24 PEOCEEDINGS OP THE NATIONAL MUSEUM vol.79 



aboriginal art is inferior to that of other peoples who have a similarly- 

 developed totemic system. 



The Australians are one of the most primitive of peoples, and their 

 exhibit at the National Museum consists of spear hurlers, boomer- 

 angs, clubs, stone axes, shields, an ornamented fur robe, a netted 

 bag, baskets, a message stick, and a pair of shoes which are thought 

 to render the wearer invisible. Their boomerangs, churingas, and 

 message sticks have symmetrically incised or painted designs. 



Isolated as are the great island masses of New Guinea and Aus- 

 tralia, we find, as expected, that the decorative motives and the 

 style of their application are distinctive and extremely stylized. 

 A further causative factor in emphasizing the isolation of their art 

 impulses is the racial integrity combined with linguistic forces pe- 

 culiar to the area. The patterns are applied to basketry and to 

 wood through painted designs. Another form is the combined in- 

 cised and painted design so frequently found on Melanesian weapons 

 of offense and defense. Sand paintings of a ceremonial nature are 

 not nearly so pleasing as are those of the Hopi of southwestern 

 United States; they are rather in form of a maze such as is well 

 known to our Apache artist when in a ceremonial mood. 



Painting with carbon or charcoal or colored clay is also char- 

 acteristic principally in red and yellow earths. The body is thus 

 painted with stripes; line drawings, and fiat surfaces forming 

 geometrical figures. Even the rocks are thus painted, as are objects 

 of diverse description. The narrow oblong wooden shield and the 

 wooden troughlike bowls are so painted, the latter being longitudi- 

 nally corrugated and painted over with red ochre. Further orna- 

 mentation is in the form of white and black bands. Weapons, as 

 shields, spears, and spear-throwers, have zigzag line ornamentation 

 representing snakes. Transverse line, angle, and flat surface de- 

 signs are varied, and on the curved wooden boomerangs are wavy 

 V-shape patterns in transverse order. 



In North Australia basketry ornamentation occasionally takes on a 

 realistic spirit in the form of painted dancer or warrior figures. 

 Peoples having a higher development of basketry technology weave 

 their decorative designs in the body walls of the basket, so that both 

 in the primitive design itself and in the technical deficiencies of 

 basketry, for instance, may one see the low stage of Australian cul- 

 ture. To be sure many peoples, as our own Plains Indians and the 

 Malayan peoples of Java and the Philippines, have a highly devel- 

 oped technical achievement — ^the one in quill work and the other in 

 basketry — but a corresponding lack of development of pictographic 

 or painting art. It is impossible to establish from observation the 

 art sequence of peoples, whether one observes the Papuans and the 



