Quinkan Country

 Quinkan Country  is home to groups known as the Kuku-Thypan, Kuku Yalanji, Gugu-Yimithirr, Gugu-Warra, Gugu-Ballanji, Gugu-Minni, or Olkola, as well as other names.

The Kuku Yalanji describe rock paintings as Stories. Storytime, a regional term similar to Dreaming or Dreamtime, was Creation time, when Country and everything that dwelt here was made.

The epic narratives of the Storytime tell of the origins of the dramatic Cape York landscape of rocky ridges, escarpments, plateaus, steep cliffs, rock falls, river gullies and valleys.

Different groups have their own special versions of Stories and interpretations, and key elders hold cherished elements of the story – some can be told to the wider public, others are restricted. Charlie Lee Cheu and Danny Lee Cheu talk about some of these Stories from Quinkan Country.

Many stories tell of a time when the Country was flat, without mountains. A summary of one account is that Goorialla, the Great Rainbow Serpent, travelled across this unformed land. He stopped and did his droppings, which were transformed into the mountain Ngarrabullgan (which Europeans called Mt Mulligan, after an Irish prospector whose party found gold). On its summit, Goorialla created a beautiful water lily lagoon, and made a campfire which left behind a mammoth coal seam.

Later Goorialla came to where people were camping. Young brothers with nowhere else to stay were seeking shelter, and Goorialla opened his giant mouth very wide so that they could retreat there. But it was a trick and he swallowed them. When men reached the sleeping serpent, they sliced him open to free the boys. When Goorialla woke, he was hungry and in a great rage. In his fury, he broke the mountain into bits, and hurled it around the Country, which explains the many rocky outcrops, boulders and eroded shelters that can be seen in the region today.

One notable character appearing in the local rock shelters are the Quinkans.

Down Laura there, you know, you see them mob Quinkan walking on the stone. – Charlie Lee Cheu, Western Yalanji

Quinkans could take many forms, including Imjin (Anurra) and Timara, and could deceive men by transforming themselves into beautiful women or other creatures.

Artists painted certain Quinkans as huge male figures with strangely shaped heads, large donkey-like ears, distended, stick-like bodies and enlarged genitals. The females had rounded bodies, exaggerated and long pendulous breasts, often a high head adornment, and often hands with a peculiar number of fingers.

This Quinkan style is a relatively recent art development, introduced about 4,000 years ago. Unlike the famous early paintings of Lascaux and other sites in France and Europe, which featured animals, Aboriginal people painted human figures for millennia; it was a favoured subject. And these visualizations have astonishing longevity. They have endured far beyond the 100s of years of the great European oil paintings by artists such Leonardo da Vinci.

This long, long history contrasts dramatically to that of the Europeans in Australia.

Aboriginal people occupied this region at least 37,000 years ago.Western scientists date the Cape York landscape, its sandstone and river valley formations, as being formed on the cusp of the Cretaceous and Jurassic epochs.

Its rock shelters provided cool and welcoming campsites that eventually became outstandingly rich in art. The paintings that can be seen today were made from around 27,000 years before the present, possibly longer.

With its solid rock medium, this art has endured across tens of thousands of years—and across the continent’s climatic epochs.

The rock art of Quinkan Country was created long before the invention of writing in the northern hemisphere, which is understood to be about 5,500 years ago. The paints, which were made from differently shaded ochres and plant dyes mixed with various liquids, including local orchid sap, became an indelible part of the rock face, merging with the rock’s chemistry.

The Stories and the paintings provide clues to this region's Aboriginal history, lived out by people who witnessed great ruptures and changes in the landscape, such as rising oceans and huge floods. Despite such ordeals, they successfully sustained their societies and their home environment for tens of thousands of years.

On the walls of many Cape York rock shelters, successive generations of Aboriginal artists painted layer upon layer of the Stories that connected ancestral characters with the present times. Over thousands of years, artists devised paintings in particular styles that represented the human or transformative animal and Spirit people. Many were overpainted with new images.

While artists gathered materials, designed and painted these images, family members sat nearby, preparing meals and listening to music, singing, talking, preparing for travels, meetings with other groups, dances and ceremonies. Children would have been captivated as stories and characters started to take shape on the walls in their large formats, vivid colours and patterns.

Epic stories provided explanations about how animals and landscapes came to be in their current forms. Some levels of Story information, such as the full details of initiation ceremonies, were only available at certain life stages, when a child or young adult had earnt the right to gain knowledge of them. Some sites and stories were exclusive to girls or boys, men or women.

For hundreds of generations people have marked the places where they lived, gathered, ate, played, and loved. Though countless paintings and carvings have been lost, taken, or destroyed, thousands of striking images remain in rock shelters and caves across the continent. The Western Yalanji custodians care for these sites today, including through a Ranger program.

