The Maliwawa paintings of Arnhem Land show large human figures, rare animals, and a style that appears to bridge two major phases of Aboriginal rock art.
In the sandstone shelters of Arnhem Land, researchers have documented a body of rock art that immediately catches the eye for its scale and its strangeness: towering red human figures, animals placed in active scenes, and head shapes that look, at first glance, almost impossible. Described in a 2020 paper in Australian Archaeology, the Maliwawa Figures matter because they do more than add another set of paintings to Australia’s immense record. They seem to preserve a middle chapter in the visual history of the region, one that had been visible on the rock for millennia but had not yet been clearly named.
A new chapter in Arnhem Land
Australia’s First Peoples are known to have occupied the continent for at least 65,000 years, and the country holds an enormous rock art archive across that span. In the north, Kakadu’s rock art tradition alone is described by Parks Australia as one of the world’s greatest concentrations of such sites, while the National Museum of Australia notes the depth of Aboriginal occupation on the mainland. Against that backdrop, the importance of a newly defined style is easy to grasp. It is not a footnote to an empty landscape. It is a new piece in one of the deepest cultural records on Earth.
The Maliwawa Figures were recorded at 87 sites stretching from Awunbarna, also known as Mount Borradaile, to the Namunidjbuk clan estate of the Wellington Range, about 130 kilometres to the northeast. Across those sites, researchers counted 572 motifs, including 319 animals and 240 humans, and the style was given its name by senior Traditional Owner Ronald Lamilami. Some of the works had been noticed before, but only when the larger body of material was assembled did the pattern become unmistakable. What had looked like isolated oddities resolved into a coherent visual language.
Figures that seem to hover
This is where the “cone-head” label enters the story. Some of the human figures do appear to have elongated, cone-like heads, especially when seen in photographs without context. But the study itself points in a more grounded direction. The artists repeatedly depict headgear, and the catalogued forms include cone headdresses, feather headdresses, ball headdresses, and rayed-line types. What looks like a nonhuman skull shape is, on the strongest evidence available, part of costume and visual convention rather than anatomy.
That does not make the figures any less arresting. Maliwawa humans are often large, sometimes life-size, painted in shades of red with stroke-line infill. One of the male figures documented at Awunbarna is 1.95 metres high. Their feet angle downward, their limbs bend in a way that resists ordinary balance, and their heads often tilt upward or back. The result is a look the researchers themselves describe as “floating” or “dream-like.” They do not rush across the wall in the sharp motion associated with older Dynamic Figures. They seem suspended, poised between movement and stillness, as if the artist wanted presence more than action.
Animals at the center
The most revealing feature of the Maliwawa corpus may be the fact that humans are not in charge of it. Animals slightly outnumber them overall, and the shift is sharp when compared with nearby Dynamic Figure art. Professor Paul Taçon put it plainly in the source material: “human figures are often painted together with animals, especially macropodids, and the relationship between humans and these animals seems to be a focal point in the artists’ message.” The numbers support that reading. In the Maliwawa sample, only about 42 percent of the figures are human, while Dynamic Figure art is overwhelmingly human in subject matter.
Those relationships are not abstract. The scenes include figures holding snakes, turtles, birds, and one another. Some stand face to face. Some bend over. Some appear in rows. There are back-to-back humans and back-to-back animals. In one striking panel, a man with cone and feather headdress reaches toward a large snake. In another, two figures hold hands. As Taçon explained, “The artists are clearly communicating aspects of their cultural beliefs, emphasizing important animals and interactions between humans and other humans or animals,” which is why these panels feel less like decoration than deliberate social or ceremonial statements.
That emphasis also helps explain why the paintings feel so different from a simple gallery of creatures or portraits. Animals in Maliwawa art do not sit on the edge of human life. They press into it. Macropods dominate, but birds, snakes, fish, thylacines, bilby-like creatures, and a dugong all appear. In several compositions, animals seem to witness or join human activity rather than merely share the same wall. The paintings suggest a world in which meaning travelled between species, and where depicting that traffic mattered.
The dugong inland
Among the most striking images is a dugong painted far from the present shoreline. The paper argues that it is the oldest known dugong depiction yet found. That matters because the site lies inland today, south of the Arafura Sea. In the source material, Dr. Sally K. May framed the puzzle this way: “Today, it is located about 15 kilometers south of the Arafura Sea, but 6000-9400 years ago, the coast would have been further north,”. The simplest implication is that at least one Maliwawa artist knew the coast directly, whether by travel, memory, or living in a landscape whose shoreline was not the one we see now.
The dugong is not alone in pushing the viewer outward. The Awunbarna shelters also preserve three animals that researchers describe as more similar to bilbies than to any known Arnhem Land creature. That does not settle the matter. The paper itself allows other possibilities, including wallabies and rock-wallabies painted with exaggerated ears and snouts. But the images are unusual enough that the researchers treated them as a genuine problem of identification, not a trivial flourish. The same is true of the dugong. These are not random curiosities. They are signs that the painters were working with a broader map of experience than the inland shelters alone might suggest.
A middle chapter, finally visible
To understand why the Maliwawa Figures matter so much, it helps to place them between two better-known Arnhem Land traditions. Dynamic Figures are generally older, more animated, and far more focused on human bodies in motion. The later X-ray style is famous for showing internal bones and organs in humans and animals. Maliwawa art sits between those worlds. It lacks the full internal detailing of X-ray painting, though some animal figures hint at rudimentary body cavities, and it carries a calmer, heavier presence than the earlier dynamic style. Griffith University’s summary of the research called the paintings a “missing link” between those phases, and that description holds up well.
The dating is not based on a single dramatic laboratory result. It rests on the slower, stronger work of style, superimposition, and regional comparison. The researchers argue that the Maliwawa Figures most likely date to between 6,000 and 9,400 years ago. They consistently overlie Dynamic Figures and old hand stencils, while some later forms lie beneath Simple Figures. In other words, the paintings occupy a real slot in the sequence. They are not floating outside time any more than the figures themselves are floating outside the rock.
The clearest reading, then, is not that Arnhem Land preserves portraits of literal cone-headed beings. It is that between about 6,000 and 9,400 years ago, artists in northwestern Arnhem Land developed a striking way of painting large headdressed humans, animals, and shared scenes that does not fit neatly into the old categories. The Maliwawa Figures are important because they sharpen the chronology, preserve unusual animal imagery, and show a society using rock surfaces to encode relationships between people, creatures, and belief. That is the strongest ground the evidence gives us, and it is more than enough to keep these figures alive in the imagination
