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Recent survey in the Gulf of Carpentaria region of northern Australia has identified a unique assemblage of miniature and small-scale stencilled motifs depicting anthropomorphs, material culture, macropod tracks and linear designs. The unusual sizes and shapes of these motifs raise questions about the types of material used for the stencil templates. Drawing on ethnographic data and experimental archaeology, the authors argue that the motifi were created with a previously undocumented stencilling technique using miniature models sculpted from beeswax. The results suggest that beeswax and other malleable and adhesive resins may have played a more significant role in creating stencilled motifs than previously thought. Keywords: Australia, Gulf of Carpenteria, rock art, stencils, experimental archaeology, beeswax, Introduction Australia has one of the most diverse stencilled rock art assemblages found anywhere in the world. In their simplest form, stencils, or negative silhouettes/impressions, are motifs created by spraying [...]

In this paper, we explore how we might "see" and interrogate absence and presence in the archaeological record. Our aim is to bring into question the epistemic lens (archaeological), through which absence is made visible, and the epistemic lens (Indigenous knowledge), through which absence is made impossible. To do this, we turn to the contact rock art record from Yanyuwa Country in northern Australia, where, despite four centuries of contact with the "other" (Indonesian trepanger gatherers and Europeans), no motifs depicting introduced subject matter resulting from these encounters have been found. Rather than attributing this absence to taphonomic factors, we argue that it can be understood as an Indigenous presence when juxtaposed with the richly narrated lifeworld of the Yanyuwa. For Yanyuwa, creating rock art is a non-human-centered activity; it is through the actions of Ancestral Beings and spiritual entities that all rock art, potentially including introduced subject matter, is made and taken away according to cultural circumstances such as Yanyuwa health and well-being and changing engagements with country during postcontact times. We conclude by advocating for archaeologists to look outside of or suspend Western-oriented frameworks and reasoning and turn to self-determined Indigenous ontological and epistemological habits around how absence appears and operates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers themes of species maintenance and place engagement in Yanyuwa country, northern Australia. It traces the complexity of interpretations and relational contexts involved in places that are commonly--and we argue--misleadingly, referred to as increase and magic sites. Examining one specific place, at which people carry out maintenance rituals, we explore the complex bonds that unite Yanyuwa with the geography that is the Ancestral Hill Kangaroo. Not content with the classificatory habit of declaring actions either increase oriented or hunting magic, this research more fully explicates the relational substance of places that play a key role in ecological health. This is achieved by asking how might the profundity of a place of relational importance, such as a maintenance site, be better understood and written of in ways that convey an Indigenous ontology and epistemology? Keywords: maintenance sites, increase sites, place, aboriginal, kincentric ecology, Australia., INTRODUCTION Old people, old people like my father, my grandfather, they would go there, maybe at the end of the wet season when everything was fresh, they would go to [...]

Education is about learning. But it is not always about teaching. Nor is it always held in formal educational settings. Here we present an example from Mua Island in Torres Strait, where cultural knowledge was recently communicated and passed down to the younger generation through community participation rather than through formal educational institutions. The role that community research and ceremonies play in customary learning is here brought out through recent commemoration of the legendary hero Goba on Mua Island. [This article was written with the Mualgal (Torres Strait Islanders) Corporation.]