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Collection of Three Australian Aboriginal Drone Pipes (1800 to 1900 Australia)

Wood, pigment

Drone pipes or Didjeridu are long hollowed out wooden musical instruments which when blown emit a droning sound. They were used during ceremonial dances called ‘corroborees’ and other sacred ceremonies.
The design on the didjeridu from Arnhem Land represents a map of the artist’s country showing major watercourses, billabongs and bubbling fresh water. Aboriginal art is all about meaning. Individual carvings and painted artefacts are the products of systems of communication which create meaning by encoding relationships between things, by relating people and place to the world of land transforming Ancestral Beings. However, just as there are many different spoken aboriginal languages throughout Australia, so too there are many systems of visual communication, each with its own regional identity and characteristics.

A Collection of Three Australian Aboriginal Drone Pipes ‘Didjeridu’
a: North Eastern Arnhem Land of carved wood decorated with a design painted of red and yellow ochre and white pipe clay the remains of a band of black pitch to one end
b: Central Desert area carved with fluted undulating parallel lines by the use of a possum tooth tool coloured with red ochre
c: South Australia the hollowed out tube fashioned with an adze from a tree trunk decorated with red ochre
All with old dry and original patination
Late 19th Century

Sizes: A: 125cm long – 49¼ ins long
B: 127cm long – 50 ins long
C: 133cm long – 52¼ ins long
cf: Several examples in the National Museum of Victoria