Ancient Rock Paintings and the New-Age Musician

If you had mentioned the words rock art to musician Steve Roach a few years ago, quite likely his first impression would have been to think of an album cover. But these days the words are more likely to evoke images of Magnificent, Giant Horse or Red Lady galleries, a few of the ancient aboriginal rock art sites here in the Cape York Peninsula in northern Queensland.

Roach is here with eight other Americans and three Australians to work on a public-TV documentary entitled “Australia’s Art of the Dreamtime,” a bush tour of ancient rock paintings scattered throughout the unpopulated Quinkan Reserve area near the small town of Laura, 200 miles north of Cairns. The Quinkan Reserve (named after the ubiquitous Quinkan, or spirit, figures found at many sites) is said by anthropologists to contain one of the largest collections of prehistoric rock art in the world, much of it unseen by Western eyes.

The exception to that is local resident Percy Trezise, 64, a former pilot, painter and explorer who discovered much of the rock art over the last 30 years and was the driving force behind the establishment of the reserve.

Trezise is the on-camera guide for the film. Along with Roach, writer-photographer David Stahl and a camera crew from WIPB, a small Indiana public station that’s underwriting the project, he recently spent a week in the bush around Laura, climbing over massive sandstone plateaus along the Mossman Gorge to view the art-filled escarpments and overhangs where aboriginals lived tens of thousands of years ago.

And what about New Music artist Steve Roach, known mainly for his high-tech synthesizer compositions? Where does he fit into this esoteric blend of archeology, ancient art and the mythology of the aboriginal dreamtime, the time when all things were created?

The answer has to do with synchronicity. Last summer, when David Stahl was driving to Mexico, he heard a tune from Roach’s “Structures From Silence” LP on the radio.

“It was perfect for the opening sequence I had in mind,” recalls Stahl. “It was like a Kubrick movie. I got in contact with Steve and it turned out he was working on this new LP, ‘Dreamtime Returned,’ at about the same time I had been working on the film.”

Roach began work on his “Dreamtime Returned” double-LP three years ago, starting with his own perception of what the dreamtime signified and gradually doing more and more basic research into Aboriginal mysticism and culture. When the chance came to actually visit sites where dreamtime myths were made real, he jumped at the opportunity. And what he found went far beyond his expectations.

“You can talk about the mythology of the creation time but it doesn’t really say it,” he says. “I want to convey the experience. Melody isn’t something that enters in here. I’m working with a whole new set of parameters in terms of how I can bring forth the dreamtime through music.”

To evoke the experience of the dreamtime in Cape York’s aboriginal rock art sites, Roach is relying on a small Walkman Pro stereo tape recorder, taping just about everything that catches his fancy for later digital sampling when he gets back to Los Angeles. It’s not simply music he’s capturing but rather sound: the predawn chatter of kookaburras in the bush, aboriginal chants, the eerie “talking” of didgeridoo maestro David Hudson, the tones produced by hitting a large sandstone bowl hollowed out by the elements.

“Steve (Trezise, Percy’s son) showed me a tree with a hole about the size of a pencil eraser in it,” he says. “I put my ear up to it and it sounded like a Tibetan monk’s chanting. It was a colony of bees. So I put the mike up and recorded a section of that. I started directly on the synthesizer, so it’s interesting that we’re going back in time to the primitive and allying it with high tech to come out with something that makes a bridge. What I really want to do is defy the technology.”

It would seem that Roach has his work cut out for him. There are few places in the world more technology defying in character than the desolate unpopulated regions of the Cape York Peninsula. The nearest hint of civilization is located in the tiny town of Laura (population 70), some 30 miles away through the bush. The very notion of Roach’s synthesizer-filled life back in Los Angeles seems nearly incomprehensible.

And yet Roach’s high-tech bridge to the past seems fitting, since the Laura rock art is itself a bridge, a melding of aboriginal creation myths with physical landscapes that has survived more than 10,000 years.

While the remote location and the physical ruggedness of the bush made work on the project difficult--the entire crew had to be airlifted by helicopter to view various sites--it is because of its inaccessibility that the Quinkan rock art has lasted so long.

“The Quinkan art is one of the most difficult bodies of art in the world to see and will remain so,” says Percy Trezise, rolling a cigarette while water boils in a billy for morning coffee. “It took us 27 years to find three-quarters of it. In 1972, I had a Churchill Fellowship to study the impact of tourism on rock art around the world, and I learned that isolation and rugged country and hard walking is natural protection. Vandals don’t walk very far.”

Unfortunately, the spectacular wealth of art of the Quinkan Reserve may remain unseen for at least another year. By the time the film is ready for broadcast later this year, the overall costs (including donated equipment) could reach the $200,000 mark, a figure that KIPB simply can’t give away for free. To try and recoup some of the money, says station manager Jim Needham, “Australia’s Art of the Dreamtime” will first be marketed to universities and libraries, with a secondary effort to display it to the general public via public TV sometime in 1989.

Steve Roach, on the other hand, won’t have to wait that long. His record label, Fontana, is planning to release “Dreamtime Returned” early this summer as a double CD package. And despite the delay in the film’s airing, the project has been a pleasurable experience for him, a contrast to his frustrations in dealing with major studios.

“This is the kind of thing I want to be doing,” says Roach. “Having been inside the gate at studios, I know that one day you’re built up as the greatest thing since sliced bread and the next day you’re back on the streets. This isn’t just a regular gig to do a sound track where I’ll do what I can to see what will work. It seems more like a lifelong interest and this is just one step along the way.”