22 March

Agency and landscapes. Aboriginal rock art can look like some sort of primitive attempt to draw. I don't think it has anything to do with art as we conceive it. Aboriginal people gave agency to all things in the landscape, including themselves. The landscape was a living set of interacting agencies. With our Western eyes we turn this into 'myths', we either dismiss it as simplistic or sentimentalise it in a noble savage sort of way. We're the simple folk. Remember this is a culture that lasted maybe 100,000 years, an unbelievable thing. Nobody else comes within cooee of that record. They cracked the intellectual puzzle of how to live within a landscape, indefinitely. We have no idea, but agency is the road to understanding it, I'm sure.