Marree Man - Work

Work

The Marree Man geoglyph depicts a man holding either a throwing stick once used to disperse small flocks of birds, or a boomerang (but see Plaque section below).

The lines of the figure were 20–30 cm deep at the time of discovery and up to 35 metres wide.

Selecting a suitable site would have required aerial photography or satellite imagery. Using a computer, the figure could have been superimposed over the photograph and adjusted to fit the geography with the corresponding latitude and longitude coordinates mapped out. Some surveying skills would have been needed to plot the outline, and then with the aid of a hand-held global positioning system stakes could have been placed every hundred metres or so.

The image is gradually eroding through natural processes, but because the climate is extremely dry and barren in the region, the image is still visible as of 2012. While there is a layer of white chalk material slightly below the red soil, the figure was not defined to this depth. This raises the question why the creators did not dig a little deeper to make the image both more visible and more permanent.

Read more about this topic:  Marree Man

Famous quotes containing the word work:

    Ours is the old, old story of every uprising race or class or order. The work of elevation must be wrought by ourselves or not at all.
    Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904)

    The truth of the thoughts that are here set forth seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved.
    Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)

    Every work of art should give utterance, or indicate, the awful blind strength and the cruelty of the creative impulse, that is why they must all have what are called errors, both of taste and style.
    Christina Stead (1902–1983)