Sculptures

In north-eastern Arnhem Land both full sculptures and heads are made of ancestral beings and various animals. The anthropomorphs vary greatly within the local style, which is stiff and straight-bodied, with short arms, a flat horizontal shoulder line, and poorly shaped legs. No fingers or toes are shown as a rule. The neck is well defined, and the head on the majority of them has the well-known hatchet-face with a straight but angled lower jaw line, a sculptural type distributed throughout Indonesia and Melanesia. The eyes are either circular or oval grooves or pits, and the mouth is a narrow reversed crescentic or angled slit. The top of the head is often flat.   The body is a flat or convex-sided prism as a rule but is rounded in some of the figures, and hair may be added with bark-fiber. All are brightly decorated with a combination of incised grooves and painting or by the latter method only. When a figure is carved it is painted red to signify a spirit being in human form, and then with a design which identifies it as an ancestral being. These figures are kept in a sacred store-house. In 1938 the Australian Museum received from the Rev. W. S. Chaseling, a mortuary post with a human head carved at the top, but R. & C. Berndt unearthed the rich mythology and plastic art of this area in 1947; they believe that it was introduced at some early date from Indonesia. Wooden sculptures of human beings and animals are also made and used in Cape York, where they were introduced as part of hero-cult rituals from Torres Strait.

In north-eastern Arnhem Land, also, models of the Baijini proa's anchor are made by the Jiritja moiety and of the seagull and other birds' heads by the Dua moiety for love-magic purposes.

Another technique of plastic art employed was that of modeling crudely fashioned kangaroos, turtles, goannas, crocodiles, and birds in beeswax. The most important of them are human figures up to 8 inches long, which may be covered with feather-down; they are made to represent a man or a woman whose death is to be brought about by sorcery.