Gallery Images: Daytime Shade  |  Aboriginal Camp  |  Meriam House  |  Platform Shelter  |  Stilt Shelter  |  Indigenous Shelter  |  Indigenous Shelter (two)  |  Indigenous Shelter (three)  |  Indigenous Shleter (four)  |  Indigenous Shelter (five)

Stilt Shelter

Another barrel-vaulted, stringybark roofed shelter (found in Burara country, North Central Arnhem Land) on three parallel ridge poles. This photograph illustrates the method of stepping into the two metre high platform space using a diagonally leaning pole as a ‘stairway’. A local name for this type of shelter translates as ‘table on stilts’. (Memmott)

Original Caption

"A Dormitory Six Feet above a Log Fire Roasts Sleepers but Discourages Mosquitoes. This platform, sustained by stakes, is occupied only in the wet season. In the swamps, egg hunters build beds in tree forks. They use sticks for mattresses and bark for covers." (Thomson 1948:408)

Reference

AERC Reference No: A7/6-2
Region: Top End (Arnhem Land)
Place: Burara Country, Cape Stewart, near the mouth of the Cadell River, North Central Arnhem Land.
Photographer/Artist: Donald Thomson
Date of Image: 24/3/1937

Source(s) of Image:
(i) Museum of Victoria Photographic Collection No. 1742
(ii) Thomson, D. 1949 "An Arnhem Land Adventure" in The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. CXIII, No. 3, March, p. 408.

Other collection/reference nos.: Wiseman, J. 1996 Thomson time: Arnhem Land in the 1930s: a photographic essay. Museum of Victoria and University of Melbourne, Melbourne, p. 30.

Images on these pages are only for teaching and research purposes within the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre


Images on these pages are only for teaching and research purposes within the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre