Summary: An Aboriginal engraving site with an enormous (14m) whale and two men on a rock platform above Mona Vale Road.

Swimming above Mona Vale Road is an enormous whale or shark, described by Campbell in 1899:

This remarkably fine figure is probably a shark, and it has a wide and smooth groove; near the underside of the shark is the figure of a man flourishing a waddy; a curious protuberance is shown below his uplifted arm; a few feet away is a portion of a wallaby ; the rest of it has been weathered away.

MonaValeRoad Whale LR stitch LR Mona Vale Road Whale

The whale, which is about 14 metres in length, is still very distinctly grooved.

AWAT0299 LR Mona Vale Road Whale

Below the whale is a man with holding a waddy; this figure is a little harder to make out.

AWAT0274 LR Mona Vale Road Whale

While Campbell only described the shark / whale, a man and part of a kangaroo, many years in 1954 McCarthy documented eight figures:

The figures in this series were not recorded by Campbell, who recorded a huge whale [actually a shark!] 42 feet long, a man with a club and a half wallaby on a large rock beside Mona Vale Road. The additonal figures, all incomplete, comprise two indeterminate objects; a small man; and a larger man 5 foot high. The latter is at the head of the whale, and he has a horizontal bar just above his penis… They appear to represent an earlier series than Campbell’s.

The man at the head of the whale is much less deeply carved (or more weathered).

AWAT0283 LR Mona Vale Road Whale

You can still make out the bar above the penis described by McCarthy, but the man’s upper body and head is weathered away.

AWAT0284 LR Mona Vale Road Whale

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Aboriginal Sites by National Park

A review of different techniques for photographing Aboriginal rock art. This includdes oblique flash, chain and planar mosaic imaging which combines hundreds of overlapping photos.
Over a hundred Aboriginal sites have been recorded in the Hornsby region, with many of these in the Berowra Valley National Park and around the suburb of Berowra.