think, for example, of allowing his shirt to be washed by a person
who knows nothing of the chemistry of soap, blue, and starch? or
his dinner cooked by a man who (however skilled in the mere
kitchen art of sending up appetising dishes) is totally ignorant of
how much albumen, salts, and alkalies go to the formation of
vegetable and animal diet?
A kindred subject of unreasonable popular dissatisfaction are the
Medical Certificates of good Health now legally required from men,
women, and children performing any kind of labour in factories,
warehouses, shops, fields, ships, or in domestic service. Obviously
it is impossible to certify the health of any individual for more than
a few days at a time, and the necessity which the recent Act
enforces of obtaining a fresh certificate (and, of course, paying the
doctor for it) every week, is felt by discontented persons as a
burden unfairly laid upon them by the State. We regret that the
process is, in truth, slightly troublesome and expensive (the
minimum fee for the humbler trades is, as our readers are aware,
half-a-crown; for exercising the higher professions—artists,
merchants, lawyers, &c.—5s.), but it was recognised so long ago
as 1876 as a right principle of legislation in the case of factory
works, and it now forms so legitimate a source of regular income
to a large body of most respectable medical gentlemen, who make
it their business to grant certificates, that we cannot imagine
anyone being so ill-advised as to suggest the repeal of the law. Of
course the number of persons thus excluded from the labour
market is very considerable indeed, but we must accept such a
consequence as inevitable. Since cripples were rejected a century
ago for the office of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, the
practice has been constantly followed of placing restrictions upon
the feeble attempts at industry of persons labouring under natural
defects and disabilities, and the Blind, for example, are no longer
allowed to compete with the seeing in making mats and baskets.
For all such wretched people there are open the proper asylums,
the Hospital for the diseased, and the Workhouse for the feeble,
the maimed, the deaf, and the blind. Charity itself can ask no
more. The resistance of these unfortunates against entering these
institutions must be put down. The world is, after all, made for the
strong—the strong in mind, and the strong in body; and the notion
that it is our business to “bear each other’s burdens” belonged
altogether to an Unscientific age. What if physicians and surgeons
do try experiments daily on the patients in the hospitals,
sometimes involving a good deal of pain, or loss of limb or life?
These people are fed and housed, and often extravagantly
fattened up on the most luxurious food, on the condition of serving
the cause of Science as subjects of experiments. And what, again,
if the children in the workhouses be given over now and then by
the Guardians, at the request of the Medical authorities, for
vivisection? They are nearly always placed under the influence of
anæsthetics, indeed, we may say invariably so, unless the object
of the experiment would be frustrated by their use. Could the
humanest of our humanitarians ask anything more? The rule of
Science is the most benign, as well as enlightened, the world has
ever seen.
The sanitary interests of the community are now recognized on

