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.  Savage Ornamentation:  282.jpg]

The Australians sometimes introduce crude decorative attempts at designing the human figure, as in the pointed shield opposite (Fig. 2, a), which, with the other Australian designs, are from Mr. Brough Smyth’s ‘Aborigines of Victoria.’  But these ambitious efforts usually end in failure.  Though the Australians chiefly confine themselves to decorative art, there are numbers of wall-paintings, so to speak, in the caves of the country which prove that they, like the Bushmen, could design the human figure in