Sydney - A wall of Aboriginal rock art paintings replete with images of aeroplanes, bicycles, guns and steamships blasted open the notion that interaction between Australia's indigenous population and the rest of the world began with the British takeover and the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, scientists said Saturday.
"This rock art dismantles the popular identity of Australia being a nation first visited by the British," Griffith University archaeologist Paul Tacon said.
The panoply of 1,500 pictures, some dating back 15,000 years and the most recent done in the 1940s, detail extensive contact with Bugis traders from the Indonesian port city of Macassar in Sulawesi, now called Ujung Pandang.