The Mysterious Gwion Gwion Figures Haunting Australia's Kimberley No One Can Explain

In eighteen ninety-one, a pastoralist named Joseph Bradshaw rode into a remote Kimberley gorge and found painted figures on the sandstone walls so sophisticated he refused to believe Aboriginal Australians had made them. He was wrong. But the mystery he stumbled into has never been fully resolved. The Gwion figures depict slender human forms wearing conical headdresses, arm bands, tassel belts, and ceremonial gear, painted with a precision that researchers have struggled to explain for over a century. Strands of hair are rendered at a thickness of one to two millimetres. No corrections or changes were made during painting. An imprint of a feather found at one site suggests the artists used quills rather than fingers or brushes. In twenty twenty, a study published in Science Advances confirmed the main tradition was painted between twelve thousand seven hundred and eleven thousand five hundred years ago, during the final upheaval of the last ice age. One motif dated to seventeen thousand years and nobody knows why it stands alone. The organisms that should have destroyed the art are now protecting it. And somewhere in the Kimberley right now there is a shelter nobody has looked inside yet.

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