Located along Flat Rocks Ridge in Gunderman, the Group 8 Aboriginal engraving site has a number of axe grinding grooves and (mostly) animal motifs:
This site was obviously a stopping place where hunters sharpened their stone axes and engraved a record of the game they wished to kil or had killed. It is possible that the placing of the kangaroos and birds beside the waterhole indicates they were killed in such a situation. On the other hand, the general theme may simply be a depiction of a popular & favoured hunting place for the artists responsible for the engravings. Such a scene was commonly the inspiration for bark paintings of Arnhem Land. The fish suggest people from Mangrove Ck or Hawkesbury River.
J.C. Lough
At the southern end of the site are four potholes, three of which have axe grinding grooves – a total of 51, which is the second-highest of all the Flat Rocks Ridge sites (after Group 6).
Next to the potholes are two large kangaroos, one of them “a large and well portrayed male kangaroo 10 ft long with a very fat or broad tail, depicted in an ambling pose with its forepaws and head close to the ground”.
The second is partly covered by encroaching vegetation and much harder to see: “another huge kangaroo, 11 ft long, in a more upright pose”.
Near the first kangaroo is a small bird “of the wading type”.
Many of the figures at this site are very weathered and couldn’t be located. At the northern end of the site is a fourth waterhole with grinding grooves, which oddly was not documented by McCarthy or J.C. Lough.











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