all hands as the supreme concern of the State, as the care of his
own health and the prolongation of life at all costs are the chief
ends of each individual man. We therefore commence our yearly
review by noting in what manner the advance of Science, (in which
lies our only hope,) has contributed during the past twelvemonth
towards this grand object.
The foremost place of honour is, of course, due to the discovery
of the eminent Dr. Howlem of the scientific way to give Cholera;
after which we may reckon Dr. Mowlem’s short method of
conveying the Plague; and last, Dr. Bowlem’s most interesting and
valuable plan for producing Leprosy. These immense discoveries
(effected, it is needless to remark, by laborious pathological
experiments on animals and idiots) may well make the past year
memorable in the annals of the Science of Medicine; and though
the particular specific remedies for the diseases in question have
not yet been ascertained by the Faculty, we can scarcely fail to
attain that secondary object ere long, together with the proper
treatment of Consumption, Scarlet Fever, and other maladies
which Science has been able to convey for the last hundred years,
and must ere long find out how to cure.
Next in importance to actual discovery we are inclined to place
the new Regulations which Parliament has laid down in obedience
to the High Court of Convocation. The absolute prohibition to
Women to read or write—even in cases where they may have
formerly acquired those arts (now recognised as so unsuitable to
their sex)—will, we apprehend, tell importantly on the health of
infants, and of course eventually on that of the community. So
long as females indulged in no more deleterious practices than
dancing in hot rooms all night, unclothing their necks and chests,
wearing thin slippers which exposed their feet to deadly chills, and
tightening their waists till their ribs were crushed inwards, the
Medical Profession very properly left them to follow their own
devices with but little public remonstrance. The case was altered,
however, when, three or four generations ago, a considerable
movement was made for what was then called the Higher
Education of women. The feeble brains of young females were
actually taxed to study the now forgotten Greek and Latin
languages, and even Mathematics and such Natural Science as
was then understood. The result was truly alarming; for these poor
creatures flung themselves with such energy into the pursuits
opened to them, that, as one of their critics remarked, they
resembled “the palmer-worm and the canker-worm—they
devoured every green thing”—and not seldom surpassed their
masculine competitors. At length they began to aim at entering the
learned Professions—the Legal, and even the Medical. Our readers
may be inclined to doubt the latter fact, which seems to involve
actual absurdity, but there is evidence that there once existed two
or three Lady Doctors in London, who, like Pope Joan in Rome,
foisted themselves surreptitiously into an exalted position from
which Nature should have debarred them. Of course it was the
solemn duty of the Medical Profession to put a stop at once to an
error which might lead to such a catastrophe, and numerous books
were immediately written proving (what we all now acknowledge)
that the culture of the brains of women is highly detrimental to
their proper functions in the community; and, in short, that the
more ignorant a woman may be, the more delightful she is as a
wife, and the better qualified to fulfil the duties of a mother.
Since Science has thoroughly gained the upper hand over
Religious and other prejudices, the position of women, we are
happy to say, has been steadily sinking, and the dream of a Higher
Education has been replaced by the abolition of even Elementary
Schools for girls, and now by the final Act of last Session, which
renders it penal for any woman to read a hook or newspaper, or to
write a letter. We anticipate the very happiest results from this
thoroughly sound and manly legislation.
The last sanitary event to which we need at present advert is
the new law by which, on the certificate of any single Medical
Graduate that a person is Insane, the police will be called on
immediately to arrest and consign him to such mad-house as the
Medical graduate shall appoint. The magistrate by whose order the
arrest is made is left no option as to obeying the Medical
graduate’s certificate, and we are glad also to see that, by another
clause in the Act, the only remaining difficulty connected with
these Asylums has been removed. None but a Medical graduate,
responsible only to the great Medical Trades Union Council, is
henceforth eligible to the office of Inspector of any Lunatic Asylum
throughout the kingdom, nor can any Justice of the Peace grant an
order for admittance or search, except to such a graduate. These
wise and reasonable regulations will afford much satisfaction to
the Medical gentlemen who have undertaken the arduous but not
unprofitable profession of managers and proprietors of Lunatic
Asylums.
Our prognostics of last New Year’s Day have been amply
justified by the Summary of Crime for the past twelvemonth, which
has just been published, according to the excellent recent
appointment of the Registrar General of Offences. Crimes of the
lesser class, such as murders, poisonings, electroding and
exploding, have indeed increased considerably in number, and
perhaps also in the degree of recklessness and violence exhibited
by the offenders; but on the other hand, as we prophesied, those
crimes which involve so much larger evils to the community—the
detestable Homœopathic and Hydropathic heresies, Infidelity
respecting the sacred doctrine of Evolution, neglect of Schooling,
and neglect of Equination, Vaccination, Canination, and
Porcination, have dwindled under the severe measures of
punishment which we urged for so long on a too lax legislature,
but which have at last been thoroughly enforced. We may really
hope to see a few years hence the Reign of Science so complete
that no man, woman, or child in the land will presume to whisper
a doubt on any subject on which the Sanitary Office has
pronounced, or attempt to evade the seasons appointed by
authority for receiving the Rites above mentioned. The Act passed
at the end of the last century, whereby certificates of Vaccination
were substituted for all legal purposes for Baptismal certificates,
was the first step towards the happy order of things under which
we now have the privilege to dwell.
Lest our readers should feel a not wholly unnatural anxiety,
