While we had taken a look at the rock paintings at the Ngajarli1 site a few days before—because it’s very close to Hearsons Cove—this afternoon we would come to realise how much we didn’t see, understand, nor recognise.
My sister had booked a short tour of this part of the Murujuga2 aboriginal settlement. This is a settlement in between red hills covered in large rocks, located on the Burrup peninsula. The special thing is that many of these rocks are painted by the original aboriginal people of that place—called Yaburra—and that some of these paintings—the correct term is petroglyphs—have been dated more than 60,000 years old.
Our guide Clinton Walker is one of the Yaburra. He explained the meaning of many of these paintings—there are such paintings all over Australia, obviously from different aboriginal people, and they estimate they are in the millions—while also explaining that some of these paintings were meant for the Yaburra only and will not be explained to, well, foreigners.
Before I continue, an important caveat:
When I’m writing about the Ngajarli site, this is from my imperfect and incomplete memory3. Therefore, any mistakes in what I write down below are mine and mine alone, and not of our guide Clinton, who did an outstanding job.
The only way to recap everything our guide Clinton told us—make no mistake, it was a lot and merely part of huge and deep amount of knowledge—would have been to record everything he said. I didn’t do that, nor would I want to do that as that would undermine Clinton’s business. If you want to know, please go there yourself and book this tour. It’s very highly recommended.
To give us an idea of the communal knowledge of an aboriginal people like the Yaburra, Clinton asked us how long could we recall the memory of our people. Well, for one modern Western European people do not record and transfer knowledge like the aboriginal people, as we use paper and increasingly electronic means of keeping records. On top of that, while hunter-gatherers most probably were the first to inhabit the area known as The Netherlands (my home country) some 40,000 years ago, the first settlements didn’t begin to appear until around 4,800 BC. Clinton then said that the knowledge of his people goes back some 60,000 years (or possibly more).
Clinton then joked—I think it was a joke—that, as far as they were concerned, the aboriginal people were the first humans. They were, as far as I can determine, the first people to settle on the Australian continent4. However, they were not the very first hominids period5.
All that knowledge has not only survived that long period, but has been extended with new findings along the way. It is not totally clear how this knowledge is exactly transferred across the generations, because the aboriginal people do not divulge their deepest secrets to aliens (later on, Clinton would call petroglyphs of invasive species like pigs and cows a result of ‘First Contact’, meaning that the original human inhabitants consider later arrivals as aliens6). A lot of it is done through rituals, storytelling and the divulgence of the most secret (and sacred) information from elders to their successors. But the petroglyphs also play a role, as they both contain old information—some of them have been aged at 60,000 years—but also tips on where to find food and prey, and info for some of their rituals (as there are sites for men only and for women only), and other aspects that I either forgot, or were not mentioned.
Please do keep in mind that this is just a small part of what was told on the tour. Here are a few examples (ones that I was able to photograph7):
1. Marbi—Yaburra Tribal Brand.
The aboriginal people were very successful in their settlement on the Australian continent (no mean feat considering how hostile—most of Australia is a desert where it often becomes searingly hot—their environment was and is), so different people8 settled in different areas. The tribal brand is a symbol that is unique to each people, and—if I understood our guide Clinton correctly—is a way to mark a people’s territory.
So if aboriginals from another settlement see the Yaburra tribal brand, they know they’re approaching other people’s lands, meaning they have to loudly announce themselves in order not to be mistaken for invaders.
2. Marrjuru.
This is a petroglyph of the quoll9 marrjuru. Marjurru haven’t been sighted on the Burrup Peninsula, so they’ve most probably become extinct in this area. Also, this petroglyph might be older than it looks because many of these rock paintings are ‘touched up’ over time.
3. The Goanna Biligara.
The goanna biligara comes out in the hot season—called Garrbarn10—which stretches from October to March. The Yaburra hunt and eat biligara, although not on Murujuga country. So this is a petroglyph telling hunters where it can be found.
4. Mangguru.
This is believed to be a petroglyph of a fat-tailed kangaroo called mangguru. This species is extinct, but it has lived between 40,000 to 50,000 BP (Before Present). While fossil records for this have not been found (as of yet), similar petroglyphs are found throughout the Pilbara.
5. Emu painting.
An emu petroglyph, which might be relatively recent.
6. Kangaroo painting.
The kangaroo depicted is either bending over while feeding on grass or shrub, or sleeping. In both cases it is easier to hunt. Clinton did tell us that the Yubarra kill no more than a third of any prey, so that it can recover.
7. An actual kangaroo atop the Marrjuru painting.
During the tour, as Clinton was explaining something, an actual kangaroo showed up, which was pretty cool.
