Aboriginal Art and the Telling of History

Laura Rademaker is Australian Research Council DECRA Research Fellow at the Australian National University. A historian of Indigenous Australia, she is a winner of the Australian Historical Association's Hancock Prize and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia's Paul Bourke Award for her interdisciplinary and community-based historical methods. Sally K. May is Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow in the School of Humanities, University of Adelaide. Her research, which is based on more than twenty years of fieldwork in northern Australia, focuses on relationships between people, landscapes, material culture, and imagery. Gabriel Maralngurra is a renowned Australian Indigenous artist. He also works as a translator, artistic mentor, tour guide, and co-researcher in Aboriginal and colonial history and art from western Arnhem Land.  He is one of the founding members of Injalak Arts and is currently its co-manager. Joakim Goldhahn, author of Birds in the Bronze Age, is an internationally acclaimed rock art researcher who also works in the fields of Indigenous Archaeology and the European Bronze Age.

List of figures; Foreword; Acknowledgements; Note on the text; List of abbreviations; 1. Rock beats paper: 'prehistory', rock art and archives; 2. Change and tradition in West Arnhem land rock art; 3. The counter-archive of First Nations biography; 4. Reading the writing on the wall: rock art and the written word; 5. Touchstones for memory, bedrocks for history; 6. Timelessness and permanence: rock art and time; Conclusions; Afterword; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.