The Flat Rocks Ridge Group 3 Aboriginal engravings is a large and complex rock art site, which comprises five separate sets of motifs over a long rock ledge overlooking Mill Creek.
It is probable that other figures in the group are featured in the legend connected with th,is female ancestress. On the other hand, there appears to be a hierarchy of figures in the group as a whole which makes it very difficult, as with other groups, to interpret them from the point of view of associations. The more important series, with the deepest and widest grooves, comprising the large woman, emu, boomerang, man, possum, swordfish, and several human tracks, might thus be considered as a ritual set.
McCarthy (1961)
What was described by McCarthy as Series 5 of the Flat Rocks Ridge Group 3 has the largest and best-preserved figures.
Series 1
This single figure is a “male wallaby 5 ft 3 in long, excellently proportioned and in a leaping pose with tail curved upwards”, which is located the northern end of the rock ledge.. It has been struck on the forehead by a small boomerang”.
Series 2
Not located, this is also a single figure east of Series 1 – “a young emu 15 in long, depicted as though picking food from the ground.”
Series 3
Also not located, is this small group of figures about 30 metres north-east of Series Il, described by McCarthy as “very weathered and indistinct”. They include a death-adder snake (in semi-coiled position) and three barred elongate objects.
Series 4
McCarthy describes this group as the first part of the main part of the group (Series 5); it includes a “poorly done figure of a man with bent legs and penis (which is very long) as though he is in a dancing posture, with knees pushed forward”.
Another “poorly designed” wallaby or kangaroo is in this group.
A second, very weathered human figure was not documented by McCarthy (or J.C. Lough). Only the upper torso is visible.
Series 5
This main group of engravings is dominated by figure which is over three metres in length:
the remarkable figure of a huge woman 18 ft. long. She is is turned sideways with her face to the front, her feetless legs are close together, her buttocks project two feet, her breasts are small and hang from the base of the arms. The latter are slightly above the horizontal, one has two large fingers, the other three, and both bear armlets on the upper arm and wrist…
McCarthy (1961)
…Her head is remarkable because of its enormous ears and five eyes, and the well-defined neck is an unusual feature of anthropomorphic figures among these engravings.
Near the middle of the site is a “magnificent alert emu about 9 ft high and long, whose neck runs round the side of a small pothole”.
McCarthy in his interpretation of the Group 3 site links the large woman and the emu:
The Woman is isolated in all her glory in the middle of a large portion of the rock surface. This woman, and the one shown in Group 6 (Series H, fig. 38) could have been the wife, shown in two different aspects, or wives, of the supreme culture-hero of this area. Thus, among the Wuradjuri of southern New South Wales (Berndt 1947: 77), the wife of Baiami was Kurikuta, an eternal ancestral being who left the earth in ancestral times to live in the sky. She was envisaged as being beautifully shaped, with large and protruding breasts, youthful and virile in nature. Her assistant-totem was the emu, and for this reason people cooking emu had to be careful not to burn the fat, otherwise Kurikuta would come down in the smoke, sending thunder in the day or a flash of lightning in the night as a warning. The lightning was produced by the movements of her body which was covered with glistening quartz crystals. A clever magician could divert Kurikuta from a camp otherwise a number of people were killed during her visitation. In both groups of engravings (Groups 3 and 6) emus are represented, probably in the ritual relationship of assistant-totem to these female ancestral figures.
At the very southern end of the rock platform is a narrow, roughly-shaped shield.
Clustered around several potholes in the rock platform are forty axe grinding grooves.
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