Academic disciplines, and especially history and archaeology, presume that a particular kind and experience of time is normal and universal. Although deeply concerned with history, rock art confounds ‘settler-time’ and the temporalities assumed by academic disciplines. This chapter considers the ‘re-appearance’ of ever-present buffalos in west Arnhem art, as well as the ever-presence of seemingly ‘disappeared’ art to reveal how the knowledge on the rocks points to alternative ways of experiencing time.

This chapter provides a broad overview of the richness and diversity of rock art in western Arnhem Land. Emphasising the cultural connectivity between rock art, history, culture, Ancestral Beings, language, and land, we introduce the cultural context for rock art creation as well as the paradox whereby an apparently conservative artistic tradition might also shed light on historical particularity and change.

Until recently, academics deemed that the pasts of Australian Indigenous people did not really count as history. But First Nations people have quite obviously left records of their experiences and have long insisted that they have history. For example, Aboriginal people have variously referred to rock art as ‘archives’. In order to comprehend Indigenous archives, this chapter makes the case for broader approaches to knowledges and conceptions of the past.

This chapter reveals how rock art sheds important light on individual lives as well as speaking more broadly to Indigenous experiences. We argue that rock art is created in social, historical contexts – and these contexts are evidenced in the art. Rock art is a fully situated historical source. Focusing on the story of artist Quilp, we demonstrate how rock art is a ‘counter-archive’ that can reveal important new understandings about Aboriginal experience, about which the colonial archive is silent.

This chapter reveals how Aboriginal people adopted and integrated alphabetic script into their art, recognising the potential of this kind of knowledge transmission and blurring the categories imposed on their pasts. Focusing on the biography of artist Narlim, we reveal how he integrated alphabetic script into his art at times, experimenting with different forms of communication.

This chapter turns to intergenerational historical memory and the function of rock art as both archive and mnemonic as the art’s own communicative power. Through the biography of Josie Maralngurra, we reveal the art’s function in passing historical knowledge to the next generation at its production, content, through evoking memory and its speaking to future generations. Rock art is a means of transferring knowledge in the present to future generations; a living practice as well as ancient record.

We conclude that this First Nations archive is a repository of a different kind, for a different kind of history, grounded in a different kind of time, beyond the limited pasts which most academic historians and archaeologists are used to knowing. Scholars must therefore rely on deep partnerships and reciprocity with First Nations communities to approach these knowledges.