The dilly bag, one of the dreamings (or, Aboriginal Art), is a very common type of traditional Aborigine bag usually woven from pandanus fibre. Its primary function is in collecting food but it can be used to carry anything. It can be worn around the neck when swimming and diving to collect waterlily roots and stalks, clams, turtles and fish. They are also used to collect fish after poisoning a waterhole.
Dillybags are also used as a strainer, such as when process yam pulp. Also, when making fish poison, leaves are put in a dillybag and the bag is rubbed in the water to get the soap out. This is done with the leaves of the fish poison tree, or the soapy tree, and freshwater mangrove.
Dilly bags are sometimes painted with ochre or with a yellow dye made from the roots of the dye tree.
(note: I'm sure in the Aboriginal Tongues, the names of the trees were quite beautiful and more interesting. Unfortunately there are over 400 indigenous languages to Australia and only about 40 of the languages survive, and so there's really no one name for the tree except it's rude translation, and it's latin equivolent. Though, doubtless the aborigines each had their own names for the various trees.)
There are three types of Dilly bag: The Fine-Weave Bag, the Loop-Weave Bag,
and the Net Bag. All three consist of four major parts: Ass (I'm not kidding), Handle, Mouth, Rim. This is probably the source for the saying "...ass-end of a dilly bag". |
