Aboriginal Art Symbols

They telling us the history and culture of the indigenous Australia

Aboriginal art symbols can be found throughout Australia on rock shelters, in caves, under rock overhangs and on sheltered sites of boulders. Colours of symbols vary from one site to another and even the design might be slightly different.

There are a lot of motifs you can discover when visiting shelters with rock paintings or engravings, or an Aboriginial gallery. Typical motifs are figures, feet, hands circles, linear and dot patterns, animal and bird tracks and abstract designs.

Aboriginal symbols can be found at places used for ceremonies or as shelter. At sacred sites paintings or engravings often show aspects of Tjukurrpa and often the motifs include ancestral beings.

On one of the tours I did here, I had learned one important thing. An atomic Aboriginal art symbol might be easy to interprete, but the combination of symbols tells a story which is not obvious. They often would tell different stories, too.

Depending on whether you are an initiated Aboriginal man or not, the Elders would tell you a different story about a painting.

When I was on a tour in the Mutawintji National Park the guide could tell us the meaning of almost every motif, but there are some motifs he is not familiar with. I would like to explain you why.

There is a symbol in one of the shelters in the Mutawintji National Park for which our guide could not tell us the meaning. Until some years ago he had assumed that it is probably non-aboriginal.

Then one day an Aboriginal woman participated on this tour. She told him this symbol is related to women business. He asked her if she could tell him the meaning, but she just said, “mind your own business man”.

In the Aboriginal culture the business of women and men is strictly seperated. The meaning of an Aboriginal symbol is either exclusively know to men or women or to both men and woman.

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