Nourlangie Area and Aboriginal Rock Painting

After the 'jumping croc' cruise, we drove to the Nourlangie Area in Kakadu. From there, you can see the Arnehem Land escarpment, a long stretch of raised sandstone that goes on for miles. We did the 2km loop around Nourlangie. Our timing was pretty good as we just avoided a huge thunderstorm. Fortunately, it stopped just as our guide finished telling us a little bit about the area.

First, we stopped at the Anbangbang rock shelter, used by the Aboriginal people for 20,ooo years as a refuge during the wet season. They also used the rock as a canvas upon which to practice rock painting. A Czech scientist determined that Aboriginal people painted right over the top of earlier works. Aboriginal rock painting is divided into three distinct periods - the Pre-estuarine period (including the earliest paintings and those up to 6,000 years ago), the Estuarine period (6,000 to 2,000 years ago) when rising sea levels brought the coast to its present level and artists began to use the paintings for teaching, giving figures of animals an X-ray quality -showing the parts of the animals that were good to eat, etc. and the Freshwater period (2,000 years ago to the present) when fresh water was more readily available so the Aboriginal people had more time to devote to their art. The rock paintings function as archives for the Aboriginal people. They used natural water-soluable ochres to achieve the warm colours of their paintings.

We continued along the loop walk and stopped at the Angangbang Gallery, featuring Dreaming characters painted in the 60's by a famous Aboriginal artist. These paintings were meant to renew interest in traditional Aboriginal ways. The artist depicted the story of a man who had an incestuous relationship (not necessarily by our definition, but with someone with one of the same kin names). The woman killed herself and he fled the community. As he was camping along the river's edge and cooking, he caught fire. Covered in blisters, he leapt into the water. As a punishment, the Aboriginals say he became a crocodile, the blisters becoming the bumps on the crocodile's hide.

Finally, we headed up to the Gunwarddehwarde lookout for spectacular views over the Arnehem Land escarpment.