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Description: | Painted War Shield, Djirbal Peoples, Daintree Region, North Queensland, Australia.
These beautiful kidney-shaped shields are among the best-known Aboriginal artefacts from Queensland. They acquire their shape from the large thin buttress roots of a Giant Fig tree. Selecting one root, the Djirbal carver cut it off and thinned it down to a plank. Because the root curved down into the ground, and thinned as it did so, the resulting shield takes the same form.
They were used in normal warfare in combination with spears and clubs. They were also used for fighting ceremonial duels to ward off the large and heavy wooden swords used for such fighting. The various Djirbal cultural groups resorted to ceremonial duelling when older men were in major disputes, during the initiation of young men, and when a bridegroom went to collect his future wife from her family. In each situation, a man’s shield embodied powerful protective forces through its decoration.
Mineral pigments and charcoal were powdered and mixed with the artist’s own blood, to make the paint. The designs found on Djirbal shields have not been extensively studied, but those which have been identified are the totemic animals of particular clans, as well as boomerangs, carrying bags and important places (‘Dreaming Sites’) in the traditional lands of the Djirbal peoples. It is likely that such an iconography invoked ancestral beings and places of power in battle.
Wood, pigment. Early 20th Century. Purchased from Staplegate Antiques, Canterbury in 1961.
Kidney shaped shield with a circular central boss on the face and a handle dug out from the body of the shield in the back. The hole is caved in one piece from the buttress root of a strangler fig tree. The surface is painted with an asymmetrical pattern of white curvilinear zig zags outlined in black against a pale yellow background. The side and back of the shield demonstrate evidence of use in fire starting.
caption: General view of object no. 12.3.61/1.
caption: Detail view of object no. 12.3.61/1. | Publisher: | http://www.horniman.ac.uk/ | Rights holder: | Horniman Museum and Gardens | Subjects: | mineral pigment giant fig wood Djirbal shields (weapons: accessories) War- and Peace-making | Source: | Horniman Museum | Identifier: | oai:oai.horniman.ac.uk:object-57621 | Go to resource |
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