© James BrickwoodLost heritage: staff at work on the restoration.
The sandstone carvings, in bushland near Grotto Point at Clontarf, are unusual because they are thought to date from the years immediately before or during white settlement.
After more than a century as a local attraction, the carved images of a kangaroo, a sun fish and flying boomerangs were infested with lichen and partly covered with bracken and dirt.
Restoring the carvings is a painstaking task for staff from the National Parks and Wildlife Service, and the NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change, who were working on the site yesterday with toothbrush-like jeweller's brushes.
"It's all about not scratching the grooves," said David Lambert, a rock art conservator with the department. "We wet the rocks so you are only scraping away the lichen and not eroding the sandstone as well."
No one knows exactly when the rocks were carved, or what the pictures symbolise. The presence of a sun fish - a rare and sizeable culinary event - might recall a memorable feast on the shores of Middle Harbour, but that is speculation.
"You would suspect that there is some sort of story attached to them but that piece of cultural heritage has been lost," said Brad Welsh, an Aboriginal heritage officer with the National Parks and Wildlife Service.
"It may have been made just before white contact, and they stopped doing it because of white contact," he said.
"There's no way to get an exact date for it but the grooves are not worked that deep, so it may be an area that was started on and then they left off.
"And it can't have been there that much longer because it's sandstone and it would have weathered away."
Although some of the biggest and most heavily engraved rock art sites are north of Sydney in Ku-ring-gai National Park, there are more than 200 known indigenous sites around Sydney Harbour.
Reader Comments
to our Newsletter