Painting Giants: Why Did Australia's Rock Art Suddenly Get So Big in the 1800s?

How people respond to change can vary significantly from individual to individual, culture to culture, and time period to time period. Some adapt, others resist, and some use a combination of the two. Determining how people in the past responded to change can be more challenging; historians and archaeologists may look for clues in changes in burial practices, read through historical accounts, or analyze rock art.

Australia has a particularly rich history of rock art with paintings in Awunbarna dating back at least 15,000 years. But somewhere in the 1800s and early 1900s, something changed: painters started creating more and more exceptionally large images, from life-sized kangaroos to an over-six-meter-long rainbow snake. But why?

To find out, researchers Paul Taçon and his colleagues, working with senior Amurdak Traditional Owner Charlie Mungulda, spent years recording rock paintings in northwestern Arnhem Land, particularly around Awunbarna. They discovered the explosion of giant imagery was not random but likely a response to one of the most disruptive periods they had yet encountered: the arrival of Europeans.

A Long History, Dotted with Occasional Giants

The Awunbarna (Mount Borradaile) region is known for its breathtaking rock art galleries, some of which date back at least 15,000 years.

Among the many depictions are an unusually high number of 'giants'. Massive paintings aren't exactly unheard of in Australian rock art, just not typically so common and numerous. In western Arnhem Land, one of the earliest phases of rock painting, called the Large Naturalistic Style (18,000-13,000 years old), is characterized by images of large animals, humans, and ancestral beings.

However, the styles that followed were typically smaller, with only occasional larger paintings such as the huge Dynamic Figure Style human or animal figure painted between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago and the life-sized Maliwawa human figures made between 9,500 and 6,000 years ago.

Then the European Contact period began, and oversized images suddenly appeared across Awunbarna and western Arnhem Land.

Since 2018, Taçon and his colleagues have documented and analyzed 165 rock art sites across the region, with an emphasis on post-European-contact art.

Documenting Giants

Images range from depictions of local wildlife to painted hands, women, ships, and firearms. Many images were made with traditional pigments like ocher, but Awunbarna also has an unusually high number of blue paintings made with Reckitt's Blue, a laundry whitener.

Among them are various examples of life-sized and even larger paintings, including a massive X-ray fish at Nawarla Gabarnmang, located in south-central Arnhem Land, a rock python at Djuwarr, and a kangaroo with a spear in its neck at Yuwenjgayay, the latter two in Deaf Adder Gorge. Further east, depictions of massive buffalo, a life-sized kangaroo, giant crocodiles, a sea turtle, and a massive bottlenose dolphin decorate the rock surfaces.

Among the many depictions are rainbow serpents that appear again and again. 29 rainbow serpents were found across 21 of the 167 known Awunbarna rock art sites. That's 12.6% of all known sites with a depiction of rainbow snakes; for comparison, Namunidjbuk has 352 rock art sites, of which only 2 have an individual rainbow serpent depiction. While to the south at Injalak Hill, another two rainbow serpents are known, from two sites out of 232.

The rainbow serpents at Awunbarna are not just numerous; they are massive. Elsewhere in western Arnhem Land, one rainbow serpent is painted over a European ship as if it had swallowed it, and another is a staggering 20 meters long.

Twenty of these giants date to the post-Contact period; they are layered atop older art, and many are painted with white pipe clay (kaolin), which typically lasts only a few centuries, unlike red ocher. This is because kaolin sits on the rock surface rather than being soaked in, as with ocher.

Color, art style, and subject matter also suggest they are much more recent. The older Yam-style rainbow serpents are usually smaller, only around a meter long with snake-like bodies. More recent rainbow serpents are often much bigger, including a roughly 6.1-meter-long serpent that watches over the AW5’s ceiling (it is actually 6.88 meters if you follow the curve of its body). It's depicted with a crocodile-like head, razor-sharp teeth, fins like a fish, and an 'x-ray' style detailing showing its ribs and backbone.

The team also recorded two incredibly rare finds: one is a large white-and-red painting of a whale, possibly a humpback, depicted swallowing a woman. It's the only known whale painting anywhere in western Arnhem Land and the only known Australian rock art of a whale with baleen ever recorded. The other rarity is a giant male figure; at 2.1 meters, the reclining figure shares the wall with a giant fish to the left and right of him. On top of all that, the team documented an unusual 124-meter-long arrangement of rocks, one that, upon close inspection, looked like a slithering rainbow serpent complete with a crocodile head, making it the third such arrangement ever recorded in all of Australia.

