Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Private collection, Sydney

RELATED WORK
Maker Unknown, Throwing Stick, South Tully River, Cape York Region, Queensland in the collection of the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, Brisbane [registration no. 4544 (illus. online)]

This boomerang is a very rare and fine example of a fighting boomerang from the southern districts of the rainforest region of northeast Queensland. It most likely dates from the late nineteenth century, and at least one comparable example collected at Murray Upper is to be found in a public collection in Australia. Walter E. Roth, the Protector of Aborigines in north Queensland in the 1890s and 1900s, noted that combatants in the Lower Tully River area would strike the ground with the boomerang in order to commence battle.

In the North Queensland Ethnography bulletin Roth illustrates how sections were removed ' from a flange on the butt of a tree' to make these boomerangs.1 Milkwood (Alstonia sp.) was commonly used for these, the outer surface painted with distinctive patterning more commonly associated with the kidney-shaped rainforest shields made from sections removed from the buttress roots of large rainforest trees. The main pigments used were tree sap or animal blood for black, pipe clay for white, and ochres ranging from pale yellow to dark red.

From the 1870s onwards, the remote valleys behind Tully were a prime focus for mining and other ventures, and soon after, botanists, ornithologists, ethnographers and photographers ventured into the region, many trading with Aboriginal people for artefacts. Large numbers of the painted shields and the other distinctive form, the bi-cornual baskets were keenly collected, Roth noting this trade being unlike that of 'the old days... as little bartering continued between Aboriginal groups of the region'.

Lindy Allen

1. Walter E. Roth, North Queensland Ethnography, Australian Museum, Sydney, bulletin no.13, 1909, pl. LIX