Jakarda Wuka (Too Many Stories)
Narratives of Rock Art from Yanyuwa Country in Northern Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria
**Winner, 2024 Chief Minister's NT History Book Award**
Fully illustrated, Jakarda Wuka (Too Many Stories) draws on a combined 70+ years of collaborative research involving Yanyuwa Elders, anthropologists, and an archaeologist to tell a unique story about the rock art from Yanyuwa Country in northern Australia’s southwest Gulf of Carpentaria.
Australia’s rock art is recognised globally for its antiquity, abundance, distinctive motifs and the deep and abiding knowledge Indigenous people continue to hold for these powerful symbols. However, books about Australian rock art jointly written by Indigenous communities, anthropologists, and archaeologists are extremely rare.
Combining Yanyuwa and western knowledge, the authors embark on a journey to reveal the true meaning of Yanyuwa rock art. At the heart of this book is the understanding that a painting is not just a painting, nor is it an isolated phenomenon or a static representation. What underpins Yanyuwa perceptions of their rock art is kinship, because people are kin to everything and everywhere on Country.
Jakarda Wuka highlights the multidimensional nature of Yanyuwa rock art: it is an active social agent in the landscape, capable of changing according to different circumstances and events, connected to the epic travels and songs of Ancestral Beings (Dreamings), and related to various aspects of Yanyuwa life such as ceremony, health and wellbeing, identity, and narratives concerning past and present-day events.
In a time where Indigenous communities, archaeologists, and anthropologists are seeking new ways to work together and better engage with Indigenous knowledges to interpret the 'archaeological record', Jakarda Wuka delivers a masterful and profound narrative of Yanyuwa Country and its rock art.
This project was supported by the Australian Research Council and the McArthur River Mine Community Benefits Trust.
li-Yanyuwa li-Wirdiwalangu (Yanyuwa Elders) are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Northern Territory who live in the coastal region inclusive of and opposite to the Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria.
Assoc. Prof. Liam M. Brady, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University. His research is designed to challenge traditional, westernoriented approaches to interpreting and understanding the archaeological record, generate new insights into deep-time social interaction, and draw attention to new ways of thinking about partnership-based research practice with Indigenous communities.
Associate Prof. John Bradley, Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University. John has worked alongside Indigenous communities in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory, for more than 30 years. In that time he’s developed a close bond with the local Yanyuwa people and is now among a tiny minority of people who speak Yanyuwa fluently.
Prof. Amanda Kearney, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. Her research involves addressing themes of Indigenous experience, ways of knowing, land rights and the prevailing impact of settler colonial violence on Indigenous lives and lands and waters. Her research has developed with the kind support of Yanyuwa families, the Indigenous owners of land and sea in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia.