But why? Why this sudden surge of massive animals, humans and ancestral beings?

More and Ever Larger

To answer this, it may help to understand ancestral beings, especially rainbow serpents, which are so ubiquitous in the regions. Rainbow serpents are ancestral beings from the Dreamtime that embody timelessness; they exist in the past yet remain active in the present, able to fold time itself so that events in the Dreamtime are ever-present rather than simply stopping.

Among the central concepts the rainbow serpent represents is change, with rainbow serpent stories often dealing with transformation in landscapes, plants, animals, people, and other ancestral beings. One of the key aspects of the rainbow serpent is learning to accept, cope, and perhaps even control change.

In western Arnhem, two rainbow serpents in particular are often mentioned in oral stories and painted traditions: Yingarna, the original creator being and the first mother of all life, and her child, Ngalyod, typically associated with sacred sites. Yingarna created the region's clans and languages and linked the people across western Arnhem during her travels.

During her travels, she was said to be joined at one point by a giant man called Wuraka, so tall his head stood above the water as he crossed the sea. But he eventually grew tired and sat down to rest, before turning into stone.

The other companion was a being called Luma Luma, who sometimes took the form of a whale; upon reaching the coast, Luma Luma would turn into a giant man. He was a terrifying ritual leader who would sometimes consume people, including children. He was eventually killed, and his spirit became a whale. (Rather interesting when you think back to the unusual depiction of the giant man and the whale eating a woman found at two of the rock art sites, isn't it.)

In both cases, the giants came from the ocean before traveling across the land. According to Amurdak Traditional Owner Charlie Mungulda, these stories were often told to young people beneath the large 6.88-meter-long Awunbarna rainbow serpent.

Meanwhile, the rainbow serpent rock arrangement was used during Morak, a male initiation ceremony. The ceremony taught initiates cultural laws, food-sharing customs, and the consequences of breaking tradition, and prepared them for the Mardayin ceremony. A female rainbow serpent established the ceremony during her travels.

Given the context of rainbow serpents being associated with change, ceremonies, and cultural customs, the timing of all these giant paintings starts to look far less like a coincidence.

During the contact period, artists likely began painting large rainbow serpents and animal paintings to try and reassert control in the face of great change and rapid cultural upheaval. The giant paintings reinforced traditional stories of creation and destruction. They emphasized laws, connection to the land, and kinship ties across languages, all of which were being threatened by external forces.

Paintings of rainbow serpents, as well as crocodiles, fish, and other creatures, all feature prominently in the Mardayin ceremony, one of the most important ceremonies performed in the region during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The ceremony celebrates spiritual links between people, sites, and the ancestral realm, thus depicting animals and beings connected to this ceremony as massive, created its own kind of authority. In local tradition, exceptionally large fish, goanna, or even yams are described as maraiin, aka spiritually significant, simply because of their size. It's not much of a leap to think other giant rock art paintings would carry the same weight.

The rainbow serpent in particular, the most powerful creation being, was continuously painted over and over again, bigger and bigger across generations.

The detailed analysis of the Awunbarna rock art tells a story in which it seems that artists faced with change and upheaval brought about by the arrival of Europeans turned to their creator beings, painting them ever larger, generation after generation, as a way of reasserting their authority, law and connection to the land and their ancestors in a period when it was all under threat.

I've never come across a singular painted image with anything even close to 6 meters; that rainbow serpent would have been a terrifying and powerful sight to behold. Even to an outsider, standing beneath something so massive stretched across the ceiling must have driven some point home that perhaps words cannot adequately describe.

Why do you think Awunbarna's rock art got bigger and bigger in the post-Contact period?

Let me know what you think, and if you'd like to support this blog and the person writing it, you can chip in once, monthly, or yearly. Only if you'd like to.

Reference

Taçon, P. S. C., May, S. K., Jalandoni, A., & Mungulda, C. (2026). Paintings of Rainbow Serpents and other big creatures of Awunbarna, Northern Territory, Australia. Australian Archaeology, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2026.2676505