You'd think that by 1950 they would have switched to paper...

The Independent reports on the Australian history being rewritten thanks to a series of rock-paintings found in Wellington Range, depicting sea-faring vessels from 15 000 to 50 years ago. This proves, among other things, that Australians have been a sea-faring people from far longer than expected, and that there has been contact between the Australians and the rest of the world well before James Cook.

This creates an interesting contrast between tangible and intangible heritage. The tangible heritage - the hundreds upon hundreds of rock paintings are certain to draw hundreds of thousands of visitor to the Wellington Range to marvel at 15 000 years worth of heritage. I am left wandering though, how much will the intangible heritage change - will people adopt the rewritten Aboriginal history and start thinking of the natives as a highly developed seafaring cultures with many overseas contacts well before James Cook's time? Or will they simply take the rock-paintings of World War II era warships as another proof of the huge gap between Civilized Man and the Noble Savage?

If tangible heritage is a pretty straightforward affair - it's stuff, it's there, there's little you can do about it, then the intangible appears much more complicated, as it is composed of ideas without an inherent truth value attached to them. The American myth of the self-made man is very much a part of the country's cultural heritage, whether or not the evidence supports it; the "800 years of slavery" that the Estonian people supposedly suffered through is a fixed part of the nation's heritage, even if tangible heritage (like written records for instance) prove, that it may not have that bad all of time at all.

So how should one approach that part of intangible heritage that is also wrong? If the heritage were disconnected from the real world and had no impact on native-non-native relations today, I would say, it doesn't matter. One shouldn't care about whether the oral tradition actually makes sense or not - after all, there is quite a bit in native cultures that doesn't make sense (at least to us), what matters is that it is heritage, and thus tells us something about the people who consider it heritage, be it native Americans, Australians or the Western World.

Unfortunately the heritage does make a difference, and attitudes ingrained in collective consciousness very much affect people's attitudes towards indigenous people today. That's why I want to believe that the newly discovered rock paintings will change the traditional imagery of the Australian aborigenes at least somewhat. At the same time, this is also why the "outdated" views on natives, even if the society has rejected them, cannot simply be deleted out of existence in an Orwellian stroke of revisionism, but have to be preserved at least in recording. It serves as a lesson for future generations, but also as an independent object of study - a piece of intangible heritage worthy of preservation as much as any other.