founded on the admitted increase of the lesser crimes to which we
have adverted, we wish to remind them that such an occurrence
was inevitable on the final collapse of Religion, and that we must
be content to wait till Science shall have had time to substitute
some more effectual checks on human passions than it has yet
been in our power to apply. It is too obvious to need remark that
since men have learned that Death is the end of their existence,
they must be expected to seize more hastily and resolutely every
pleasure which life may offer, nay, that it would be absurd and
unscientific to expect them to do otherwise. Let us do justice to
the old effete superstition, and admit that the delusive notion that
an invisible Being watched human actions, loved good men, and
would punish bad ones in another world, if not in the present, was
calculated to exercise considerable influence of a beneficial sort on
ordinary minds. Certain types of character (not now, of course, to
be found in the world) seem to have flourished under the fictitious
charm of these antique ideas—characters exhibiting a certain
courage and unselfishness, of which it is scarcely possible to read
without some little regret that they are not conformable with
sounder philosophic views of the nature and destiny of man.
People had, we must remember, in former days, four distinct
motives for doing good instead of evil. First, they believed in an
omnipotent Lord and Master whom they called “God.” 2nd, they
believed in a sacred internal Guide whom they called Conscience;
and 3rd, they believed in a peculiar principle of action which they
called Honour. After all these came the Criminal Law, ready to
punish those who neglected what were deemed to be loftier
motives. Now we, in this glorious Age of Science, must remember
that of all these four incentives to virtue only one remains. We
know there is no God, or, at least, that, if there be, he is Unknown
and Unknowable; and we are persuaded that Conscience is merely
the inherited prejudice of our barbarous ancestors in favour of the
class of actions which were found conducive to the welfare of the
tribe. As to the Law of Honour, men had already begun to forget
what it signified a hundred years ago, when the Age of Science was
just dawning, for we find at that epoch a writer of considerable
pretensions, in a periodical called the Fortnightly Review, actually
asserting that its standard “is submission not to Law but to
Opinion ... deference to the opinion of a particular class.” Up to
that period we think it was universally understood by “honourable”
persons to signify, quite on the contrary, Reverence for an inward
standard of rectitude, truth, and generosity; for a man’s own
private sense of Honour and self-respect, which he would not
forfeit to gain the applause of a world. In our time, of course, it is
needless to say that all these fine ideal sentiments have gone
utterly out of vogue, and, having left them behind us, we have
only the Criminal Law on which to rely for the protection of life and
property. It is needless to repeat that the delusive exhortations of
some amiable but short-sighted philosophers of the last century to
“labour for the good of Humanity in future generations” (a motive
which they supposed would prove a substitute for the old Historic
Religions) have been once and for all answered by the grand
discovery of the Astronomers that our planet cannot long remain
the habitation of man (even if it escape any sidereal explosion)
since the Solar heat is undergoing such rapid exhaustion. When
the day comes—as come it must—when the fruits of the earth
perish one by one, when the dead and silent woods petrify, and all
the races of animals become extinct—when the icy seas flow no
longer, and the pallid Sun shines dimly over the frozen world,
locked like the Moon in eternal frost and lifelessness—what, in that
day predicted so surely by Science, will avail all the works, and
hopes, and martyrdoms of man? All the stores of knowledge which
we shall have accumulated will be for ever lost. Our discoveries,
whereby we have become the lords of creation and wielded the
great forces of Nature, will be useless and forgotten. The virtues
which have been perfected, the genius which has glorified, the
love which has blessed the human race, will all perish along with
it. Our libraries of books, our galleries of pictures, our fleets, our
railroads, our vast and busy cities, will be desolate and useless for
evermore. No intelligent eye will ever behold them; and no mind in
the universe will know or remember that there ever existed such a
being as Man. This is what Science teaches us unerringly to expect,
—and in view of it, who shall talk to us of “labouring for the sake
of Humanity”? The enthusiasm which could work disinterestedly
for a Progress destined inevitably to end in an eternal Glacial
Period must be recognised as a dream, wherein no man in a
Scientific Age can long indulge.
There is, then, but one Method on which we can rely to repress
human passions and hold together the somewhat brittle chain of
Society. That method is the Scientific Treatment of Crime, under
such conditions as careful investigation and experiments may
prove to be best suited to effect its cure. We can hold out no
supersensual motives to the Minds of the multitude, but we can
treat their Bodies in the very best manner possible to render them
virtuous and industrious citizens. It is true that as yet the results of
our efforts in this direction have not been very satisfactory. The
salutary processes employed in the Penal Hospitals under the most
eminent physicians have not been altogether crowned with
success; and crime of the violent kind increases year by year
almost in geometrical proportion. Nevertheless, it would ill become
any of us who have the privilege to live in this enlightened age to
entertain a shadow of a doubt that our Scientific method is the
right one, and that by-and-by (while we respectfully wait the
results of their experiments) our great Medical men will discover
the proper remedies for murder, rape, and robbery. For our own
part, it is superfluous to assure our readers, we retain unwavering,
unbounded faith in the resources of Science to provide a perfect
substitute for Religion, for Conscience, and for Honour.
J. OGDEN AND CO., PRINTERS, 172, ST. JOHN STREET, E.C.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained
as printed.
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A treasury of Sanskrit poetry in English translation 1.

