The Kimberley mountain ranges stretch across the entire northwestern tip of Australia. For centuries, these uncomfortable and sparsely populated places have been home to several Australian Aboriginal tribes - the Unambal, Warrora, Ngarinyin and others.
Here, on the Mitchell Plateau and in the valleys of the Glineldzh, Prince Regent and King Edward rivers, 60-80 miles from the ocean coast, in places sheltered from human eyes, in the rocks and in numerous caves, the ancient sanctuaries of this people are hidden - ritual places, visited, as a rule, only by old people, on whom the tribe entrusted the duties of communicating with spirits.
These rocks and cave walls are painted with amazing drawings, many of which are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. Among them, you can often find images of mysterious, mouthless creatures with large round eyes. They usually wear long robes.
Their frozen white faces are like masks. The arms and legs are poorly worked out, often they are barely outlined and almost merge with the light, in some places shaded body. Necklaces are occasionally written on the chest, but more often an oval-shaped object is depicted, usually interpreted as a heart or sternum.
The heads are surrounded by a strange horseshoe-shaped or arcuate halo, very reminiscent of the halos of Christian saints. At the top of the paintings, sometimes you can see mysterious signs resembling some kind of oriental writing.
Sacred to the aborigines of Kimberley, these images are revered by them as images of mysterious powerful creatures, who came to these lands in ancient times. They taught local residents to use tools and weapons, gave them tribal laws, rituals and customs, after completing their mission they left - some to heaven, others underground.
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These mysterious creatures called themselves Wonjins. Today's natives call this water spirits.
Water for these dried up places is rain. Rain means life. It is the source of all that the earth gives. The spirits of water - wonjins - are the lords and managers of life, the rulers and managers of everything that is on this earth, its supreme deities. Various animals and plants are often depicted around them - these are the children of Wonjins.
The oldest person in a tribe or in a group of hunters has a dacha to rewrite the images of Wonjina every year before the monsoon period. The picture is updated according to the old outline, completely preserving all the details of the previous picture. Renewal of Wonjin images, according to Aboriginal beliefs, causes rain. The natives believe that when the image is erased and Wonjina disappears, then drought and famine set in.
Wonjin are part of the daily life of the tribes who have hunted in the Kimberley Mountains for many years. Wonjina is depicted not only on the rocks and walls of caves, but also on the cradles of newborn babies, on ceremonial boomerangs and shields, on a myriad of various talismans, amulets and other symbolic crafts.
But at the same time, the natives are firmly convinced that the first images of Wonjin were made … not by them. The authorship belongs to some mysterious people of a different race who lived here many years ago and disappeared to no one knows where.
For decades, anthropologists and ethnologists have been puzzling over the mystery of the Wonjin origin. Many assumptions have been made on this score.
The most exotic hypothesis is that Wonjins are aliens from outer space. This, according to the authors of the version, is indicated by the clearly "extraterrestrial" appearance of the Wonjins and a strange halo around their heads, very reminiscent of the spherical helmets of astronauts. Supporters of the theory of "paleovisite" vouch that the Wonjin figures are images of aliens.
There are other hypotheses on this score. The main problem is that it is impossible to even approximately determine how long ago the first images of wonjins appeared to the Kimberley rocks: this could have happened two hundred or two thousand years ago.
Australian aborigines live in only two time dimensions: for them there is “primitive times”, or the times of Creation, when all life on Earth arose, and the present. There is no past, and they are not interested in the future. Aboriginal people do not have year counts either: their language has the numerals "one", "two" and "three", and for the numeral "four" the term "a lot" is already used.
Aboriginal people make a clear distinction between works of art that they consider to be their own and those that belong to the era of Creation. They place the images of wojin in the second category and do not consider them their own, although they have taken responsibility for regularly updating them for ritual purposes.
The North Kimberley tribes have a legend that the ancestors of their family clans arrived in Australia on boats led by people called Wonjina, although each of them had their own name. These aliens from across the sea painted their symbolic images in underground galleries and on the surface of rocks. When the Wonjins left these places, they went underground, leaving their footprints on the stone.
The aboriginal legends clearly show the very real circumstances of the Wonjin's arrival and departure: the boats on which they sailed and, possibly, sailed away; weapons and tools that they taught the aborigines to use. What is hidden under this layer of ancient legends?
Back in the 1930s. the first explorers of the Kimberley rock paintings suggested that the Wonjin image could have embodied the story of sailors from the Old World or Southeast Asia who escaped after a shipwreck several centuries ago.
It is possible that a tiny colony of shipwrecked sailors - Europeans or Malays - existed for some time on the northwest coast of Australia. Its fate is difficult to guess - maybe they left the Green Continent, or maybe they were exterminated by the natives.
After them, only strange rock paintings remained, in which the natives tried to comprehend the historical experience they received of communicating with people of a different, more advanced race, and to build it into the system of their worldview and mythology. This is how Wonjina's image was born …
In an effort to shed light on the mystery of the mysterious drawings, researchers have discovered that wongjin-like clothing is worn by the inhabitants of the northeastern islands of Indonesia - Xiau and Sangihe, located north of Sulawesi. And far south of Kimberley, in the headwaters of the Gascoigne River (Western Australia), G. Giles met a small group of Aboriginal people who had clearly Asian features.
The similarity of the wonjin attire and the clothing of the inhabitants of some Indonesian islands, the presence of Asian (Malay) features in certain groups of aborigines - all this seems to indicate the direction in which to move in order to find the solution to the mystery of Kimberley's drawings.
However, some researchers offer another version of the origin of the mysterious wonjin. In their opinion, the long robes that resemble robes and the shining around the heads of these mysterious creatures come from … Christian icons!
Christianity came to South and then to Southeast Asia at a fairly early time. In the VIII-XIV centuries in China, especially in the ports of the southern coast, hundreds of thousands of Christians lived, and in the XII-XIV centuries. in Zaytun (Quanzhou) there was a bishopric that maintained ties with Rome.
Perhaps a ship carrying Chinese Christians once wrecked off the coast of northwestern Australia? Or is it an echo of later eras, when Portuguese or Spanish ships appeared in the coastal waters of the Green Continent?
Perhaps the events developed like this: several Christians (it does not matter whether they were Chinese, Portuguese or someone else), due to circumstances, were forced to live for several months or years among the Kimberley aborigines. Maybe one of them had an icon with them, or one of the sailors painted images of saints on the rock.
The natives watched with interest the strange customs of the mysterious aliens. They saw that these people know and can do much more than the Australians; they associated this success with the grace-filled help of unknown deities in long robes and with halos around their heads, which were worshiped by aliens.
And when strangers left them - either by going back to the sea, or simply to another world - the aborigines began to imitate them to worship these creatures, which gradually became part of their mythology and acquired new, purely Australian features, becoming wonjins - the masters of life and everything of existence …
All this, of course, is a hypothesis, and there is no reliable answer to this riddle, but it is obvious that the aborigines of northwestern Australia once had to face something so unusual that their mythology forever captured this event in the image of the powerful and mysterious wonjins, whose images henceforth became sacred to them.
And whoever the people who first created these murals were, we can confidently say that they were not Australians.
Altair Sheremetyev