Summary: Two Aboriginal engravings on Elephant Rock near Patonga, including an intriguing carving of an ant, spider or "indeterminate bag-like object"...

Located near the end of Elephant Rock, a huge rock platform near Patonga, are two Aboriginal engravings. One of them was first described in 1966 by Ian Sim as “an indeterminate bag-like object with two projections at one end”. A couple of decades later it was depicted more elegantly by McCarthy as being an ant or a spider: a “Unique figure among the rare insects in the engravings as a whole”.

It’s hard to make out the two legs of the ant/spider, which was described by McCarthy as having “a half oval head pointed at the back, no eyes, triangular body with slightly convex sided and flat end, narrow neck, 2 narrow double line legs pointed forward in line with the body and the narrow end of one of them is tuned d.ownward, a single line curved leg pointed backward on each side of the body.

Engraving Mankind Group 149 1 Elephant Rock Engravings

Near this engraving, on a more vertical section of Elephant Rock, is a rayed headdress. Like the ant/spider, it is a very unusual engraving, which was documented by Ian Sim.

AWAT2122 LR Elephant Rock Engravings

A short distance from Elephant Rock and only recorded fairly recently is an Aboriginal engraving of a man.

Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to Hiking the World, and receive notifications of new posts by email. (A hike is added every 1-2 weeks, on average.)

Join 637 other subscribers

0 Comments

Leave a Reply

Aboriginal Sites by National Park

Hornsby Shire - which is the largest LGA in the Greater Sydney Metropolitan region - contains approximately 600 recorded Aboriginal rock art sites (and over 1,200 Aboriginal heritage sites). These date back from thousands of years to post-European contact art.
Over 40 sites have been recorded within the park; many were located along the river bank and were flooded by the building of the weir in 1938.