Familiar, not foreign: Depictions of watercraft in the rock art of mainland southeast Cape York Peninsula, Queensland

Archaeologists have a longstanding interest in cross-cultural engagements between Indigenous people and Others, especially in settler colonial nations. In Australia, much archaeological attention has been directed to how such engagements are reflected in rock art, particularly in respect of colonial period seafaring activities and non-Indigenous watercraft technologies. Scholars have written extensively about depictions of foreign watercraft in Arnhem Land (Northern Territory, NT), and to a lesser extent Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria (NT), and the Kimberley and Pilbara regions of Western Australia, but have largely overlooked this topic in the northeast of the continent. Here we describe non-Indigenous watercraft motifs from mainland southeast Cape York Peninsula, Queensland. The majority of the motifs identifiable to a specific type represent coastal vessels dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was the period when bêche-de-mer, pearl shell and trochus boats were locally commonplace and largely operated by Indigenous crew, who we argue were probably the creators of the rock art. Given the likely time period and subject matter, we suggest that artists in this region incorporated non-Indigenous watercraft into their artistic traditions once these items had become core elements of their Indigenous worlds. Rather than conveying a sense of strangeness associated with outsiders, the images convey core ideas of the self, as well as encoding new experiences.