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Anyone who will look through a collection of Australian weapons and
utensils will be brought to this conclusion. The shields and the clubs
are elaborately worked, but almost always without any representation of
plants, animals, or the human figure. As a rule the decorations take the
simple shape of the 'herring-bone' pattern, or such other patterns as can
be produced without the aid of spirals, or curves, or circles. There is
a natural and necessary cause of this choice of decoration. The
Australians, working on hard wood, with tools made of flint, or broken
glass, or sharp shell, cannot easily produce any curved lines. Everyone
who, when a boy, carved his name on the bark of a tree, remembers the
difficulty he had with S and G, while he got on easily with letters like
M and A, which consist of straight or inclined lines. The savage artist
has the same difficulty with his rude tools in producing anything like
satisfactory curves or spirals. We engrave above (Fig. 1) a shield on
which an Australian has succeeded, with obvious difficulty, in producing
concentric ovals of irregular shape. It may be that the artist would
have produced perfect circles if he could. His failure is exactly like
that of a youthful carver of inscriptions coming to grief over his G's
and S's. Here, however (Fig. 2), we have three shields which, like the
ancient Celtic pipkin (the tallest of the three figures in Fig. 3), show
the earliest known form of savage decorative art--the forms which survive
under the names of 'chevron' and 'herring-bone.' These can be scratched
on clay with the nails, or a sharp stick, and this primeval way of
decorating pottery made without the wheel survives, with other relics of
savage art, in the western isles of Scotland. The Australian had not
even learned to make rude clay pipkins, but he decorated his shields as
the old Celts and modern old Scotch women decorated their clay pots, with
the herring-bone arrangement of incised lines. In the matter of colour
the Australians prefer white clay and red ochre, which they rub into the
chinks in the woodwork of their shields. When they are determined on an
ambush, they paint themselves all over with white, justly conceiving that
their sudden apparition in this guise will strike terror into the boldest
hearts. But arrangements in black and white of this sort scarcely
deserve the name of even rudimentary art.

[Fig. 2. Shields: 280.jpg]

[Fig. 3. Savag