Rock paintings are not a portable or tradable commodity, and are not simply illustrations. They are a useful element in a functional knowledge system. Some take the form of maps and diagrams. Others tell epic stories about the origin of landscapes, and the principles of everyday life.

The ancestors of yesterday used carvings and paintings on rock to depict people, spirits, animals and plants, and the dual and transforming creatures in between.

These paintings are not just art for art’s sake. In a tangible way, paintings on rock were and are the Stories, culture, and history of people who have lived on these lands since time immemorial. Through their continuing presence, the Stories enacted, made and remade the occupants of these places. In so doing, they constantly reinforced wide worlds of connection—the complex entanglement of people, Country, and the natural world; of history, culture, science, and morality; of the animate and inanimate, human and non-human; and of the present and the deep past.

The Magnificent Gallery presents a panoramic history of the Kuku Yulanji people, revealing a rich local knowledge of their Country through deep time.

Aboriginal family and clan groups visited this big Story Place over millennia. The local custodians told their cherished Stories through paintings and carvings on rock-faces. The Kuku Yulanji and other local peoples told their epic Stories through yarning, music, singing, dancing and re-enactments. Expert storytellers in their melodic languages and in English, many continue to share accounts of their deep pasts today.

Today this place might remind people of a modern art studio and gallery, but it served many functions. The families and clans who stayed here used it for shelter, as a base camp for hunting expeditions of small and larger animals, and as a location for preparing yams and fruits. While the young children played and watched, adults spent time caring for babies and cooking. It was a place to enjoy everyday activities with families. On some occasions, in order to conduct activities of a more secret or sacred nature, the audiences were more exclusive.

This shelter was a stopping place along longer journeys—part of a constellation of smaller sites packed with related, often linked, imagery. Travelling through Country required detailed knowledge, much of it contained in vivid story-telling traditions of the beginning times that local custodians call Storytime.

In vivid, carefully crafted images and symbols, the colourful walls of the Magnificent Gallery speak of a people’s enduring connection to a deeply storied past.

As though mirroring the continuity of past and present, known also as ‘ Everywhen ’, artists of the day painted over more ancient images. Through layers of painting upon painting, today’s visitors can recognize the artistic agility and imaginations of people of the more distant past. Plants, humans, animals, spirit ancestors were among the many subjects.

On its walls, generation after generation of individuals and family groups went about creating an enduring spectacle of Story, colour, shape and pattern. Consequently, at this shelter, several periods of time can be glimpsed at once on the same rock wall - itself testifying to layers of geological time. The opportunity to witness visible signs of successive generations of use over a vast time-scale contrasts with much archaeological research, where research into deep time requires digging beneath the earth’s surface.

This place speaks of an interconnected time-zone: an ever-present moment in place-time. Indigenous custodians of this place thought about time differently from most of us today, with our digital clocks and calendars. They practiced a close study of the sights, sounds, smells and seasons of the natural world in which they were, and still are, intimately entwined.

Artists made some of these paintings 15,000 years ago, during the the Upper Pleistocene, the later epoch of the Ice Age. Other art at Magnificent Gallery was created 120 years ago—or even more recently.

The hundreds of images that they made expressed their people’s ways of thinking about their origins, their history and their present times. When they visited, this cultural site reinforced a sense of belonging and a set of principles and values to live by.

With an astonishing variety of motifs, styles and shapes, the Magnificent Gallery says much about the creative imaginations and deep knowledge of the Kuku Yulanji ancestors. Over centuries, this steadily accumulating collection of imagery must have inspired awe and pride. It also demanded respect and wariness, as not all the figures depicted were benign. Many were associated with terrifying or grisly Stories.

The Magnificent Gallery is one of many. As noted in the  Australian Heritage Database : 'Quinkan Country is distinguished from other regions by the richness, size and density of its figurative art and the diversity of Aboriginal paintings and engravings located in its numerous shelters, overhangs and on rock surfaces.' The area contains some of the largest groups of Pleistocene and Holocene art anywhere in the world across a great variety of sites.

Local Aboriginal people favoured ochres such as haematite as pigments, which later became preserved by natural processes under a layer of white vitreous silica. When these pigments were scientifically tested using carbon dating techniques, the researchers found dead micro-organisms trapped on the surfaces, perhaps due to the brushes used.

Aboriginal artists around Australia used brushes made from bark or twigs: stringy bark, tree orchid, pandanus, palm leaf, and the chewed stems of moghania parviflora and grewia retusifolia. Local elder George Musgrave (1921-2006) explained that his people favoured the native kapok bush, wallaby grass tied into bundles, and lawyer vine, which was traded around the region.

This was verified when scientists found twisted strands of kapok tree and local orchids on the surfaces of paintings: the exact same fibres that George had said local artists used for their paint brushes. While stencilled hand images revealed no such plant remnants, this is hardly surprising. The pigments were sprayed by mouth and to achieve a fine, sprayable consistency, they required dilution, not added texture.

