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Recent survey in the Gulf of Carpentaria region of northern Australia has identified a unique assemblage of miniature and small-scale stencilled motifs depicting anthropomorphs, material culture, macropod tracks and linear designs. The unusual sizes and shapes of these motifs raise questions about the types of material used for the stencil templates. Drawing on ethnographic data and experimental archaeology, the authors argue that the motifi were created with a previously undocumented stencilling technique using miniature models sculpted from beeswax. The results suggest that beeswax and other malleable and adhesive resins may have played a more significant role in creating stencilled motifs than previously thought. Keywords: Australia, Gulf of Carpenteria, rock art, stencils, experimental archaeology, beeswax, Introduction Australia has one of the most diverse stencilled rock art assemblages found anywhere in the world. In their simplest form, stencils, or negative silhouettes/impressions, are motifs created by spraying [...]

According to written histories, trepang fishers from Island Southeast Asia ("Makassans") frequented coastal northern Australia from c.1750 to 1907 CE. Yolŋu oral traditions and old Austronesian borrow words in coastal Aboriginal languages suggest a long and complex history of foreign voyaging to northern Australia. Yet archaeological radiocarbon chronologies for the Southeast Asian trepang industry and earlier voyaging encounters are few and the dates have never been comprehensively reviewed. Only one Arnhem Land trepang fishery site has been dated extensively, and others have produced unusually old dates of c.1200-1500 CE. The Groote Eylandt rockshelter of Dadirrigka yielded an enigmatic sherd of friable earthenware above a radiocarbon date of c.1100 CE. Here we have compiled, reviewed and recalibrated all 49 radiocarbon dates directly associated with Southeast Asian contact sites, stratigraphy and rock art in northern Australia. We discuss the dates and their archaeological contexts region by region to assess their reliability. We also report for the first time Yanyuwa (southwest Gulf of Carpentaria) oral traditions which shed light on their past kinship and exchange relationships with Makassan visitors. The radiocarbon dates provide tentative support for four phases of interaction in northwest Arnhem Land and Groote Eylandt, including pre-Makassan encounters and the organised trepang industry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There is a paucity of archaeological excavations and radiocarbon data from northeast Arnhem Land, the Kimberley and the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, where historical writings, linguistics and oral traditions are still the most reliable indicators of the timing and nature of cross-cultural interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The known geographic distribution of beeswax rock art is largely restricted to the Arnhem Land plateau and Kimberley regions of northern Australia. While considerable research has focussed on the antiquity and meaning of beeswax rock art, much less attention has been directed to the nature and extent of the distribution pattern for this unique motif production technique. In this article, we present details of two beeswax motifs recently discovered in Marra Country at Limmen National Park (southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Territory). In the first instance, the motifs are explored in the context of their meaning, drawing on ethnography collected in the region over the last 40 years. The motifs are then used as a platform to engage with questions around the low frequency, and in some cases complete absence, of beeswax rock art across other areas of northern Australia. While it is highly unlikely there is one single, homogenous explanation for this in the Gulf country and northeastern Australia, we suggest that exploring the social, cultural and relational understandings of beeswax in these areas offers considerable potential to understand better how people engaged with and inscribed their cultural landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Marra Australian Aboriginal philosophies guide archaeological research. • Stone artefacts are embedded within Marra relational philosophies and politics. • Stone 'raw materials' are potent ancestral substances. • Access to powerful Marra ancestral quarries changed through time. • Lithic analyses of Marra stone artefacts reveal changing social worlds. In archaeology, investigations into the social and cultural contexts of stone artefacts have largely focused on their typological styles, manufacturing technologies, functions, geographic distributions and the significance of the quarries they come from. Yet what is oftentimes overlooked is the deeper contemporary understandings by Indigenous groups of the stone artefacts recovered from excavations. In this paper, we analyse an assemblage of 9,642 excavated stone artefacts from the rockshelter site of Walanjiwurru 1 in Marra Country in northern Australia, in light of the cosmological significance of regional stone sources to local Aboriginal groups. Each recovered stone artefact, and the quarries of their raw materials, is laden with meanings that help reveal how Marra Aboriginal people socially and cosmologically engaged with their landscape. By combining archaeological and Marra cultural perspectives, we argue that subtle variations in the range of stones and their relational characteristics signal changing political engagements with