Clinton is part of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation and due to their efforts Murujuga is now being nominated for World Heritage status. I certainly hope it will be rewarded this honour, as it greatly deserves this. This was an outstanding tour of a fascinating corner of Australia, and I highly recommend it. Book here: Ngurranga Tours.
When confronted—in a very good way, I hasten to add—with a highly different culture, my (SF) writing mind goes into overdrive. The inescapable impression is that the Aboriginal people of Australia have been living in harmony with their—often very harsh—environment, for a very long time (possibly more than sixty-thousand years). Obviously, the arrival of Europeans—originally mostly English convicts and their keepers—has hugely upset that equilibrium, and while Australia—the government—is slowly making amends, most of the Aboriginal Australian people have been uprooted from their original way of life, whether they like it or not. It’s a dire and complex situation.
It reminds me of a short story called “Cradle and Ume” by Geoffrey W. Cole that appeared in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds Online Magazine11 on November 23, 2012, which is also available at Escape Pod as issue EP 439.
In that story, an isolated tribe of humans—called Kamurei—have been living in a part of South America free from outside contact of, well, further developed people—called posthumans—so that they can live their lives as they see fit, and supposedly in close harmony with their environment.
The central question that the story asks is: “will such isolated people—that is, deliberately kept from ‘First Contact’—live in harmony with their environment forever, or will they eventually also develop technology?” In the story, they do, partly because the Kamurei find remnants of old buildings and other technological artefacts as they spread across an Earth abandoned by posthumans, and because the posthuman Ume surreptitiously leaves hints of technological progress.
The dilemma is complex: on the one hand such non-technological people can die from diseases that are curable—even preventable—by modern medicine12. On the other hand, when confronted by an alien culture, aboriginal people suffer due to:
Discriminatory treatment of Aboriginal people which leads to:
Dispossession of their original lands;
Poverty;
Low education levels (for the modern society, not for their own society);
High unemployment;
Poor housing;
Poor health and nutrition;
Inability of politicians to address Aboriginal problems;
Exposure to alcohol and drugs;
(Caveat 2: this list is not complete, I know. It functions to give an idea of how bad such a one-sided ‘First Contact’ can go for the original inhabitants of a land.)
In general, this demonstrates that Aboriginal people might have been better off if there was no First Contact of invading Europeans. Yet one wonders if a more benign approach—slowly introducing Aboriginal people to modern technology—might have worked.
It’s a paradox: is the ‘purity’ or ‘innocence’ of an isolated people—who do manage to live in harmony with their surrounds—sacrosanct, or should they be given the choice to be uplifted to a higher level of technology (not necessarily spirituality). The fine line between protection and interference, (as one of the commenters on the Escape Pod thread had it).
It’s a conundrum that fascinates me. It’s a highly complex dilemma, and I’m incorporating it in my novel—currently a work-in-progress—called “The Constructors of Consensual Reality”. I don’t pretend to have any definite answers, so—as many writers before me—aim to depict both sides of the argument as honestly as possible (and what might happen if truly ethical and highly advanced aliens would take a stand on this).
Author’s note: all pictures are mine, via my iPhone 14 Pro Max, whose magnifying features worked surprisingly well. Of course, they might work just as well or even better on other flagship smartphones—which I don’t have—but this is just a remark on how far smartphones are becoming the default camera for many people.
Obviously—I know my physics—a larger lens always captures more light, but smartphones are so much more portable than a true camera with a big lens.
Meaning ‘Deep Gorge’;
Murujuga means ‘hip bone sticking out’, which adequately describes the shape of the Dampier peninsula, whose original name is the Burrup peninsula;
As a side note, check out this recent Nautilus article: “Faulty Memory Is a Feature, Not a Bug”;
The ‘out-of-Africa’ hypothesis of the African origin of modern humans is very well established;
The anthropological and genetic evidence—conclusive fossil evidence is still missing—so far points to the hypothesis that humans and chimpanzees had a common ancestor (which is qualitatively different from the common misconception that humans descended from apes). The period where Hominini Panina were split into Hominina (humans) and chimpanzees is estimated to have happened some 4 million years ago, in Africa;
Which is correct;
There are also petroglyphs about the ‘first humans’, the people that settled the continent first. These are sacred and the aboriginal people request that we aliens do not photograph those. Out of respect I complied;
I’m calling the different factions of aboriginals ‘people’ rather than ‘tribes’, as this seems the way they prefer to be called;
A catlike carnivorous marsupial with short legs and a white-spotted coat. Also called dasyure, native cat, tiger cat;
The cold season is called Muthu and runs from April to September;
It also features my novelette “Follow Me Yhrough Anarchy”. Really chuffed to have been published in this legendary publication;
And even that is not straightforward, as aboriginal people in the 19th Century had, on average, longer lifespans than Europeans. Only when modern medicine was developed did Western Europeans live longer—on average—than the aboriginal people;