THE PICTURE CAVES OF AUSTRALIA.
Bi Jessie Mackat.
I. j I have never been fortunate enough to read any detailed comparison, between the native art of Australia and that of New Zealand. And yet the subject must have struck many students as one of deep and even momentous interest. How comes it that in the were picturing, the mere reproduction of natural objects of every day observation, the degraded and unstoried aboriginal was so far before the cultured rangatiras with .half a hundred generations of heaven-descended ancestry? How comes it that in the matter of conventional art decoration, oil the~ other hand, the Maori was master of one of the most' elaborate, if the most bizarre schools of design ever evolved by any unlettered race, ' wMle the aboriginals' 'wretched hut and -equally wretched canoe were destitute of adornment? „ (These problems are curiously interwoven in the life and history of. these widely diverse races. The "detailed study of -Maori art has been laid before us in the valuable- work by Mr Augustus Hamilton, ' >but I have not ascertained that the far-scattered pictures of Che Australian have ever been gathered , into any one volume. Yet they lie here and there, with thousands of miles between, all over the continent, and notices of these rock-painted or rock-hewn figures are to be culled from many a book of travel. Eor obvious reasons these references are far more nunWous than those of New Zealand writers to the few faint cave pictures of the Maori. Some years ago I drew attention to the ., remarks of Canon Stack and Mr Hamilton on the rockpaintings of Canterbury, pointing out the curious fact that, with the exception of a few rock-facings across the 1 Waitaki at Duntroon these curious emblems are seen in no other province. And in Canterbury they are confined to Weka Pass in the north, an area of 10 or 15 miles in the basins of the Opihi and Te Ngawai Rivers, and a spot ox two far south on the Waitaki River. But the Australian etchings -and intaglios, if one may use such technical terms, extend -from one end of the continent to the other, some fair inland, some on the coast, some on islands, differing not very greatly in New South' Wales, in Western Australia, and the Northern Territory. Another point of difference from the Maori rock-paintings is seen in the greater varieties of colour found in' Australian pictures. Black, I white, and the priestly "kura," or red, ksufficed the Maori, but in at least a few I cases a vivid blue and a very distinct yelI low were used by his fellow-artist aoross- | the Taeman Sea. Moreover, the artistic sense of the latter expressed itself, if not ; in absolute sculpture, at least in bold rei lief carving, which was sometimes on rock of such hardness as to excite wonder, remembering what poor tools the aboriginals possessed. Certainly, an equal amount of patience and skill must have accompanied the carving of the Maori's greenstone tiki, but the ludicrous portrayal of the human form in conventional Maori fashion has forced his apologists out of pity to invent a religious reason for his ineptitude, or at least to bring him into line with .the ancient Semites who refused to make graven images which were so often a snare or offence^ to the monotheistic spirit — a ! refusal which found its highest sanction in the second commandment. Whether the Maori carver feared to bring the wrath j of the gods on himself or his over-faithful ' presentment is not absolutely clear ; aiKi just when the squat conventional tiki, or the hideous conventional gate-image, took final and unlovely shape no one can now tell.' One outstanding sign of the fixity of Maori' art in these rude figures was the changeless perpetuation' of the threefingered hand. Only a few weeks since, it will be remembered, a new authority in the North Island has declared that the three-finger malformation at least had no foundation in religion, but remained a lasting memorial c-f the first Maori carver of note, who was called by his ' admiring tribesmen the. Three-fingered One — a prototype in his infirmity of the armless Eog-, lish artiet, Bertram Hiles. And we Europeans can scarcely, say much on the head of Maori fidelity to custom since for four hundred years our dock* faces perpetuate the mistake of a mad king, who insisted that the Roman numeral IV should be rendered' by four strokes. The Australian carvers were singularly fond of portraying the human ihand, and with tolerable fidelity. At Carved Cave Spring, near Mount Magnet, in Western Australia, a number of hands were found to be executed on hard rock, together with feet of kangaroos and Anus.
For the aboriginal took his themes direct from Nature. Once on «. glittering ice-field ages and ages ago, Ung, « maker of pictures, fashioned an image of snow; Fashioned the form of a tribesman — gaily he whistled and sung, Working the snow wits his fingers.- Read ye the story of Ung.
And the Southern Ung, albiet in warmer material, fashioned both pictures and carvings of tribesmen, as well as of canoes, spears, kangaroos, fish, birds — everything, in fact, that came within his daily ken. In 1803 Flinders found drawings of porpoises, kangaroos, and other objects in Chastn. Island, nea* Groote Eylandt, -in the Gulf of Carpentaria. In 1821 another early explorer found' a care on Clack Island on the East Coast, with red and black drawings of sharks, turtles, and other sights of th© shone, picked out with .dots in fine white clay. George Frenoh Angaß, the accomplished amid conscientious nation-builder, to whom Australia, owes so much, look a deep an 4 intelligent interest in these forgotten memorials. The flat stones and headlands
about Port Jackeon and 1 the neighbouring bays were full of such specimens of early I art jKhoo. Angas landed in, the thirties.
But Angas did not view these symbols with an ignorant eye. Both in them and in the native words he soon picked up he discovered what he took for proofs of an Asiatic origin, nor did he heitate to find analogies between tie fragments of traditional custom yet lingering there and some of the most ancient religious ceremonies in the world. From poor old 1 Queen Gooseberry, the aged widow of the chief of the ldng-vaniehed Sydney tribe, Angae got an inkling of the orgies prevailing at old-time corroborees, which set him Pondering whether the word aad the ceremonies lad ever counted cousinship with the Coryibantic revels of old Greece. Some hint of human sacrifice was quickly suppressed by the prudent Queen Gooseberry, who rested her testimony on what she had learned from her father long befdre. One wonders, by the way, whether laiißlhilology has found aaiy likelier Persian koo, where are you? suggested by ; Angas. He discovered forgotten significances m the frequency oi -these d«me> ing human figures, and others, possibly totems, about the promontories of New South Wales, recalling how" in old Europe . promontories were peculiarly ■■sacred, -and usually: crowned with a, shrine; ■■ - But it -was a far more famous man who was, fated to «rio» the greatest tfea-sure-caves of Australian «*, also m «».- fourth decade of the last century But George Grey s discoveries on the Glenelg River m Western Australia, together with . the strange romance that has lately been linked with them, must be left to a second article. I
(To be continued.)
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Otago Witness, Issue 2812, 5 February 1908, Page 82
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1,236THE PICTURE CAVES OF AUSTRALIA. Otago Witness, Issue 2812, 5 February 1908, Page 82
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