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The Australian State of Tasmania, at latitude 42 degrees south, became an island about 8,000 years ago when the sea rose to its present level, following the melting of polar and glacial ice that covered much of the land mass. After that time, the Tasmanian Aboriginal rock art developed independently of mainland Australia, with its form being basica...
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Citations
... Island isolation due to sea-level rise, an unfavorable drier and variable climate, and resource depletion are thought to have resulted in the cessation or infrequent use of the eastern Bass Strait islands (Furneaux Group) after 5000 BP (Bowdler 2015;Sim 1998). Meanwhile islands in the Fleurieu Group continued to be actively occupied by Aboriginal people, especially in the past 2000 years (Bowdler 1979;Sims 2013). The dynamics of land use on the Bass Strait islands in the past provide an opportunity to investigate and better understand the different roles of Aboriginal land use and climatic shifts in landscape changes in the broader region. ...
... Aboriginal peoples in many parts of Australia, including in the northwest Tasmanian mainland (south of the Fleurieu Group), are known to have used fire to promote open landscapes (e.g., grassy woodlands, heathlands) in the past for land accessibility and to increase resource availability (Bowman 1998;Fletcher, Hall, and Alexandra 2021; Jones 1969). There is no archaeological study for Three Hummock Island, but rock petroglyphs have been found at the north end of Coulomb Bay near a mutton bird rookery on the western side of the island (Bowdler 1974, Figure 1), which is clearly indicative of past Aboriginal presence (Sims 2013). For the Holocene, archaeological evidence indicates Aboriginal occupation of Hunter Island from at least 8000 BP (Bowdler 1979) and this is consistent with our paleoecological results of vegetation change and landscape burning in the Fleurieu Group. ...
... In the 1830's, the remaining indigenous Tasmanians were removed from their traditional lands and exiled to Flinders Island, destroying cultural continuity. Most Tasmanian rock art is non-naturalistic and there is none known that depicts mammals (Sims, 2013) and any cultural information that was recorded at the time was mostly recorded by untrained laymen. However, it is clear that both monotremes were well known to the Tasmanians. ...
The most striking feature of monotremes is that they are egg-laying mammals, but this was only accepted by the scientific establishment eight decades after specimens of echidna and platypus were first examined in Europe. Even before the specimens were sent, colonists had been told by Indigenous Australians that the echidna and platypus laid eggs. In this paper I briefly summarise aspects of the significance of monotremes in some mainland Aboriginal cultures, and the attempts by the naturalist George Bennett to discover if platypuses were oviparous. In Tasmania the disruption of Aboriginal culture early in the 19th century meant that there are very few details known of their insights into ecosystems and monotreme biology. Some incidental information was recorded by George Augustus Robinson during his “Friendly Mission”, while what appears to be a previously unremarked presentation at the Royal Society of Van Diemen’s Land in 1849 reveals Aboriginal knowledge of the reproductive behaviour and life history of Tasmanian echidnas not described in the scientific literature until very recently.
... For example, the absence of wild emus from Tasmanian landscapes represents a cultural loss. In the early 19th century, emus were being depicted in Aboriginal paintings, rock carvings, songs, stories, and dances (Backhouse, 1843;Robinson, 1966;Mackaness, 1977;McFarlane, 2010;Sims, 2013). Many of these traditions continue today. ...
The Tasmanian emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae diemenensis) persisted on a large, continental island alongside Aboriginal people for ~14,000 years. It was extirpated soon after European colonization in the 19th century. Is hunting by people sufficient to explain the rapid demise of the emu or should we look to a synergy of pressures? Could wild emus be reintroduced to Tasmania? We investigated the distribution, hunting, and extinction of emus in Tasmania, before and after colonization, using population simulations, species distribution modelling, and land use analysis. We also evaluated the potential for rewilding with emus in present Tasmanian landscapes. The Tasmanian emu was a generalist with respect to vegetation and was widespread in the lowlands of eastern Tasmania. Prior to colonization, the maximum sustainable yield of adult emus was low, less than one per person per year. Following colonization, hunting rates quickly increased to a level that can account for rapid extinction. Large parts of Tasmania have both habitat and land uses suitable for an introduction of Australian mainland emus (D. n. novaehollandiae). This putative reintroduction of wild emus to Tasmania could reinstate several ecological and cultural roles but successful rewilding would require support from the wider community. We recommend field trial experiments, with methodologies co-designed by local community members.
... Since that time we know for a variety of reasons that the people of Tasmania have a common past with those of the mainland partly because of our knowledge of sea-level change, partly because of common features of the archaeology. For example, archaeology has shown that Tasmanians, in common with mainland Aboriginal people, produced rock art in the form of hand stencils and engravings (Davidson 1936;Dix 2016;Sims 2013), as well as other forms of art (Roth 1899). This rock art similarity seems likely to be explicable in terms of a continuation from behaviour that was present before isolation (Davidson & Roberts 2008: 27). ...
