Qualla: Chasm Island

Chasm Island: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The art came first - long before the strangers, long before the name. In the cool shelter of caves that undercut Chasm Island's sandstone cliffs, Anindilyakwa artists painted across uncounted generations: porpoises and turtles, canoes and harpooned dugong, a human hand pressed in red against pale rock. The Anindilyakwa call this island Burrabarra, and to them it is not scenery but story, a place shaped in the creation time by ancestral beings whose deeds are written into its stones. The English navigator who landed here in 1803 saw only the surface of something immeasurably old.

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Chasm Island: Country Made by Ancestors

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For the Warnumamalya - the 'True People', the Anindilyakwa name for themselves - the clans and their estates were established during the Dreaming, amutiyurrariya, and charged with a spiritual essence, mardayan, that endures. The Barabara clan estate includes Chasm Island, a place...

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Chasm Island: The Stranger Who Couldn't Reach the Top

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Between 5 and 14 January 1803, Matthew Flinders charted the coast aboard the Investigator, sailing around Groote Eylandt and landing on this small island to take bearings. He gave it the name that stuck: the deep chasms splitting the cliffs - crevices running roughly southwest to...

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Chasm Island: The First Record, and Who Made It

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the chasm caves, Flinders found what he called 'rude drawings, made with charcoal and something like red paint upon the white ground of the rock' - porpoises, a turtle, kangaroos, a human hand. He sent the expedition's artist, William Westall, to copy them. Westall's two water...

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Chasm Island: A Tradition Still Being Read

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most of the paintings are maritime - men in canoes with spears and paddles, a hunter with a harpooned turtle, shoals of fish, a water goanna - the record of a saltwater people describing their own world. In 1948, the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land return...

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