Weapons
The weapons, especially when used in ceremonies and gift-exchange, are painted with designs of ritual significance. The spatulate fish-tailed clubs bear attractive patterns on the blade. The Kopapinga specimens from Milingimbi have two sets of slanting panels in which there are bands of red, white and black outlined with different colored dots, or the panels are filled with dots or cross-hatched lines, and sometimes a totem species is incorporated in the design. Some of the panels are in the form of transverse zigzags. Crescentic and hour-glass figures combined with chevrons appear on the Kakadu specimens from western Arnhem Land. On the Groote Eylandt paddles the field is subdivided into panels infilled with floral motifs, diagonal, crossed, broken lines and dots. The surfaces of the cone-shaped proximal end of the Groote Eylandt spear-thrower are covered with similar motifs and on the shafts of spear-throwers throughout Arnhem Land totemic designs are painted for special purposes. Simple line designs decorate the spatulate and barbed spear-heads. Shields, which offer the greatest scope for decoration, are not used in Arnhem Land.
Twined Baskets
Men's baskets for carrying sacred objects, string, and implements, and the women's for gathering food, bear designs with mythological meanings. The closely-twined type is made out of pandanus leaf and the open style from water-lily fiber. These baskets are tubular in shape, and one variety has a well-defined neck. The designs are painted on them in well denned bands of red, yellow, black and white, in panels bearing crosses or sets of crescentic lines or in multi-colored diamond patterns. Figures of ancestral beings, animated stick people (in western Arnhem Land), and of various animals are introduced into the panels, which may be outlined by overstitching with pandanus fiber, human hair or possum fur twine. The designs are further embellished on the men's baskets, which are of great ritual and exchange value, with red parrakeet feathers which may form a complete design, and with pendants of parrakeet feathers.
Pipes
On the reddened surface of the elongate, thin cylindrical pipes, introduced long ago by Indonesian visitors, are incised a wide range of complex geometric designs. The sacred patterns are covered with paperbark or cloth when used in the camp, but some of the pipes are so sacred that their use is confined to the ceremonial grounds.
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