While the world has already lost some art by Rembrandt, da Vinci, and Van Gogh in just a few hundred years, some Indigenous art has lasted more than 30,000 years — so what is the secret?

In the context of the rest of the world, the oldest Indigenous artwork had already been painted when humans first arrived in Europe, was already thousands of years old when people hunted mammoth in North America and was positively ancient by the time Egyptians contemplated their first pyramids.

Indigenous rock art has survived wildfire, flood, ice age, hotter and wetter climates, and the passing by of hundreds of generations of people — and perhaps even the occasional visit from now-extinct megafauna.

Even if you put the singular importance of Indigenous art in the story of humankind to one side, just the fact that paint on a rock can survive through so much time and weather is almost inconceivable.

But despite scientists like Professor Andy Gleadow examining these ancient paintings down to the molecular level, it is still not fully understood how the first Australians created such indelible images.

"Some of these paintings are very, very old indeed, and they certainly are getting up to the tens of thousands of years old," Dr Gleadow said.

"But we don't know what the original paints were and whether what we see now is simply a remnant."

How these Gwion Gwion paintings in the Kimberley were created to last for thousands of years is not entirely understood. ( ABC Kimberley: Vanessa Mills )

This mystery of how paint can last for tens of millennia was the question that lodged in the mind of Ralph Drayton-Witty while he was watching a television program about the age of rock art, from his home in Tasmania.

"This rock art, which as they claim are 20, 30, 40, 50,000 years old, I'm just wondering how they can last so long when Dulux paint guarantee their paint for only 10 years," Mr Drayton-Witty said.

He put his question to Curious Kimberley, which invites people to suggest questions they would like the ABC to investigate.

A selection of questions was put to a popular vote and the secret to the resilience of Indigenous rock painting was chosen.

Not all rock art is thousands of years old. this painting is believed to document Dr Ludwig Leichhardt's party which passed several miles south of this area in November 1845. ( Supplied: Kakadu Culture Camp )

A lost art

As a Walmajarri and Gija artist in the east Kimberley, Gabriel Nodea paints images on canvas from an unbroken cultural connection right back to some of Australia's oldest rock paintings.

"My art is painting dreamtime stories of what I know, what I've been told or handed down by older people," Mr Nodea said.

Mr Nodea also works to preserve ancient rock paintings in his traditional country, and has marvelled at how his ancestors were able to create such long-lasting images.

"Looking at rock art on my mother's country, many, many times before I've asked that question myself," he said.

He creates a modern version of traditional paint for his own contemporary art, crushing coloured rocks to make ochre, and then dissolving that in a combination of water and PVA glue to carry and set the paint.

But Mr Nodea said his paint was no match for the mystery recipe used in ancient times.

"It can last a very long time on canvas, but not on a rock wall," he said. "We don't know the true story about how the old people mixed the paint, but they probably used an oxide and blended it with some sort of special animal fat, and we don't know which one it is."

Gija artist Gabriel Nodea makes paint with ochre for his contemporary paintings. ( Supplied: Robyn Sloggett )

The important role that rock art played in traditional Aboriginal culture might explain why ancient Australians developed such a resilient painting technique.

"Rock art is like a report or some sort of referral letting people know that someone's been there before," Mr Nodea said.

The ancient paintings on Gija country carry information about who the traditional owners are and how they should conduct their lives.

"All those paintings on the wall tell us all the animals for survival purposes, about kinship relations, and how we live our daily lives."

Painting with rock on rock

Part of the secret to rock art paint being able to last for tens of thousands of years, according to Dr Marcell Scott from the University of Melbourne, was that the paint was made from rock, and was very compatible to the rock on which it was painted.

Dr Scott has been working with Mr Nodea to preserve ancient paintings, and she said modern paints, often based on titanium dioxide, had a much tougher job staying attached to the materials used in modern buildings.

"The substrate is so different, and the paint and the binder used in modern paints for painting say our garages and our houses, is fundamentally different," she said.

Wandjina figures are depicted in the traditional art of the Worrorra, Ngarinyin and Wunumbal tribes of the west and north Kimberley. ( Supplied: Mike Donaldson )

This contrasts with rock art where the paint can become a part of the rock on which it is painted.

"It's made from ochre, and at a very fundamental level, that's rock," Dr Scott said.

"And over time, through an oxidation process [and] a range of other geological processes, it was stabilised on the rock surface."

An incredible record

The exact age of Australian rock art is still the subject of investigation.

The oldest reliably dated rock art is a 28,000-year-old charcoal drawing from Arnhem Land.

But there is a lot of art work from hand stencils in north Queensland, animal sketches in the Kimberley, and rock carvings in the Pilbara, that are suspected to be 40,000 or even 50,000 years old.

Dr Gleadow is leading the Kimberley rock art dating project, a multidisciplinary team trying to answer what has turned out to be quite a difficult problem to solve.

By using a range of techniques, they have come up with some dates for the Kimberley's Gwion Gwion art and even older animal paintings.

"All of the important work on the Gwion paintings is currently under review for publication," Dr Gleadow said.

"The Gwions are one of the middle period of the sequence of rock art, there are older paintings and we have measurements on those to show they are definitely older, and some of them much older."

Surveying Gija rock art on Texas Downs station in the east Kimberley. ( Supplied: Robyn Sloggett )

Through his team's dating work in the Kimberley, Dr Gleadow noted that all the oldest images appeared to have something in common.

"The older styles of the rock art, the ones that are mostly reddish coloured to mulberry-purplish coloured, sometimes almost black, these are mostly made of iron oxides in various forms, and these are extremely durable," he said.

"The iron oxides have actually penetrated into the pore spaces, the little gaps between the grains of sand that make up the sandstone that these rock faces are made of."

Whatever the secret is to how these ancient paintings have survived for so long, there is no doubting the incredible value of what they record.

Archaeological evidence now shows people reached Australia at least 65,000 years ago, and their artwork provided a record of humanity responding to changing climate and historical ages.

"Given that we are talking about time spans going back well over 10,000 years now, that relates to really major environmental changes that the whole Earth has gone through in that time," Dr Gleadow said.

"That's something we need to manage very carefully so that they are indeed around for tens of thousands of years to come."