Drawings of Aboriginal carvings at Point Piper, 1845 | State Library of New South Wales

Drawings of Aboriginal carvings at Point Piper, 1845
by W. A. Miles (1798-1851).
Ink and wash
From Miscellaneous papers relating to Aborigines, c. 1839-1871.
Ref: A 610, pp. 199, 201, 207, 209

Drawings of Aboriginal carvings at Point Piper

In July 1845 the travelling artist George French Angas (1822-1886) and Sydney Police Inspector W. Augustus Miles (1798-1851), an amateur anthropologist, persuaded King Bungaree's widow, Cora Gooseberry, who was camped by the creek at Camp Cove, to show them Aboriginal engravings at North Head. In return she received flour and tobacco. Miles copied the designs at South and Middle Heads, while Angas's drawings were reproduced in his Savage Life and Scenes, London, 1847. At Point Piper, the two artists copied dozens of engravings of male figures, shields, whales, fish and kangaroos, now destroyed.