ON ABORIGINAL CAYE-DEAWINGS ON THE PALMER 

 GOLDFIELD. 



i.FJi.J^TS: I). 



By ROBERT L. JACK, F.G.S., F.R.G.S., 



GOVERXITENT GEOLOGIST. 



[^Read before the Royal Society of Qiieenslaml , December 14, 1895. 



The figures about to be described are not introduced to your 

 notice on account of their artistic merits, wliicb would hardly 

 procure for them a place in the National Gallery. They are, in 

 fact, not much above the level of the dawTi of art displayed on 

 school slates. As examples of the art of a race in a stage of 

 intellectual infancy, and which race will certainly die before 

 attaining manhood, they possess, however, a certain interest 

 for ethnologists. 



All the drawings, except two, are from two localities within 

 the limits of the Palmer goldfield, viz., Chinky Creek, a tribu- 

 tary of the Mossman, and Mun Gin Creek, an affluent of Cradle 

 Creek, which is itself a tributary of the Palmer Kiver. They 

 occur in caves or on cliffs forming the escarpments of horizontal 

 beds of the Desert Sandstone or Upper Cretaceous formation, 

 which here lies unconformably on the upturned edges of 

 Palaeozoic schists. Geologically the drawings are, therefore, of 

 more recent date than the upheaval and extensive subaerial 

 denudation of the newest Cretaceous rocks ; but there is internal 

 evidence that they are probably not more than twenty-five years 

 old. The drawings are reproduced (Plate I) on a uniform scale 

 of one-twenty-fifth. 



I am somewhat at a loss for a single word by which to 

 name the drawings. A fresco was originally understood to be 



