Jawoyn

Jawoyn country on the Arnhem Land plateau included Nawarla Gabarnmang, a rockshelter where generations added images to ceilings and walls. Beeswax figures there belong to the fifteenth through early seventeenth centuries: two have calibrated radiocarbon ranges spanning approximately 1433–1631. Earlier paintings lay beneath them, and later artists painted over the wax, leaving visible layers of renewed work.

On one ceiling panel, successive images retained many of the same subjects while their colours changed. White pigment and white-based two-colour painting became more prominent than red and red-based combinations. Figures, animals and designs accumulated on surfaces already meaningful to earlier generations. The shelter was therefore an active setting for artistic work during the centuries before nineteenth-century European contact. Its layered images preserve both continuity in chosen subjects and changes in how Jawoyn artists presented them.