Australian Rock Art in the Expanded Field: History, Meaning, and Contemporary Context

Abstract

Compared with the prehistoric parietal art of Europe, Australian Aboriginal rock art is little known in art historical contexts, despite that fact that many of these works are older, more dynamic, and more sophisticated. More than the laneways of inner-city streets, much of the Australian landscape is literally layered with art. There are thousands of rock art sites recorded in Australia and perhaps an equal number that have been forgotten or destroyed. New galleries and cathedrals of colour are regularly reported in the popular press. Yet the status of rock art in Australian art history, like much of the rest of Indigenous art production, is under-researched and poorly conceptualised within the discipline. To address this, we devised a panel session for the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand’s 2017 annual conference, at the University of Western Australia, upon which this special issue is based. The responses we received were curated into two parallel interdisciplinary sessions, each of which had an artist, an art historian and an archaeologist.