The Tingle Factor Box

I Wonder How Often They Broke? Carved Emu Egg

 

Imagine, you have spent days working on a beautiful carving. You have carefully moved and crafted the piece, ensuring that you don't press too hard at any time - after all, you don't want to press too hard and risk snapping a piece off. You work carefully on the intricate details of people, plants and animals. All this, just to carve a piece of wood - imagine the skill needed to successfully carve an Emu Egg!

 

When I took this intricately carved Emu Egg, a gift to my Great Aunt from an Aboriginal stockman in Bourke, to show the children their immediate reaction was 'I wonder how many it took before they managed to not break one'. Some had never seen an Emu Egg before, carved or otherwise and were amazed by the size (one thought that being an egg laying Emu must be quite painful!). One Emu egg can have as much egg in it as 8-12 chicken eggs. They were also amazed by the idea that they could possibly be strong enough to carve without breaking. Certainly, the artist must be extremely careful in their work, in case hours of effort is lost through breakage.

Kalti Paarti, or Emu Egg carving is a highly skilled art which became popular in the mid 19th century and is kept alive today as part of the living Aboriginal culture. It is an intricate process, which first involves collecting or buying the eggs. Emu's are now protected under Australian law, so artists must have a license. Next, the eggshell must be pierced and the 'egg-inards' as one child called them, have to be removed. This can be done through egg blowing, though I have been told that traditionally, it can also be done by piercing the egg and leaving ants and other insects to clean it. If you can verify this, I would love to know!

Next, the egg is carved. Emu eggs are a very dark greeny blue, almost black and, as the egg is carved, lighter colours, right through to white can be revealed. By using these differing colours, all occuring within the shell, the image can be made '3-D'. There are two main 'schools' of carving. Paakantji artists, from Western New South Wales tend to produce scenes which move around the egg, like the one I showed the children. Wiradjuri artists tend to create more of a cameo effect, carving a scene or item within a specific area of the egg. 

Imagine, you have spent days working on a beautiful carving. You have carefully moved and crafted the piece, ensuring that you don't press too hard at any time - after all, you don't want to press too hard and risk snapping a piece off. You work carefully on the intricate details of people, plants and animals. All this, just to carve a piece of wood - imagine the skill needed to successfully carve an Emu Egg!

 

When I took this intricately carved Emu Egg, a gift to my Great Aunt from an Aboriginal stockman in Bourke, to show the children their immediate reaction was 'I wonder how many it took before they managed to not break one'. Some had never seen an Emu Egg before, carved or otherwise and were amazed by the size (one thought that being an egg laying Emu must be quite painful!). One Emu egg can have as much egg in it as 8-12 chicken eggs. They were also amazed by the idea that they could possibly be strong enough to carve without breaking. Certainly, the artist must be extremely careful in their work, in case hours of effort is lost through breakage.

Kalti Paarti, or Emu Egg carving is a highly skilled art which became popular in the mid 19th century and is kept alive today as part of the living Aboriginal culture. It is an intricate process, which first involves collecting or buying the eggs. Emu's are now protected under Australian law, so artists must have a license. Next, the eggshell must be pierced and the 'egg-inards' as one child called them, have to be removed. This can be done through egg blowing, though I have been told that traditionally, it can also be done by piercing the egg and leaving ants and other insects to clean it. If you can verify this, I would love to know!

Next, the egg is carved. Emu eggs are a very dark greeny blue, almost black and, as the egg is carved, lighter colours, right through to white can be revealed. By using these differing colours, all occuring within the shell, the image can be made '3-D'. There are two main 'schools' of carving. Paakantji artists, from Western New South Wales tend to produce scenes which move around the egg, like the one I showed the children. Wiradjuri artists tend to create more of a cameo effect, carving a scene or item within a specific area of the egg. 

It's So Small! Lilliput Aboriginal Words Of Australia

Imagine you are a little girl, and you have just won a prize for doing excellent work at school in music. You are quite excited, because as part of your prize, you received a tiny parcel. You wonder what could be inside – a tiny musical instrument, or perhaps a little medal. When you unwrap it, you are a little surprised to discover an Aboriginal Language Book, but rather taken with it none the less – it is so small, and full of interesting new words to learn.

When I showed the children this little book, ‘Lilliput Aboriginal Words of Australia’, they were amazed by it. They had seen tiny books, but are used to such books being fiction, or tiny storybooks. To see what, in their minds, amounted to a dictionary in such a small form was simply amazing. They were also intrigued by the words contained within, and searched to see if there were any words which they thought might be particularly interesting.

Today, as many are well aware, Aboriginal languages are, sadly, in decline in Australia, yet what many may not realise is that Australian English is scattered with Aboriginal words, or words which are descended from Indigenous languages. In fact, one of the greatest and most important influences on what is now recognised as a special and unique Australian English language has been the influence of varied Aboriginal languages. Some words adopted into the English vernacular even predate European colonisation - the word Kangaroo was recorded in the logbooks of both Captain Cook and Joseph Banks.

Yet it was those who arrived on the First Fleet who really began the process of adopting local words into what we now know as the Australian variant of the English language . When the First Fleet arrived, there were approximately 250 distinct Aboriginal languages and within 100 years of colonisation, it is estimated that approximately 400 words were ‘borrowed’ from 80 different languages. Many of these words were adapted from the Dharuk language and its dialects, which were spoken in the Sydney area, but as further exploration and colonisation occurred, new languages were encountered, with new words to adopt. Many of these words were associated with flora and fauna, with many of our plants and animals known by their Aboriginal names – even the word bindi-eye descends from the Kamilaroi and Yuwaalarraay languages! Yet there are others which are associated with the distinct ‘Aussie slang’, such as Yakka which was first recorded (and borrowed) from the Yagara language of the Brisbane area in 1847.

Wonder how many broke? - Carved Emu Egg

Imagine, you have spent days working on a beautiful carving. You have carefully moved and crafted the piece, ensuring that you don't press too hard at any time - after all, you don't want to press too hard and risk snapping a piece off. You work carefully on the intricate details of people, plants and animals. All this, just to carve a piece of wood - imagine the skill needed to successfully carve an Emu Egg!