Waggin' Trail: Walga Rock

Walga Rock is about 50 km out of Cue; it "belongs" to the Wajarri People and is one of the most significant aboriginal rock art sites in Australia, but weirdly it is rather difficult to find much information about it on the internet, and there certainly isn't much info provided when you get there. I only knew about it from Ian; there are hardly any signs and not many people seem to know about it here.

The site is mainly famous for a "mysterious" drawing of a sailing ship, which until recently had many mythical explanations but is now believed to be a drawing done by a fellow called Sammy Hassan. He was one of about 140 Malays brought to work as pearl divers in the late 1800's on a ship called the Xantho, which worked out of Shark Bay and coastal areas north of there. In 1917, Sammy Hassan moved from Dirk Hartog Island to the Cue area and stayed on stations near Walga Rock; the drawing matches features of the Xantho and there are various historical records backing up this story.

Walga Rock is the second largest monolith in Western Australia; the largest is Mt Augustus. Like Ayers Rock, it is a single huge rock formation. The aboriginal paintings here are probably about 12,000 years old as far as I can work out; the only detailed information you can find is buried among university papers on the internet, and even that is kind of sketchy, focussing mainly on the ship drawing. It's annoying to get to places like this and find that someone's gone to the trouble of putting up those signs that say "We would like to acknowledge and thank the traditional owners of this sacred site blah blah blah" but can't be bothered signposting any actual intelligent historical or scientific information which would help you appreciate the real significance of the place. What I've written here has been cobbled together after an hour on the internet trawling through obscure academic websites and stuff.

What is interesting is that the area is loosely part of the Weld Ranges; modern day mining activity requires that the companies do extensive heritage surveying before they're allowed to go in; any significant art or cultural areas are marked off. This can be anything from rock art to little piles of knapped stone (hand-hacked bits of stone used for tools etc). So with the renewed mining interest in the area, they are only just starting to record all the art sites that are out there, and it seems there are quite a few. Gary's mate Tony, who is part aboriginal, is going to take us to some "unknown" sites.

I don't know what the paintings represent; as Gary said, "Just looks like a bunch of squiggles to me." There are a few hand paintings, and what looks like the semi-circular crescents that usually represent a group of people gathering, as well as what could be the usual rainbow serpenty squiggles. They are quite faded and worn or covered by the effects of the rainwater washing down the sides of the monolith; in places you can see lines of Bunnings silicone gel that are placed there to direct the water away from the paintings as it runs down the rock.

The mulga trees surrounding the base of the rock were full of finch nests, and in one nest I found a poor little dead dried up finch! We also saw lots of the pretty No. 28 parrots, one emu, and some young kangaroos. Snake tracks EVERYWHERE but didn't see any thank god. It would be a magnificent camping spot.

For some reason the blog is putting photos in totally random order, so it's not very sequential but, like, whatever...here they are: