Cromer Valley bent-line motif

Source term: bullroarer on a bent line

No local term; 'bullroarer on a bent line' is McCarthy's catalogue phrase for the motif.

On a sandstone platform in the bush above Wheeler Creek, beside a shark and a scatter of mundoe footprints, someone pecked a bent line two feet long that curls into an open oval at one end. W. D. Campbell drew the whole panel in 1899 and mentioned only a small circle in his text; the scrub has since closed over the rock, so his plan is effectively the only view of the figure anyone now has. When Frederick McCarthy catalogued the Sydney-Hawkesbury engravings in 1983 he set down two readings side by side: a bullroarer on its cord, or a penis and testicles. Nothing in the record carries an Aboriginal explanation of the motif. Its exact age is unknown; the Sydney engraving tradition is conventionally placed within roughly the last five thousand years.

representing a bullroarer on a bent line curved into an open ended oval at the other end, or it represents a penis and testicles, 2 ft long

McCarthy 1983, MANLY Group 38, as quoted in the Cromer Valley Shark site record

Particulars

Object

A pecked line figure about two feet long, a bent line curving into an open-ended oval at one end, on the same sandstone platform as the site's shark/fish and circular mundoe figures; preserved in W. D. Campbell's 1899 site plan and now reported as covered by vegetation.

Function

Not recorded.