THE BLACK SWAN IS AUSTRALIA’S NATIVE born possession, and, through Juvenal a “Rara Avis,” points to a very early discovery of our great island continent. So do the painted and rock-engraved drawings depicted in “Aboriginal Art in Australia”—a paper read before the Victoria Institute, and published afterwards as a pamphlet with illustrations, by the late much-respected and lamented Right Rev. Samuel Thornton, D.D., our first Bishop of Ballarrat, 1875-1900.

This pamphlet portrays, in almost diary form, tree, stick, and stone palimpsests of the aboriginals themselves, which give a record of sundry Syro-Phoenician, Egyptian, Arabian, and Jewish wanderers, who landed prehistorically at Port Darwin, in the N.W. corner of Australia. It is known that about 30 of these strange people passed through the middle part of our island, continent to Memory Cove, South Australia, one man with a sword. As some of them are drawn without feet or hands, it is clear that they were lost and helpless, for the blacks always draw their own feet and hands in full; they know the footmark of every living thing belonging to their own country. They can name each separate unshod horse, on an unfenced run in a wild country, by the marks of its hoofs alone, but have been known to “Robinson Crusoe” at a camel-pad, on seeing it for the first time! Any new human footmark would be strange and fearsome to them. They can tell their relations and every member of their own tribe by their footmarks, the same as policeman can trace a criminal by his fingerprints; so they would naturally be impressed by the feet or hands of any strange people, as well by the footgear, leather soles, grass slippers or sandals of those remarkable adventurers who came coasting or trading from the Persian Gulf, by Ceylon, and down the Malayan Peninsula from Singapore, and on to Timor, by such large islands as Borneo, Sumatra, and Java.

Landing in our Northern Territory at Port Darwin, in Arab dhows, and being attacked by the pristine aboriginals of Australia, this mixed concourse of people, not indigenous to the country, must have been reduced to threadbare garments, even to the tappa matting represented as a proof their misfortunes and bareness. In an appeal and recognition of an at-one-ment with the Divinity figures represented as shoring in their troubles, the solitary representation is more than likely to mean Christ himself, emblematically transcribed as being without a mouth—the unseen voice which speaks to all nations in their own language.

Four women, in the same representation, facing the Divinity figure, are also mouthless—being probably intended for Mary the Mother of God, Martha cumbered with many household cares, Mary the Mother of James the Less and Joses, and Mary Magdalene.

The musical staff, the bows and arrows and seven-branched candlesticks in another rock drawing, suggest a highly cultivated people, and it is an interesting fact in regard to the Arab dhows that these early travellers must have used, that the fishing boats of Mauritius are built on the same lines to this very day because of their wonderful sea-going qualities.

Besides the numerous paintings in the caves and on the rocks by these strange people, a carved Greek face from the Isles of “burning Sappho” and a block drawing of a young man in a Phrygian cap in close proximity to a footless woman and an alligator—the mythical “Bunyip” of that part of the country—plainly show the nationality of some of these adventurers, which include a turreted-hatted Jew and the head-dressing of Egyptian women of that period, besides the curious taches and tassels they used to adorn their hair and bodies—a fact not generally noticed.

I am indebted to Miss Bothwell Gosse’s “Egypt by the Eye” for the discovery of the curious taches and tassels mentioned above as habitually worn by the athletic Egyptian women, of that lost expedition, and depicted in the blacks’ drawings as being on the neck, wrists, waists, and knee-joints of the females of this ill-fated prehistoric expedition.

The Egyptian faith in the Ka, Khu, Khaibit or Ba—(Baiame?) is in the Khaibit itself—the Egyptian Shadow Soul, left from the Egyptians of that lost company to the Australian aboriginals in Koi itself. Take it as you will, Koi, the Australian Soul Shadow, is a belief, authentic, genuine, and, no doubt, efficacious to its human subject in every line of its office. Koi, the shadow which accompanies every aboriginal in the sunny daylight, the thing he can’t get rid of—the “Thing Without Any Bones,” as the blacks themselves call it—which goes away in sleep, sickness, or death, to wander in other places.

The aboriginal belief is that after death the Koi keeps in the near vicinity of its place of sepulture, just as the Egyptian Kaibit does. The spirit comes back and taps on the trees, to inform its relations and those who knew it before in daily intercourse that it is still alive. Our Northern natives also mummify their dead, with the native papyrus paper bark.