244 Macteay Menmoriat Vouume. 
(Pl. xxxrv. fig. 2). This belt and the two following seem to be made of an easily 
split wood. 
The next longest is seven feet, three and a quarter inches wide, and ten ounces 
in weight. The largest belt maintains the same width throughout, but in this case 
a certain amount of taper is apparent. The pattern colours used are red, white, blue 
and yellow (Pl. xxxiv. fig. 3), and the pattern too complicated for description. 
Ss: 
The third example is much shorter, only five feet six inches long, three inches 
wide, and eight ounces in weight. The pattern consists of more or less triangular 
spaces, transverse bands and white checker-work (PI. xxxuv. fig. 4). 
I know of but very few references to these belts. Inspector Paul Foelsche is 
one of the few who speaks* of the “painted belts made of bark used by the natives 
of North Australia.” 
The general character is that of the belts figured by Dr. O. Finscht from Maiva 
and Kerrema in New Guinea. He terms them Goazoa, and says that they are made 
of a thin hard bark. They are painted red, or covered with a plaiting of finely split 
bamboo, the outer ends are then figured with much more elaborate and artistic 
drawings than those on the North Australian, and filled in with white and red colour. 
Mr. E. G. Edelfelt also mentions the wearing of an elaborately carved and painted 
bark belt.{ 
Another form of belt is that made of human hair, chiefly female I believe, 
twisted into twine, of which there are several hanks in this collection ready for use. 
In the Dieyerie Tribe of the south, the male hair belt, called Vzzka, is three 
hundred yards in length and greatly prized from the difficulty in procuring it. 
Howitt also noticed that the Cooper’s Creek men had “a very long cord wound 
round and round the waist like a belt.”|| And Foelsche directly refers to the wearing 
of female hair round the waist in North Australia, but amongst the Kimberley 
natives the hair girdle is only worn by the piceaninies.? Human hair was also worn 
by the men of the Port Lincoln Tribe, South Australia, the hair spun into a yarn, 
and the latter twisted into a girdle,** but strangest of all is Oldfield’s statementtt that 
* Trans. R. Soc. S. Australia for 1881-82 [1882], V. p. 14. 
+ Ueber Bekleidung, Schmuck, und Tatowirrung der Papuas der Siidost Kiiste von Neu-Guinea. Math. Anthrop. 
Geselisch. Wien, 1885, XV. pp. 3 & 4 (sep. copy). 
+ Trans. R. Geogr. Soc. Austr. (Queensland Branch), 1892, VII. Pt. 1, p. 21. 
§ Gason in Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, 1878, I. 281. 
|| Smyth’s Aborigines of Victoria, 1878, II. p- 302. 
‘| Froggatt, Proc. Linn. Soc. N.S. Wales, 1888, III. (2), p. 652. 
““ Schiirmann, Aboriginal Tribes of Port Lincoln in South Australia, 1846, p. 2. 
+t Trans. Eth. Soc., 1865, III. (n.s.), p. 268. 
t 
