Fast Fact Tag: rock art

Claims that the didgeridoo has been played for 40,000 years or more are common, but there is no historical or archaeological evidence that proves such an age.

The instrument was clearly in Aboriginal use before large-scale European settlement of northern Australia. Collet Barker’s 1829 journal describes a musician at Raffles Bay using a large hollow cane about three feet long, and Thomas Braidwood Wilson’s published 1835 account describes and illustrates the instrument there.

Those records prove that the instrument existed by the early nineteenth century — not that it had existed for tens of thousands of years. Alice Moyle later examined its distribution, language evidence and rock art and proposed a much more recent history, including possible movement into Arnhem Land within the previous thousand years or less.

Moyle’s dating is a scholarly interpretation, not an exact birthday for the instrument. The important point is that a claim of “40,000 years” is not a date established by the available evidence.

Boomerangs occur in very old Kimberley rock art, but the often-repeated claim of a simply “20,000-year-old boomerang image” is more certain than the current radiometric evidence allows.

Mud-wasp dating places the broader Kimberley Irregular Infill Animal Period at roughly 15,250–11,150 BC. Boomerang stencils occur within that early sequence, but the age of an art style is not automatically the age of every stencil.

One specifically studied boomerang stencil, DR013_09, has dated mud-wasp nests underneath the pigment. DR013_09 is the researchers’ catalogue/motif identifier — site DR013, motif 09 — not an official title for the artwork. The younger underlying nest shows that the stencil must be younger than about 11,150 BC. The motif is also overpainted by Tassel Gwion figures.

Other genuine Kimberley boomerang stencils are also documented. Rock Art Australia publishes original stencil photographs, and the 2025 Pundawar Manbur study records further examples including motifs #115, #165, #407a–b and #104, while motif #127 is a Gwion figure with held and raised boomerangs. The safest statement is that boomerangs appear in very old Kimberley rock art, while the date of any particular image must follow its own dating evidence.