Colour preference, motifs and styles developed and altered over hundreds of years.To prepare most of their paints, artists of this region sourced ochres of various hues, particularly haematite and kaolinite along with dyes, fixatives and binders from sappy or resinous plants. They ground the ochres with stone utensils, mixing them in rock crevices or on soft sheets of paperbark.

Local people used the same kinds of materials for body paint, with particular colours and designs appropriate for specific clans or individual totemic associations. The meaning and significance of designs—colours, cross hatchings and outlines—changed over time. Artists often applied rich red-browns and pale yellows. White (kaolinite) ochres were particularly popular for the more recent style of paintings.

The deep history of people living on Cape York Peninsula contrasts dramatically with the more recent history of the Europeans in Australia. During the Ice Age or the Pleistocene era, northern Australia was joined to New Guinea and the south-east Asian islands were only a short boat journey away.

In 1606, the Dutch navigator William Janszoon landed on the western side of Cape York Peninsula, mapping some hundreds of miles of the coast. The hand-coloured map below, from c.1641, is one of the first to show the Australian coastline. The Dutch thought Cape York was still connected to New Guinea as part of a single land. We now know that it was joined during the Ice Age. It is remarkable how little Europeans knew about Australia as a land mass, or about its people.

In June 1770, the Guugu Kimidhirr and Kuku Yalanji peoples encountered British navigator James Cook and the crew of The Endeavour. The ship ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef near what is now called Cooktown, and spent nearly 7 weeks moored in Waalumbaal Birri (Endeavour River) for repairs.

Local Aboriginal stories explain how Cook broke the rules that strangers were meant to observe. Bloodshed followed, but through their effective efforts, the local Aboriginal people negotiated a reconciliation.

In 1770, there were between 10,000 and 20,000 Aboriginal people living in North Queensland. The people of the Cape York region experienced some of Australia’s worst frontier violence and intense colonial intrusions. European cattlemen and their herds arrived in the Quinkan art region in the 1860s.

Though local people were simply seeking to survive on their own Country, the newcomers feared Aboriginal attacks and blamed Aboriginal people for scaring their cattle. Wanting full control over Aboriginal lands, many colonizers carried out violent acts, including massacres, murders and kidnappings of women and children. They demanded the complete removal of Aboriginal custodians and the establishment of military style police forces.

The most dramatic invasion of outsiders into this region came with a major gold discovery, known as the Palmer River goldrush. Between 1873 and 1875, up to 30,000 people arrived to extract the gleaming metal, creating immense pressure on bush food resources and waterways.

Many gold-diggers came from around Australia, from Europe, and from Canton and Hong Kong. In 1877, approximately 18,000 Chinese men were mining here, along with 1,500 European men. The population explosion was sudden, and devastating.

The destruction of vital resources, rapid environmental degradation, and the spread of introduced diseases had an immeasurable impact upon Aboriginal people, their culture, lands and sustenance.

In 1874, a Native Police camp was established in Quinkan country, at the crossing of the Laura River at Boralga (Brolga). The well-armed and notoriously violent Native Police forces carved up the Cape region into four patrol districts: Palmer Patrol, Musgrave Patrol, Coen Patrol and Mein Patrol. Native Police and troops of Mounted Police were stationed at each.

Aboriginal people from around the region were frequently forced to join the Native Police, and became implicated in enforcing militaristic colonial policies. With their formidable bush and tracking skills and violent reputations, Native Police were greatly feared by local Aboriginal people. The police trackers from the Laura area were so adept at their craft that they were sent to Melbourne to track the Kelly gang—Australia's most famous outlaws.

The surviving Aboriginal people passed on the terrible stories of massacres they witnessed to future generations. In 1889, under Sub-Inspector Urquart, police detachments and numerous volunteers, working in parties of 40 or more, carried out murderous attacks. Advanced rifle technologies made these even more devastating than the colonizing violence of south-eastern Australia. For example, after Aboriginal men killed a pastoralist called Mackenzie—likely in an enforcement of their own Law—Aboriginal people were hunted down. Not uncommonly, white pastoralists spoke of ‘exterminating Aborigines.’ A warlike situation ensued for many years.

Elder Willy Long recalled how his parents barely managed to survived an attack on his family, the Olkola people. During an attack Harry Mole was captured as a child. He was later deployed as a police tracker. Caesar Lee Cheu’s family was constantly hunted by police until they agreed to ‘come in’ to work on a pastoral station.

As with many themes from their history, such subjects are depicted in the rock art. As part of resistance efforts to avenge or weaken their police attackers, Aboriginal artists created paintings of police across the region.

