Title: The Australian Museum magazine
Identifier: australianmuseum1192123aust (find matches)
Year: 1921 (1920s)
Authors: Australian Museum; Australian Museum
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: Sydney, Australian Museum
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Smithsonian Libraries

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THE AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM MAGAZINE. ABORIGINAL ROCK CARVINGS
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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

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