Being in Australia now I am keen to take a look at the many examples of rock art here. On a bushwalk a couple of weekends ago, I was at the Namadgi National Park south of Canberra, on a walking trail called Yankee Hat, which contains the only known rock art found in the Australian Capital Terrritory.
Yankee Hat is the name of a mountain – presumably named because it looks like a yankee hat – at the site is a group of boulders located at its foot. The walk to the boulders took aout an hour and a half.
Rock art is notoriously hard to date, but dates taken from deposits found in the shelter suggest that the Aboriginal People have been using the site for at least 800 years, while dates from other nearby sites suggest that people have been in the area for around 3,700 years.
The red paints are made from ochre, while the whites are of clay. This is all the rock art there is, so it’s a fairly small site. Some of the depictions include:
Kangaroos are a common sight through the bush – one encounters many groups of them while walking the trail.
For more information about the Yankee Hat Rock Art site, click here.
