AustLit

'Allegoresis, or allegorical interpretation, is the interpretive mode of finding a 'truth' or meaning concealed in words or images, regardless of whether this truth was intended by their composer. The Homeric allegorists are the earliest known practitioners of this tradition, which predates the kind of intentional allegorical construction that began in Late Antiquity with Prudentius's Psychomachia and dominated the tradition through the Early Modern era. Commonly identified by the name of their European 'discoverer' as 'The Bradshaws,' the Gwion Gwion paintings of the Kimberley region have inspired much of this king of allegoresis. A major goal of western investigators is to make a reasonable claim about the meaning to this peculiar rock art. In other words, to allegorize it. All such attempts at allegoresis, and the apparently overwhelming desire to find meaning beyond the literal images, indicate an unwillingness to experience the images as unknowable and further, an inability to resist appropriating the images to a western way of knowing. Aboriginal views of the rock art are generally ignored or dismissed as inferior to the scientifically substantiated theories of western researchers. Just as the voices of Aboriginal peoples often inaudible in the current political and social contexts of Australia, their experience of the rock art itself is overwritten with knowledge, or what might better be called 'allegories of knowing'. (Introduction)