Jealousy is capable of converting even civilized women into fiends;
all the more these bush women, who have few opportunities for
cultivating the gentler feminine qualities. Indeed, so masculine are
these women that were it not for woman's natural inferiority in
strength their tyrants might find it hard to subdue them. Bulmer
says[172] that
"as a rule both husband and wife had fearful tempers;
there was no bearing and forbearing. When they
quarrelled it was a matter of the strongest conquering,
for neither would give in."
Describing a native fight over some trifling cause Taplin says (71):
"Women were dancing about naked, casting dust in the
air, hurling obscene language at their enemies, and
encouraging their friends. It was a perfect tempest of
rage."
Roth says of the Queensland natives that the women fight like men,
with thick, heavy fighting poles, four feet long.
"One of the combatants, with her hands between her
knees, supposing that only one stick is available,
ducks her head slightly--almost in the position of a
school-boy playing leap-frog, and waits for her
adversary's blow, which she receives on the top of her
head. The attitudes are now reversed, and the one just
attacked is now the attacking party. Blow for blow is
thus alternated until one of them gives in, which is
generally the case after three or four hits. Great
animal pluck is sometimes displayed.... Should a woman
ever put up her hand or a stick, etc., to ward a blow,
she would be regarded in the light of a coward" (141).
"At Genorminston, the women coming up to join a fray
give a sort of war-whoop; they will jump up in the air,
and as their feet, a little apart, touch the ground,
they knock up the dust and sand with the fighting-pole,
etc., held between their legs, very like one's early
reminiscences in the picture-books of a witch riding a
broom-stick."
"The ferocity of the women when excited exceeds that of the men," Grey
informs us (II., 314); "they deal dreadful blows at one another," etc.
For some unexplained reason--possibly a vague sense of fair play which
in time may lead to the beginnings of gallantry--there is one
occasion, an initiation ceremonial, at which women are allowed to have
their innings while the men are dancing. On this occasion, says Roth
(176),
"each woman can exercise her right of punishing any man
who may have ill-treated, abused, or hammered her, and
for whom she may have waited months or perhaps years to
chastise; for, as each pair appear around the corner at
the entrance exposed to her view, the woman and any of
her female friends may take a fighting-pole and belabor
the particular culprit to their heart's content, the
delinquent not being allowed to retaliate in any way
whatsoever--the only occasion in the whole of her life
when the woman can take the law into her own hands
without fear or favor."