Western Australia

The decorative art of Western Australia is confined mainly to incising on the weapons, ceremonial boards and bull-roarers, pearl-shell phallocrypts, and baobab nuts. Pecked designs occur on some of the ceremonial boards and message sticks.    The excellence of the work as a whole is comparable with that on the weapons of eastern Australia. Although the zigzag is an outstanding motive, the designs built around it combine a wide range of ideas and form another remarkable Australian example of the variation of patterns in which only a few basic elements are embodied. In other words, these designs illustrate well the artistic sense of the aboriginal artist. The finest examples are carved on a hard and dark reddish-brown wood of close grain.

A representative range of the variations in the use of the zigzag and other motifs is illustrated below. There is the plain zigzag, in low relief or incuse, set in a field of longitudinal flutings, a broad zigzag with flutings incised at a sharp angle to those in the field, or a series of parallel zigzags in which only portions of the outer ones are shown. The designs are defined by groups of flutings at angles to one another so that different patterns appear according to the way in which the object is viewed, and they are further outlined by rows of small punctures. The herringbone is a favored variation, whilst sets of rectangular, lozenge and triangular flutings are arranged in rows, and are not infrequently introduced to break the monotony of the zigzag. As a rule, the whole surface is utilized as a field, but it is occasionally divided into a series of panels.