THE AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM MAGAZINE. 



ABORIGINAL ROCK CARVINGS 



Ourblackfellows may have despised realism in art because their efforts to depict a scene serenely ignored 

 details of form. What they did naturally, the cubists, futurists, and dadaists, strove to do unnaturally. 

 The aboriginal makes his picture with a shorthand art of his ovfn and with a quaint humor. This out- 

 line drawing was made by Mr. R. H. Mathews from aboriginal rock carvings, and the scale is roughly 



8 feet to I inch. 



These pictures cover a wide range ; 

 sometimes an ambitious spirit has 

 tried to present a scene, such as a 

 kangaroo hunt. A favourite subject, 

 and one readily recognised, is a whale. 

 Then, as now, a dead whale chanced 

 at times to drift ashore. When this 

 occurred it would have seemed to the 

 blacks as if some kind providence had 

 opened a butcher's shop gratis on the 

 beach for their especial benefit. As a 

 memento of its size and shape that 

 whale would be drawn on the Bora 

 ground. Such a tale lost nothing in 

 the telling, and the marvellous meat 

 was drawn "heroic size." Sixty feet 

 in length was the testimony of one 

 witness. Another group shows a 

 whale attended by her calf, and along- 

 side is a marine monster which appears 

 to have been a sun fish. The throwing 

 of a boomerang is an incident in some 

 picture stories. What some of the 

 figures stood for we cannot even 

 guess. Some of the unintelligible ones 



may mean the tracks of game animals, 

 naturally subjects of great importance 

 to a hunter. A green turtle in another 

 group stares at an emu standing 

 beside a clutch of eggs. The turtle 

 seems to be wrestling with the riddle 

 of the egg. 



Convention, absurd to say, had over- 

 taken even the palaeolithic artist and 

 crushed his initiative with the right 

 way to do things. For instance, their 

 right and only way to draw a man 

 was to spread his fingers and to extend 

 his limbs apart as if crucified. Per- 

 haps this was a dancing attitude of a 

 corroboree. 



It is said that the portrait of a man 

 was sometimes made by outlining his 

 shadow in the afternoon sunshine. 

 Probably the sketch was first drawn 

 with a burnt stick. Along the line to 

 be engraved, holes were bored in the 

 rock an inch, or half an inch, apart. 

 Then the spaces between the holes was 

 ground away or chipped out with a 



