Hand Carved Boabs

Traditionally boabs were a food source, the white compounded powdery substance contained in the nut, tastes dry and a bit like sherbet. This was ground up to bake a type of bread or eaten raw having been dipped in water and honey. Although the powder forms a solid matter around the inside seed, when dried if shaken they make a dull 'maraca' sound and the seed
takes approximately 9 months to dry completely.

The boab is harvested, dried and sanded with shark skin, rock or sand to remove its fur like covering, leaving only the hard shell which was then carved with intricate geometric body designs and used as a shaker during ceremony and dance. As the seed takes nine months to break up they were also collected and carved with a woman's totem ancestors when she
became pregnant. The decorating by painting or engraving of boab nuts, is as an art form unique to the Kimberley. In 1897 the biologist Saville-Kent noted that boab nuts were engraved with rectangular designs similar to those found on wooden and pearl shell artifacts from the region. Basedow describes carved boab nuts from the Kimberley which were carved with designs in what Kim Akerman has called the traditional figurative style. Presumably these were observed or collected during Basedow's 1916 expedition to the Kimberley. Basedow also recorded in detail the carving technique used to decorate the nuts. 'The method they have adopted is to hold the nut firmly in the left hand and work the designs into the dark, outer layer of the shell with the sharp point of a bone or, as is the case now days, with the point of a piece of iron wire or of a pocket knife by applying semi-rotary movements with the hand,the point is made to plough forwards, and by so doing the thin, brown surface-skin is broken and falls away, leaving a light, and slightly jagged, line upon a dark background'. This tremolo action is still extensively practiced today by boab nut artists who also now use many techniques found in emu egg carving to develop subtle changes in hue and to permit more pictorialimages that include perspective and shading when

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