1. Rock carvings, Flinders Ranges.
2. Emu design carved into the butt of a boabab tree, King Sound.
Fig. 29. Remarkable cave drawing, Glenelg River, N.W. Australia
As affording a means of comparison, a hunting scene is reproduced carved upon the surface of a club by aborigines of Victoria. The little group is composed of an aboriginal hunter who in one hand is poising a spear and in the other is carrying a boomerang; behind him are two emus standing in much the same position as that assumed to be the case in the heavenly image just described.
The Minning at Eucla recognize only the long neck of the emu in the sky, and refer to it as “Yirrerri”; on the Nullarbor Plains the same portion is looked upon as the heavenly tjuringa of the emu.
Fig. 30. Pictograph of lizard, natural and conventional form.
Speaking generally, there is perhaps no other creature living which figures so frequently in aboriginal art, both on the cave wall and in the dance, as the great struthious bird of Australia. This is no doubt due in the first place to the admirable way in which it lends itself for the purposes mentioned; its antics in the field suggest many tricks for mimicry at a corrobboree, and its distinctive form supplies the artist with a model which never fails to attract the attention of the artistically inclined among his people. In [Plate XLIX], 2, we have a pipeclay drawing of an emu from the Katherine River which is rather exceptional in that it shows the bird more en face than is usual; the proportions are, on the whole, good, except that the head is screwed upwards in a rather strange way. On a boomerang from Broome ([Fig. 18]), we have a series of engraved emu pictures, all in profile, and in different attitudes.
On the whole, an aboriginal’s pictures are flat and without perspective. He takes the inspiration direct from nature and reproduces the subject singly, and as a separate entity; a number of such designs are drawn side by side with or without pictographic sequence. But there are countless occasions upon which artists, especially the more gifted, prefer to draw a real scene from life, combining subject with action. Environment or surroundings rarely, if ever, receive attention.