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Paintings and drawings

Drawings are pictures chalked onto rock surfaces using dry pigments. Paintings use wet pigments by stencilling, finger painting, or by using makeshift brushes such as chewed sticks.

The pigments used in rock art are usually naturally occurring minerals (like ochre), which are generally the product of weathering. They give very stable, long lasting, colourfast compounds.

Paintings and drawings can still be found where they are protected from direct rain and sun, such as rock caves, rock shelters and cliff faces.

Around Sydney you can see a number of good examples of rock painting. Examples of hand stencils are at:

• Red Hands Cave in Blue Mountains National Park
• Hands on the Rock cave in Wollemi National Park
• Red Hands Cave at West Head in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. The cave also has handprints.

In western NSW, the paintings and drawings are of very different styles to those made on the coast:

• The shelters at Mount Grenfell Historic Site and Gundabooka National Park contain hundreds of small brightly painted animals and dancing figures.
• Further west at Mutawintji National Park, you'll see stencils and paintings of a different style.