Scene but Not Heard: Seeing Scenes in a Northern Australian Aboriginal Site

Scenes are commonly identified in Western art history, where they typically refer to framed images containing subjects performing actions, or snapshots of landscapes. In rock art research, scenes are also sought, especially for their ability to provide insights into (usually non-Western, and past) social practices and associations between people, animals, plants, and objects. Yet the term “scene” is rarely explicitly defined, and it is often used interchangeably with other terms. This disregard for definition has been coupled with insufficient reflection on Western assumptions that underlie research, and on the role of Indigenous visual expressions in the artistic production of many scenic narratives.

Two preeminent rock art researchers, Tilman Lenssen-Erz (1989, 1992; Fritz et al. 2013) and Livio Dobrez (2008, 2011a, 2011b, 2012, 2015, 2016), have bucked the trend by defining “scenes,” as Sally May and Ines Domingo Sanz (2010), Carole Dudognon and Marcela Sepú lveda (2017), and Iain Davidson (2017) have also done in more recent studies. Still, there usually remains little (if any) consideration of whether non-Western visual conventions are, and can be, accommodated in Western defi nitions of rock art scenes (see Kelly and David, this volume). How can cultural differences in visual conventions affect what we understand a scene to be in rock art? Our primary aim in this chapter is to explore this cross-cultural gap through Aboriginal narratives of a major Wardaman rock art site.