They painted them in a traditional style, with stylized variations to suggest police clothing or uniforms. They were usually depicted upside down or lying prone as if dying, and often with weapons nearby. Archaeologist Noelene Cole describes the art depicting native police in her article ' Painting the Police '.

The terrible suffering of Aboriginal people, especially the extent of the violence, attracted attention from humanitarians in Britain and around Australia.

Consequently, the Queensland government introduced new legislation in 1897, the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act. Ostensibly introduced to ‘protect’ people from extreme violence, labour and sexual exploitation, drug addiction and disease, it actually served as a powerful means of controlling and removing Aboriginal people from their Country. This further disrupted their autonomy, language and culture. Many Aboriginal people were moved to distant government or mission run reserves, where they were placed under surveillance and control, and prohibited from returning to their own Country.

Government policy prevented them from using their own languages and conducting ceremonies. Aspects of tribal authority and Law were broken down.

Other Aboriginal people maintained links with their Country through working in a range of jobs. Ranger Danny Lee Cheu reflects on his life story and travels as a Ringer and working in the cattle industry, mining and crocodile shooting through his Country.

Given the trauma of frontier violence, continuing oppression, and threats of punishment, it is hardly surprising that they were initially wary when approached by artist, pilot, and explorer Percy Trezise. They were still subject to many restrictions on their human rights, having to live under the Queensland Aborigines Act. However, Lardil man Dick Roughsey, also an artist and collaborator of Trezise, spent time negotiating with the local custodians, and he gradually won their trust.

Some elders agreed to share their knowledge and to revisit rock shelter sites in Country with Roughsey and Trezise. A collection of the resulting recordings is held in the  Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies  in Canberra.

Against all odds, these Aboriginal knowledge holders had managed to stay in touch with their former bush lifestyles and to retain their languages.

The novelist Xavier Herbert, whose works highlighted racist and gendered violence against Aboriginal people, also accompanied them on numerous trips.

Unfortunately, the white Australian recorders, being male themselves, were only entitled to gain stories from male knowledge holders, leaving women’s stories unrecorded. But the senior Aboriginal men who agreed to record their knowledge knew the vital importance of teaching children about their culture and their Country through Stories.

Roughsey and Trezise gathered legends from elders and, during their frequent stays at Jowalbinna, they painted their own interpretations. Their work conveyed the motifs, stylistic aspects and general ideas of the rock art of Quinkan Country to new audiences. Best known for their jointly authored children’s books of Aboriginal legends, they also held art exhibitions at a number of western-style galleries, including in Cairns. Roughsey was later awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire). Adapting what they learnt from local elders, their children’s books featured Story figures such as the frightening giant, Turramulli, who is associated with dark thunder clouds.

Quinkan Country has been listed on the National Heritage Register. Today, the Western Yalanji Aboriginal Corporation plays a crucial role in keeping the Stories alive and the Country strong, including through the use of digital technologies. Glenis Grogan talks about the prospects of digital platforms and their relevance for the future of the Yalanji people and knowledge of Country.

• Beaglehole, J.C., ed. (1968). The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, vol. I:The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• David, Bruno, and Harry Lourandos. “37,000 Years and More in Tropical Australia: Investigating Long-Term Archaeological Trends in Cape York Peninsula.” Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 63 (ed 1997): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0079497X00002358.
• Forsyth, J.W., 1984. “Janssen, Willem (?–?)”, In Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Accessed 10 November 2021. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/janssen-willem-2270/text2911.
• George, Tommy, and Tom Popp. Quinkan Rock Art: Images on Rock from the Laura Area. Laura, Qld: Ang-Gnarra Aboriginal Corporation, 1996.
• Kirkman, Noreen. 1984. “The Palmer Goldfield, 1873-1883”, Honours Thesis, James Cook University of North Queensland. Accessed November 7 2021. https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/57117/.
• Memmott, Paul. 2012. “Roughsey, Dick (Goobalathaldin) (1920–1985).” In Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Accessed November 7, 2021. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/roughsey-dick-goobalathaldin-14193.
• Morwood, M. J., and D. R. Hobbs, eds. 1995. Quinkan Prehistory: The Archaeology of Aboriginal Art in S.E. Cape York Peninsula, Australia. Tempus / St. Lucia, Qld, v. 3. St. Lucia, Qld: Anthropology Museum, University of Queensland.
• “National Heritage List - Quinkan Country,” 2018. Accessed 7 November 2021. https://environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/ahdb/search.pl?mode=place_detail;place_id=106262.
• Queensland Art Gallery, ed. Story Place: Indigenous Art of Cape York and the Rainforest. South Brisbane, Qld: Queensland Art Gallery, 2003.
• Trezise, Percy. 1969. Quinkan Country: Adventures in Search of Aboriginal Cave Paintings in Cape York. Sydney: Reed.
• Trezise, Percy and Dick Roughsey. 1978. The Quinkins. Sydney: Collins.