193 



ON THREE HIGHLY ORNATE BOOMERANGS FROM 

 THE BULLOO RIVER, 



By R. Etheridge, Junr. 



(Palaeontologist to the Australian Museum, and Geological 



Survey op N. S. Wales.) 



(Plate XV.) 



The much more highly ornate carving and colouring of the 

 weapons and implements of the Australian Aborigines throughout 

 Northern Austi'alia, as compared with those of the southern and 

 western portions of the Continent, has no doubt struck all those 

 who have made the Ethnology of these strange peoples their study. 

 This fact has been ah-eady commented on by the late Mr, R. B. 

 Smyth,* but with the knowledge we now possess his remarks are 

 somewhat too casual. He observed that tjie boomerangs in use 

 around Rockingham Bay, N.E. Queensland, and the districts 

 adjacent thereto, were ornamented with incised lines, differing in 

 this respect from those employed in the southern and western 

 p^rts of Australia. Although, as may be inferred from my 

 opening paragraph, this may be true in a general sense, yet the 

 fact that Sir Thomas Mitchell,! the most celebrated of our Sur- 

 veyors-General, and, at the same time, one of the most eminent of 

 our Explorers, met with highly carved boomerangs, as early as 

 1836, in portions of the country much further to the south-east, 

 to a great extent refutes Smyth's too sweeping generalisation. 



In no weapon perhaps, with the exception of the beautiful 

 clubs and shields figured by Smyth J from various localities, is this 

 incised ornamentation more marked, than in the patterns used to 



* Aborigines of Victoria, 1878, i. p. 329. 

 t Two Expeds. Int. E. Australia, 1838, ii. p. 342. 

 t Aborigines of Victoria, 1878, i. pp. 300 and 331. 