First published in 2006

Copyright © Ian Wilson 2006

Allen & Unwin

National Library of Australia

Wilson, Ian, 1941- .

1. Rock paintings - Western Australia - Kimberley. 2.

Set in 12/15 pt Bell MT Regular by Midland Typesetters, Victoria

Author’s preface vii

Chapter 1 Drop-in at Reindeer Rock 1

Picture credits 279

LOST WORLD OF THE KIMBERLEY

Owen, author of Thylacine ; Dr Stephen Wroe of the University of Sydney;

The Mitchell Falls during the late Dry season

LOST WORLD OF THE KIMBERLEY

DROP-IN AT REINDEER ROCK

Particularly intriguingly, a few are depicted in boats that—subject to the

LOST WORLD OF THE KIMBERLEY

DROP-IN AT REINDEER ROCK

thousands of years of direct exposure to the Kimberley’s equally intense

LOST WORLD OF THE KIMBERLEY

DROP-IN AT REINDEER ROCK

For as we stood in no little perplexity in front of the painted panel we

LOST WORLD OF THE KIMBERLEY

Tim quickly led us in a right-hand direction to what turned out to be

DROP-IN AT REINDEER ROCK

of the dead’. In these depictions,

T he Kimberley is the region of north-west Australia in which the

EARLY ROCK ART ENCOUNTERS

. . . there came on a tremendous squall of wind, rain, thunder and most

Not unexpectedly, therefore, European exploration in the Kimberley got off

EARLY ROCK ART ENCOUNTERS

LOST WORLD OF THE KIMBERLEY

EARLY ROCK ART ENCOUNTERS

to be painted to represent such. These were coloured red, yellow and

Grey made several on-the-spot colour sketches of the paintings which he

LOST WORLD OF THE KIMBERLEY

EARLY ROCK ART ENCOUNTERS

one of a number of profit-hungry investors being lured by the Western

LOST WORLD OF THE KIMBERLEY

In October 1890 Bradshaw received the

EARLY ROCK ART ENCOUNTERS

the bodies and limbs very attenuated, and represented as having

LOST WORLD OF THE KIMBERLEY

The first figure, at furthest left in Bradshaw’s copy, is of an individual

EARLY ROCK ART ENCOUNTERS

can only be construed as a ‘floating’ pose. Superimposed on these figures are

LOST WORLD OF THE KIMBERLEY

Throughout the first three-quarters of the twentieth century the

EARLY ROCK ART ENCOUNTERS