Ubirr — petroglyph
Martin Kraft · CC BY-SA 3.0

Ubirr

  • 2 min read
  • 12.409° S 132.959° E

Interesting facts

  • The outcrop was once known as Obiri Rock, the name given to it by the ethnographer C. P. Mountford.
  • The Rainbow Serpent shelter is the most sacred place at Ubirr and was traditionally a site reserved for women.
  • In local tradition the Rainbow Serpent is called Garranga'rreli, and as she crossed the land she sang rocks, plants, animals and people into being.
  • Mimi spirits are said to be so thin that they can slip in and out of cracks in the rock, which is why they are painted as stick-slender figures.
  • One painting tells of the hunter Mabuyu, whose catch was stolen; he sealed the thieves inside a cave with a boulder, a story told as a lesson about sharing.
  • The Namarrgarn Sisters, painted pulling string apart, are believed to live in the stars and to make people ill by lowering strings that hook onto their organs.
  • The thylacine painted in the main gallery shows an animal that has been absent from this region for at least two thousand years.
  • Most of the X-ray paintings in the main gallery belong to what is called the freshwater period of Kakadu art.
  • Contact-era images include scenes from the buffalo-hunting days around 1900, recording encounters between Aboriginal people and white hunters.

Why it is worth it

Ubirr is a cluster of sandstone outcrops on the northeastern edge of Kakadu National Park, where shallow overhangs facing the Nadab floodplain have served for millennia as both shelter and canvas. Aboriginal people have painted and repainted these walls over an immense span of time; much of what is visible today is a couple of thousand years old, and some images were renewed into the twentieth century. Kakadu as a whole holds more than 5,000 recorded art sites, and Ubirr, together with Burrunguy (Nourlangie), is counted among the most important of them. The park, owned largely by its Aboriginal traditional owners and managed jointly with Parks Australia, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for both its natural and cultural values.

The main gallery is a record of what the river country provided: barramundi, catfish, mullet, goannas, long-necked and pig-nosed turtles, possums and wallabies, many drawn in the "X-ray" style that shows backbones and internal organs inside the outline of the animal. Near its northern end is a painting of a thylacine, an animal that vanished from mainland Australia thousands of years ago – a reminder of how old some layers are. High on the rock, out of easy reach, are slender Mimi spirits; local tradition holds that the Mimi painted these figures themselves, lowering the rock to do so. Later paintings show European newcomers standing with hands on hips.

Another shelter is linked to the Rainbow Serpent, the creation being who, in the Dreaming, travelled across the Top End and brought the land, its creatures and its people into being. From the summit of the outcrop, a short climb above the galleries, the view opens across the green or flooded plains to the escarpment of Arnhem Land – a landscape that the paintings below describe animal by animal.

Getting there

Ubirr lies about 40 km north of Jabiru along a sealed road; the low-lying road can be cut by floodwater after heavy rain. Jabiru is reached from the Stuart Highway near Darwin by the 227 km Arnhem Highway. The nearest airport by straight-line distance, Maningrida (MNG, about 144 km), lies across Arnhem Land; the practical gateway is Darwin International Airport (DRW). Palmerston, on the outskirts of Darwin, is about 215 km away in a straight line.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Northern Territory 8The Most Beautiful Places in Australia 55The Most Remarkable Rock Art Sites 16The Most Mystical Archaeological Wonders 73The Most Mystical Places 138The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306

From the encyclopaedia

Ubirr, once referred to as Obiri Rock, so-named by C. P. Mountford, is a rock formation within the East Alligator region of Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia, and is known for its rock art. It consists of a group of rock outcrops on the edge of the Nadab floodplain where there are several natural shelters that have a collection of Aboriginal rock paintings, some of which are many thousands of years old. The art depicts certain creation ancestors as well as animals from the area such as barramundi, catfish, mullet, goannas, long-necked turtles, pig-nosed turtles, rock ringtail possums, and wallabies.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

-12.40950, 132.95900per Wikidata