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Abstract. This article describes two petroglyphs and their cultural context in the Bindook Highlands, Blue Mountains, New South Wales. One is a natural waterhole, which may have been modified to resemble a macropod. The other is an outline of a bird. Gundungurra men visited this site between the years 1897 and 1905, inscribing their names there.
Introduction
The territory of Gundungurra (or Gandangara) speaking people encompassed the catchment of the Wollondilly - Cox's River system and some adjacent areas west of the Great Dividing Range (Smith 2008). Their country included what is now referred to as the 'Southern Blue Mountains'. Much of this country is little changed from its original condition, as there was minimal farming in the sandstone areas and, from the 1950s, large areas were incorporated into various National Parks and the catchment area for Lake Burragorang, part of Sydney's water supply. Although the Sydney Basin contains large areas of sandstone suitable for petroglyph production, the language groups that inhabited it, including the Dharug, Darkingung, Thurrawal and Gundungurra, for unknown cultural reasons, differed greatly in the number of petroglyphs they produced. The Dharug- Eora people produced one of the richest assemblages of petroglyphs in Australia but comparatively few are found in the territories of the neighbouring groups. Taçon et al. (2006: 227) note that petroglyphs are rare over the whole million-hectare area of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area (the World Heritage Area excludes the Eora country). Only three petroglyphs are known from Gundungurra country. This is based on a review of published literature and on the observations of the authors who each have 45 years of experience bushwalking in the sandstone areas of Gundungurra country, as well as discussions with other interested bushwalkers and rock art researchers. As petroglyphs are so rare in the Gundungurra country, it is possible that the three known examples have a high level of cultural significance.
The petroglyphs
The first petroglyph was described by R. H. Mathews (1911: 405). Mathews was shown by the Gundungurra man George Riley (c. 1833-1906) a twometre- long petroglyph of a bustard (see Fig. 1) beside Byrnes Creek, a tributary of the Wollondilly. Riley told Mathews 'he first saw this drawing when he was a boy [i.e., in the 1830s]...