Bradshaw rock paintings, or the Bradshaws are a distinctive style of rock art found in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. They are named after the pastoralist Joseph Bradshaw who was the first European to discover them in 1891, whilst searching for grazing land for his cattle. The Bradshaws are also known as Gwion Gwion by the local Aboriginal people.
Scientists estimate that there may be more than 100,000 sites spread over 50,000 km² of the Kimberley. In 1996 one of the paintings was dated by analysing an ancient wasp nest covering it (using thermoluminescence). The nest was found to be over 17,000 years old, and it should be concluded on this evidence that the paintings beneath the wasp nests are at least this old. However further interpretations suggest these artworks should be dated to around 70,000 years old, based on the animals and plants depicted who went extinct around these earlier dates.[1] [2] [3]
Debate rages as to who actually created the art. On one side of the debate is Grahame Walsh, an amateur archeologist and the leading expert on the Bradshaws with over 1.2 million images he has amassed over 21 years studying them.[4] His hypothesis claims that the Bradshaws were painted by a culture predating present day Indigenous Australians. On the other side are the mainstream scientific community who believe that it is completely plausible that the art was produced by the local people. Controversy surrounds this debate as it is believed by some non-indigenous Australians that if the Bradshaw art is found not to be Aboriginal in origin, land rights claims by Indigenous Australians may be undermined. In contrast, even if it could ever be concluded that the Bradshaws were not created by ancestors of the indigenous peoples, there may nevertheless be provable continuity based on artistic analyses, which would only strengthen indigenous connections to the past.[5] Regardless of whether the Bradshaw art is Aboriginal or exotic, "mainstream" Indigenous art is also found in the Kimberley region - proof that Indigenous people have inhabited and had cultural connection to the area.
Many of the ancient rock paintings maintain vivid colors because they have been colonized by bacteria and fungi, such as the black fungus, Chaetothyriales. The pigments originally applied may have initiated an ongoing, symbiotic relationship between black fungi and red bacteria. Their presence makes the work very difficult to accurately date.[6]