ancestral places over the past 2300 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010 the first collaborative rock art recording project was initiated in the Sir Edward Pellew Islands in northern Australia's Gulf Country. A total of twenty-two sites containing 408 images were recorded from three islands (South West, Black Craggy and Watson) and analysed using formal and informed methods. Preliminary analyses reveal some geographical patterning occurring at the site level and at the individual motif level. Whilst these archaeologically-observed patterns highlight the distribution of rock art across Yanyuwa island country, Yanyuwa interpretations and statements concerning one distinctive motif and two small-scale patterns provide crucial insights into how they understand the place of rock art on their country. By focusing on motifs as 'images of relatedness' that are embedded in a network of relationships that are the basis of Yanyuwa Law and kinship, this paper examines the complexities associated with how archaeologists might interpret patterning in the rock art record. We argue that rock art motifs are not a static representation of something but instead are important images that continue to express and generate concepts of relatedness and which ultimately lead to discussions of a non-human-centred landscape that is premised on attributions of intentionality, obligation, responsibility and reciprocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeologists have frequently employed formal style-based approaches to identify regional rock art styles as a means to learning about social organization, territoriality, boundaries and interaction/communication. However, less attention has been devoted to interrogating the relational and cultural understandings of the motifs and sites subsumed under these broad regional style labels. In this article we focus on the complex social and cultural relationships tied to rock art at a regional level from northern Australia’s Gulf country to explore the association between a regional rock art style – the ‘Gulf style’ – and local Indigenous understandings of rock art. We argue that images from the southwest Gulf country are more than part of a regional rock art style – they are a part of an important network of ontological and epistemological encounters, which extends far beyond the rock wall in which they are encountered and into the realm of kinship, ceremony and Indigenous philosophical systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the emotional geography of a place; one part of the Yanyuwa people's Indigenous homelands in northern Australia. It offers a biography of a Yanyuwa place that is deemed 'too strong to ever not be there'. There is no discreet past or present chapter in the story of this place, rather there is a continual narrative that exists right here and now, one that is embodied in emotional engagements drawn from people's connections to the spirit ancestors, the 'old people', today's youth, land rights, language and education. It is understood as somewhere of great strength, endurance and power, because such traits are revealed through the very name Manankurra. This is the power of a place name. Manankurra remains in memory, despite colonial actions enforcing a physical alienation from this place. Exile and physical estrangement from homelands are too familiar in colonial settings. Despite this, the cultural engagements and emotional geographies that demarcate Yanyuwa homelands, specifically Manankurra, by way of narrative, knowledge and memory were never lost, nor disembodied from the emotional experience of homelands. They surge back to life again and again, across generations, because of triggers in individual and group remembering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we demonstrate that Yanyuwa people have detailed biological knowledge of their northern Australian environment, which is culturally defined and embedded within their relationships to country, resources and each other. Through a case study of the impact of Bufo marinus (cane toads) on Yanyuwa culture and everyday life, we argue that Aboriginal management strategies and Aboriginal peoples' intimate knowledge of species and environment need to be understood as both legitimate and fundamental when engaging in management initiatives in Australia. We demonstrate that for Yanyuwa people emotional engagement with their environment is underpinned by a morality of social and environmental relations and that 'memory' is pivotal to this engagement. We conclude by briefly delineating how the adoption of a 'moral ecology' perspective goes some way to addressing issues pertinent to discursive encounters at cultural management frontiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an essay on landscapes and seascapes. It mentions that enacted through the identification and naming of particular topographic features with descriptive geographic terms as well as place-names and Sites are signified by this means, and localities become entwined with notions of individual and group identity.

The article focuses on the prevalence of sexual relationship between doctors and their patients. The forms of sexual contact between doctors and patients are sexual relationship with emotional involvement, impulsive sexual gratification and indecent assaults. Doctors at risk are the ones who practice alone, middle-aged and unhappy with his non-professional relationships. Patients who may spread false allegations of sexual relationship with doctors are those with mental illness and sexually uninhibited with hypomania.