This article considers some of the uncertainties about the position of oral traditions in relation to historical studies with written texts and in the narrative studies derived from archaeological evidence that may be called archaeohistories. There are issues about the ways in which we learn about Indigenous peoples, sometimes using non-Indigenous people as intermediaries and sometimes, though rarely, in the direct voices of Indigenous peoples. This article discusses the relationships among oral history, oral tradition, history from written texts, and archaeohistory, including the role of sanctification in the survival of knowledge. This discussion includes some consideration of the accuracies of these sources given the different time and personal scales over which they operate. Illustrating the argument with examples of Indigenous oral knowledge from communities in different parts of eastern Australia, it then discusses the possibility that other Indigenous accounts include narratives about different sea levels around Australia. The article concludes with a discussion of the complex interplay of memory and forgetting, verifiable secular knowledge and ritual beliefs, and different classes of historical knowledge. Application of different cultural knowledge to these sources by different agents produces different accounts of the past.
... In western Colorado, part of the 5ME792 rock art site resembles a musical instrument and has been associated with the Ute Bear Dance (Williams & Patterson 2013). Finally, there is some information about the co-occurrence of rock art and rock gongs in Tasmania in southern Australia (Sims 2013) and Micronesia, where Paul Rainbird provides some ethnographic information on the importance of sound in the traditional preparation of sakau (Rainbird 2002). ...
This chapter reviews evidence for relationships between acoustics and rock art by examining the antiquity and nature of such relationships, then examining evidence for music depicted or engraved in rock art. This is followed by a summary of the remains of actual musical instruments found at rock art sites, including lithophones found at or close to rock art. The sonority of rock art landscapes is then assessed, first in those cases where natural elements can unleash special sonorous effects and then in places where exceptional acoustics have been selected for the creation of artworks. The authors conclude that a consideration of sound is common in the placement of rock art and that it should therefore be more routinely considered when recording rock art. The significance of sound in social relations and religious activities makes this aspect of rock art sites essential for understanding the societies that produced it.
... The localisation of rock art in close proximity to the sea is common in some regions of the world, such as Scandinavia and northern Russia (Sognnes 1998;Bradley et al. 2001;Helskog 2004;Gjerde 2010;Vogt 2014), west coast of North America (Turpin 2001;Santos Ramírez 2005), Sydney Basin (McDonald 2008;Sefton 2013), north-west coast of Tasmania (Sims 2013), Dampier Archipelago (Bednarik 2007a;McDonald 2014;Mulvaney 2013) and south coast of Brazil (Simas de Aguiar 2003;Comerlato 2005). The recent detection of two sites with petroglyphs at less than 0.2 km from the shoreline in the area of Punta Odriozola (west coast of the San Matías Gulf) constitutes, however, an exceptional finding within the Atlantic littoral of Patagonia because rock art has been mainly recorded in the interior valleys and plateaus of this vast region (Figs 1 and 2). ...
The recent detection of petroglyphs on the west coast of the San Matías Gulf is the first recording of rock art in the Atlantic littoral of Patagonia. This evidence is discussed in the context of the regional and global information about coastal rock art sites. Techno-morphological and visibility analyses show similarities with motifs located in south Patagonia. These are discussed in terms of visual communication systems in societies with high mobility and open social interaction networks. It is concluded that the singular location of the petroglyphs in a coastal environment is the result of natural and social processes, such as the lower availability of rocks in the Atlantic coastal fringe, the sand-dune dynamics and the selection of specific micro-environments for the production of certain images.
Cut-back of a sea-cliff at Hannant Inlet in remote South-West Tasmania has exposed Oligocene clays buried under Late Pleistocene "collu-vium" from which abundant wood fragments protrude. The two units are separated by a transitional interval defined by mixed Oligocene and Pleistocene microfloras. Microfloras preserved in situ in the clay provide a link between floras in Tasmania and other Southern Hemisphere landmasses following onset of major glaciation in East Antarctica during the Eocene-Oligocene transition (c. 34 Ma). The Late Pleistocene "colluvium" preserves abundant fossil pollen of the shrub conifer genus Pherosphaera (al. Microstrobos). Assuming the parent plants had the same upper subalpine-alpine ecology as living Pherosphaera hookeriana, the microflora provides evidence for cold, wet conditions in the Port Davey lowlands during a low sea-level stand. The same data highlight the failure of Pherosphaera to regain its Pleistocene distribution during the Postglacial period. Our data are inconclusive whether Late Pleistocene conditions in Hannant Inlet were periglacial, i.e., the Oligocene sediments were turbated by freeze-thaw processes, or have been reworked by fluvial processes into the Pleistocene "colluvium". Nevertheless, the inferred cold-climate is consistent with the former hypothesis. The sequence is sealed under cross-bedded coarse quartzite gravels of presumed Last Glacial Stage age.
