Heart of the Nation: Royal National Park 2232

These figures have lain secluded on Sydney’s doorstep for millennia. But now, their whispers of the deep past are fading fast.

TWAM 5 March 2016

Royal National Park 2232

The three figures carved into sandstone in the bush south of Sydney have gazed up at the sun and stars for five thousand summers and winters. They whisper of the deep past of this land, but few people are inclined to listen; fewer still seek out the clues to their existence in obscure old journals or museum archives and thrash through the trackless bush to find them. Oblivious drivers whizz past on a main road 50m away; planes roar low overhead on the approach to Sydney airport. The lights of the city cast a sickly glow over the horizon at night. And all the while, these three figures lie here secluded, whispering.

Les Bursill listens. The Aboriginal academic led a team that found hundreds of Dharawal rock engravings in and around the Royal National Park in the late ’80s. Most had been noted by Europeans once or twice, then forgotten; a dozen were new to the record. Bursill was enthralled by this particular site, but also baffled: what did it mean? The answer came to him in the Top End, of all places, where some elders looked at his photos of the three figures, and the nearby engravings of a giant serpent and dancing men, and smiled in recognition: the Wawalag Sisters. They’re part of a creation story written into the landscape, its chapters stretching for 3.5km across the park.

Bursill, 71, has lately been sharing his knowledge of these sites with Peter Solness, who photographs them at night in a unique way: over a two-minute exposure, he traces their outlines with a tiny light on the end of a stick. Solness loves working alone in the bush in the dark, when “the landscape feels pre-European”, he says, and witnessing these engravings “in all their wasted glory”. Wasted because, with no Dharawal refreshing these grooves in the soft sandstone, they’re now eroding fast. In a few generations their whispers of the deep past will have faded to silence.