Volume 03 Item 03: Walter Edmund Roth Bulletin No. 13 Fighting Weapons, 1904-1906 - Page 31

                                                                                              17A

21. Throughout the Peninsula no indiginous shields are is to be met, the place of the weapon being taken by the broad-bladed spear-thrower which in the hands of a skilful fighter can brush to the right or left, as the case may be, any spear that may be thrown at him.  On the Gulf Coast-line, the northernmost limit of the shield would appear to be the Mitchell River, where the weapon is more or less identical with the Normanton and the N[orth] W[est] District pattern in that it is made from a split timber and then subsequently trimmed down into shape. The N[orth] W[est] types I have already described*. The Normanton District shields are usually decorated with red and white bands. [a typical example measures three feet three & a half inches in length by one foot in width. It is a large & proportionately very elongate oval shield, not unlike a drawnout "Goolmarry" & con cavo - convex - convex externally, slightly concave on the inner face, becoming flatter towards the apices, which are obtusely rounded; the lateral margins are parallel in the central region & slightly converging at the ends. Both surfaces are raddled, the outer decorated with three pipe-clay & four dark-red narrow transverse bands at the centre, with a pipe-clay pannel occupying the whole of each pannel apex. The handle, or holdfast, on the inside is of the usual ordinary pattern, but rather larger than usual]