The Aborigines9 Culture

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32210, 31 January 1970, Page 4

The Aborigines 9 Culture

Quinkan Country: Adventures in Search at Aboriginal Cave Paintings in \ Cape York. By P. J. Trezise. A. H. and A. W. Reed. 154 pp. This is a chronicle of toe ancient culture, folklore and simple living of the world’s oldest people, toe Australian Aborigines, who inhabited or passed through toe Cape York Peninsula to the north of Queensland. These are toe primitive people who have lately made their artistic mark with amazing paintings on canvas and bark. Here we have an explanation for their talent It is inherited! For in the rugged, junglecovered and desert recesses of toe York Peninsula there are hundreds of sandstone shelters and caves whose walls and ceilings are crowded with paintings ranging from gigantic to small, and strikingly coloured with red and yellow ochres and with black and white. As well as human beings, the drawings depict fish, birds and land animals. Some of them are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years old, and others were done in post-European times. Mr Trezise, a professional air pilot and a painter and photographer of no mean merit is also a dedicated anthropologist who spends his holidays on excursions into the wild places to record accurately for

history the possessions of these galleries before toe ochres of toe older paintings fade, or the modern vandals get at them. Mr Trezise believes that there are ■ probably hundreds of these spectacular galleries still to be re-discovered. They tell the story of toe Aborigines right back into that mystic Dreamtime when men and women were birds, beasts, animals and reptiles; of the terrible, bewi.aering later times when miners and graziers from overseas usurped toe territory of the indigenous people and whipped them and shot them down mercilessly; of toe sorceries that availed against toe superstitious natives but not against the invaders and their rifles. And what of toe Quinkans who give this book its title? Evil wraiths, they are. When dusk comes they ooze out from rock crevices, squeezed, like toothpaste, into thin, long shadowy creatures not to be trusted on any account The publishers have spared no pains in lavishing colour on the photographs provided by toe author. And a most spectacular job they and the printers have made of it There are no fewer than 43 coloured plates in toe book and an additional six on toe jacket; it would be a misnomer to call it a dust cover.