Wanjina Rock Art- Aboriginal Australian ArtifactArtifact

Imprints on Soft Rock

When the Wanjina spirits completed their creative journeys during the Lalai, the Kimberley creation period, the stones were still soft. The Wanjina built themselves houses of stone, the rock shelters that open across the escarpments. Then they lay down on the soft rock and left the imprint of their bodies. These imprints are the paintings: large, round-faced figures with prominent dark eyes, radiating halos, and no mouths, executed in white and red ochre across the shelters of the Worora, Ngarinyin, and Wunambul peoples.

The Wanjina chose not to paint mouths because to do so would bring unceasing rain and flood the world. Their power over the wet season is held in silence. Each painting belongs to a particular clan and a particular Dreaming, and the figures often appear alongside animals and plants connected to that Wanjina's story.

Keeping the Wanjina Fresh

The paintings are not relics. They are the Wanjina themselves in transformed state, and they must be maintained. Authorized custodians with the proper hereditary rights periodically repaint the images to renew the spirits' power. When the paintings fade, the rains may fail. When they are refreshed, the land is renewed. This repainting is a ceremony in its own right, performed at the appropriate season and carried as a responsibility along kinship lines.

The disruptions of the mission era broke this chain of care for many sites, and neglected paintings degraded. Sam Woolagoodja and his son Donny Woolagoodja have worked to restore the practice, keeping the Wanjina fresh as the tradition demands.