The Bullroarer Atlas

CAMPBELL1899-001 - archaeological depiction

Ellis Trig oval engraving

Australia - New South Wales - Ku-ring-gai - Cottage Point - Oceania - Sahul

Archaeological datec. 3000 BC–AD 1800Conventional Sydney Simple Figurative engraving horizon; exact motif undated and recorded by 1899.

Function not recorded Candidate only

Campbell’s 1899 Ellis Trig North plan, with the small oval identified as a possible bullroarer.
Campbell’s 1899 Ellis Trig North plan, with the small oval identified as a possible bullroarer. · Public domain Image source

Source term: oval bullroarer

No local term recorded; "oval bullroarer" is the current site record's descriptive phrase for the motif, citing McCarthy's 1983 catalogue.

On a weathered sandstone platform at Ellis Trig North, above Cottage Point in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, a small pecked oval sits beside a cluster of curved implement engravings and a marine animal pierced by a spear. W. D. Campbell surveyed and drew the whole group in 1899 for the New South Wales Geological Survey, though his plate gives the oval no caption of its own. Later cataloguing by Frederick McCarthy is cited as reading that shape as an unusual motif on this panel: an oval bullroarer, set apart from the three boomerang-like forms beside it. The engravings are all reported as very weathered and difficult to see, and no date beyond the surveyed nineteenth-century record can be put on them.

The site also has an engraving of a seal that's been pierced by a spear, and next to the boomerangs is an oval bullroarer (an unusual motif).

Current illustrated site record, hikingtheworld.blog/engravings/ellis-trig-north-cottage-point/
Object
A small pecked oval, or teardrop-shaped, engraved motif on a weathered sandstone platform, sitting immediately beside a group of three nested curved sword-club/non-returning-boomerang figures. The same panel carries a pierced marine animal (a seal, speared) and other curved implement forms. Campbell's 1899 plan draws the oval plainly but gives it no functional caption of its own; the current site record reads it as an oval bullroarer, an unusual motif on this panel.
Function
Not recorded.
Map confidence
low - Cottage Point locality anchor, Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park; the exact engraving-platform coordinate (site ID 45-6-0278) is not published here and none is sought, consistent with the atlas's handling of other Sydney Basin engraving sites (MCCARTHY1956-001, MCCARTHY1983-001).
Source location
Page references

Campbell 1899, BROKEN BAY Plate 12, fig. 2; McCarthy 1983, BROKEN BAY Group 122 (cited, not directly read)

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