Like the other Australians, the Port Essington blacks are fond of painting themselves with red, yellow, white, and black, in different styles, considered appropriate to dancing, fighting, mourning, etc.
These people construct no huts except during the rainy season, when they put up a rude and temporary structure of bark.

Their utensils are few in number, consisting merely of fine baskets of the stems of a rush-like plant, and others of the base of the leaf of the Seaforthia palm, the latter principally used for containing water.

Formerly bark canoes were in general use, but they are now completely superseded by others, hollowed out of the trunk of a tree, which they procure ready-made from the Malays, in exchange for tortoise-shell, and in return for assistance in collecting trepang.
The aboriginal weapons are clubs and spears--of the latter the variety is very great, there being at least fourteen distinct kinds.

Their clubs are three in number, made of the tough heavy wood called wallaru, a kind of gumtree, the ironbark of New South Wales; one is cylindrical, four feet long, tapering at each extremity; the other two, of similar length, are compressed, with sharp edges--one narrow, the other about four inches in greatest width, and resembling a cricket-bat in shape.

These weapons on account of their great weight are used only at close quarters, and are never thrown like the waddy of New South Wales.