[Article] We have contact: rock art records early visitors.

The image of an Asian boat lay behind a beeswax drawing of a snake

24 Jul, 2010 | The Canberra Times | by Sally Pryor

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A team of archaeologists has uncovered ancient rock paintings showing that South-East Asian ships were visiting Australia well before European settlement.
The paintings, found in Arnhem Land by a team of archaeologists from the Australian National University and Griffith University, are the oldest known contact rock art in Australia, dating back to the mid-1600s.
Working with a local traditional owner in the Wellington Range, the research team found a rock shelter containing almost 1200 individual paintings and beeswax figures.
ANU archaeologist Sally May said the process had been unfolding over the past two years.
The discovery was part of the government-funded Picturing Change project, which highlights the importance of contact rock art as some of the only contemporary indigenous accounts of cross-cultural encounters in the past 500 years.

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More informations :

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Australia’s rock art discovery - sailing vessels visit in mid-1600's 

Sun 25 Jul 2010 | Sail-World.com | by ANU

[Article] Restoring history through art.

16 July 2010 | The Phnom Penh Post | Peter Olszewski

A restorer painstakingly fixes a painting at Bakong. [Photo by: Peter Olszewski]

It’s a magic morning at the Bakong temple grounds, with the prodigious Khmer tower framed by blue sky, and a riot of purple bougainvillea blooming at its base.

Cows graze on rich green grass beside the mirror-surfaced moat, monks chant in their monastery and, in the almost ruined Prasat Wat Bakong, work hums as a team of restorers patiently re-render the many religious wall paintings.

While almost all of the restoration at the Angkor temples revolves around the ancient Khmer edifices, at Bakong there is also a restoration team working on 20th century buildings in the complex – the “working” monasteries as such.

Some of these monasteries in Cambodia are festooned with dozens of brightly rendered religious wall paintings highlighting often lurid scenes from the life of Buddha and the Jatakas (tales of the previous lives of the Buddha). Often, however, these paintings are overlooked or dismissed as kitsch, unworthy of being classified as serious art. Some of the more gruesome paintings, sort of Bosch-gone-Buddhist renderings, are often rejected as grotesqueries.

But that’s not the viewpoint of Restaurateurs Sans Frontiere, a cultural NGO established in 1981 that began work at the Bakong site in 2007 at the instigation of Dr Vittorio Roveda, co-author of the book Buddhist Painting in Cambodia.

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