Headdresses
Elaborate headdresses are made from a variety of materials. Bucket-like and conical headdresses are manufactured from rolled-up paperbark, tied around with bush string, and painted over. Other headdresses consist of radiating sticks with feathers and down attached to their ends. All sorts of constructions are worn on the head. When they are very large, the hands are used to hold them and keep them in place.
A man from Atherton in northern Queensland wearing a parrot feather headdress, a mussel shell headband, a nose bone, a necklace with a pearl shell pendant amulet, and horizontal scars over his chest and upper abdomen. A leaf has been added to a modern leather belt for modesty. |
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Men wearing long conical headdresses, dancing with knees bent. Kimberley region, Western Australia. 1930s. |
Kimberley Bent Knee Figures wearing long conical headdresses and carrying boomerangs and feather bunches.
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Men wearing bucket-like or barrel-like headdresses, Brunette Downs, Northern Territory, 1935 Photograph courtesy of the Northern Territory Library, James S. White Collection, PH 290/77. |
Similar bucket-like or barrel-like headdresses are worn by painted Straight Part Figures in the northern Kimberley, where the headdress is known as ngumuru. |
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