As the world comes to the Illawarra's backyard with the 2022 UCI World Road Championships, we're keen to showcase that backyard.
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Together with Yesterday Stories, we're launching a special weekly feature explaining more about our big, beautiful backyard.
As one of the traditional custodians, Carol Speechley explains, some of the many Indigenous sacred places include artworks that are more than 5000 years old.
In the the 'Whale Cave' and other sites across the region, Aboriginal rock paintings are preserved, protected and cherished by cultural custodians.
"It's always been a good feeling knowing this sort of site was protected and it is important, not just to Aboriginal people, to keep it from collapsing. I'm just so happy that it's still there," Carol Speechley says.
The artworks record information about the local flora and fauna present during different ages of Aboriginal occupation and they encode and transmit that cultural knowledge down to the present generation.
"One of those animals is the emu and that again is a lesson in itself, because it tells us that long time ago there were emus up here in this area."
Some of the artworks some are unique and rare examples of cultural practice and artistic styles.
"You can see the whale. That's a really significant one because it's the only one we know of here on the South Coast that has or includes x-ray art.
"We didn't know we had our own example of x-ray art here in the Illawarra, so we're really proud of that."
"The ancient artists created a paint capable of lasting for millennia. "They used to mix the charcoal or the ochre in with this resin and that made it more long-lasting. So talk about better than Du-lux or British Paints any day!"
Some of the artworks are tens of thousands of years old.
"When they dated them they're in between five and ten thousand years old. The oldest one that I know of in the Illawarra would be Bass Point and that's about 18,000 I think," Carol says.
"I always say that some of favourite Aboriginal artists lived and died over 1000 years ago, I love their work."
Mainstream Australian society has not always respected these precious Aboriginal artworks.
"So many of our sites have been changed in so many ways, some of them totally destroyed, and the spirit of this place is living."
All these precious Aboriginal artefacts and sites are now protected by The National Parks and Wildlife Act of 1974.
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