During the dream time, the Wandjina, the spirit-beings who created the world and all of its creatures, left their images behind on rock surfaces in what is now Kimberly Australia prior to returning to the spirit world. The Wandjina images have been painted over and repainted numerous times over the course of the millennia since the Wandjina left, and the repainting of these sacred images has long been an Aboriginal cultural tradition. The paintings are of profound symbolic significance to the present day aborigines, and “touching up” the paintings has been something that has been done on a regular basis throughout the paintings’ history. Repainting the pictographs has always been a way for the artists to make contact with their ancestors—a way to establish a cultural connection with their own past as a people.
In the late 1980s, there was a concerted effort to prevent repainting and preserve the rock paintings in their present form. The proponents for preservation claimed that repainting the images was akin to defacing culturally and historically important works of art. Of course, the idea that these rock images are “art” expresses an entirely Western perspective. The Aboriginal people themselves consider the images to be of spiritual and cultural significance, but not “art” in the Western sense.
Arguments for preventing repainting are informative here. First, because of the dramatic cultural disruptions brought about by European colonization and the forced relocation of indigenous groups, there has been a discontinuity in the repainting activity. The discontinuity is claimed to somehow disqualify the repainting activity as an Aboriginal cultural action. Also, the materials used for repainting differ from traditional pigments. This latter argument only makes sense if you assume the prior traditions stretching back several thousand years were entirely static with respect to techniques and materials—a clearly false assumption. It is also telling that the most vocal detractors of repainting were white academics and art historians. But what is most relevant for our purposes here is that this controversy suggests that the distinction between humans and the natural world does not cleanly separate out all humans. The human-versus-nature distinction is really a distinction between civilized humans versus everything (and everyone) else.
Modern-day Aborigines are part of the modern civilized context, separated from their ancestors by their presence in a world in which civilization reigns. The pictographs of the ancestors, like the trace remnants of old growth forests that are now call national parks, need to be preserved as evidence of what used to be. Altering these paintings is a form of vandalism on par with carving your lover’s initials into the bark of a 500 year old redwood tree. The pictographs, like the trees in the Redwood National Forest, are museum pieces. Their protected status derives from their entertainment value as relics of a bygone time in the lives of a primitive people.
A couple of things here; first, the desire to protect a pictograph and a grove of old growth Redwood trees derives from an implicit recognition of the ultimately destructive nature of civilization. Anything of potential nostalgic value needs to be walled off and protected from the otherwise indiscriminant destruction that follows from civilization’s terraforming mandate. And second, select relics from the past serve an important role in justifying the present. Civilization is extremely selective in what it chooses as alternatives for comparison. Specific features of ancient indigenous culture are highlighted in order to provide points of contrast that make civilization look good all the while diverting attention from those features that show civilized life for what it actually is.
