Flat Rocks Ridge oval-and-line engraving

Source term: oval and line, probably a bullroarer

On a saddle of Flat Rocks ridge above the Hawkesbury, north-east of Gunderman, one gallery carries a hundred and forty-five engraved figures and forty-nine grooves worn by the sharpening of axes. Frederick McCarthy numbered every mark in 1956 and worked down the list — possum, echidna, bird track, wallaby, a boomerang thrown at a rodent — and at number 30 wrote an oval and a line running from it, probably a bullroarer. Here the instrument is shown rather than found: an outline pecked into sandstone on a ground he published as a Daruk ceremonial place.

(30) oval and line, probably a bullroarer

McCarthy 1956:53, Group 10 Series IV catalogue

Particulars

Object

Engraved sandstone motif, not an object: a small oval with a line running from it, numbered 30 in McCarthy's Fig. 11 plan of Group 10 Series IV. No measurement is given for motif 30 in particular; the group's outlines run about half an inch wide and an eighth to three-sixteenths of an inch deep. Group 10 occupies a saddle on the main ridge and holds 145 engravings and 49 axe-grinding grooves.

Function

Not recorded.