How Australian rock art warns us about 2023

If you had to choose an obvious place to look for clues about what will happen in the coming year, it probably wouldn’t be the lush, green, watery tropic wilderness of Mount Borradaile, West Arnhemland, in the Northern Territory, Australia, hard by the sizzling blue reaches of the Arafura Sea.

For a start, this lost, ancient chunk of Oz is almost empty – there are far more saltwater crocs than cars, and far more rare and exquisite wading birds than people. How can this lovely place speak of modernity? Of the future? And yet if I am right, the clues hidden in this Edenic wilderness suggest that we are about to see our lives entirely overturned – in a way that once happened in Arnhemland. The rocks may even illuminate our ultimate fate.

To understand, check out the rock painting above. What you are looking at is an example, from Mount Borradaile, of ‘contact art’. This