Australia makes an appeal to the fancy which is all its own. When
Cortes entered Mexico, in the most romantic moment of history, it was
as if men had found their way to a new planet, so strange, so long
hidden from Europe was all that they beheld. Still they found kings,
nobles, peasants, palaces, temples, a great organised society, fauna
and flora not so very different from what they had left behind in
Spain. In Australia all was novel, and, while seeming fresh, was
inestimably old. The vegetation differs from ours; the monotonous grey
gum-trees did not resemble our varied forests, but were antique,
melancholy, featureless, like their own continent of rare hills,
infrequent streams and interminable deserts, concealing nothing within
their wastes, yet promising a secret. The birds and beasts--kangaroo,
platypus, emu--are ancient types, rough grotesques of Nature, sketching
as a child draws. The natives were a race without a history, far more
antique than Egypt, nearer the beginnings than any other people. Their
weapons are the most primitive: those of the extinct Tasmanians were
actually palaeolithic. The soil holds no pottery, the cave walls no
pictures drawn by men more advanced; the sea hides no ruined palaces;
no cities are buried in the plains; there is not a trace of
inscriptions or of agriculture. The burying places contain relics of
men perhaps even lower than the existing tribes; nothing attests the
presence in any age of men more cultivated. Perhaps myriads of years
have gone by since the Delta, or the lands beside Euphrates and Tigris
were as blank of human modification as was the whole Australian
continent.
The manners and rites of the natives were far the most archaic of all
with which we are acquainted. Temples they had none: no images of gods,
no altars of sacrifice; scarce any memorials of the dead. Their worship
at best was offered in hymns to some vague, half-forgotten deity or
First Maker of things, a god decrepit from age or all but careless of
his children. Spirits were known and feared, but scarcely defined or
described. Sympathetic magic, and perhaps a little hypnotism, were all
their science. Kings and nations they knew not; they were wanderers,
houseless and homeless. Custom was king; yet custom was tenacious,
irresistible, and as complex in minute details as the etiquette of
Spanish kings, or the ritual of the Flamens of Rome. The archaic
intricacies and taboos of the customs and regulations of marriage might
puzzle a mathematician, and may, when unravelled, explain the less
complicated prohibitions of a totemism less antique. The people
themselves in their struggle for existence had developed great
ingenuities. They had the boomerang and the weet-weet, but not the bow;
the throwing stick, but not, of course, the sword; the message stick,
but no hieroglyphs; and their art was almost purely decorative, in
geometrical patterns, not representative. They deemed themselves akin
to all nature, and called cousins with rain and smoke, with clouds and
sky, as well as with beasts and trees. They were adroit hunters,
skilled trackers, born sportsmen; they now ride well, and, for savages,
play cricket fairly. But, being invaded by the practical emigrant or
the careless convict, the natives were not studied when in their prime,
and science began to examine them almost too late. We have the works of
Sir George Grey, the too brief pamphlet of Mr. Gideon Lang, the more
learned labours of Messrs. Fison and Howitt, and the collections of Mr.
Brough Smyth. The mysteries (Bora) of the natives, the initiatory
rites, a little of the magic, a great deal of the social customs are
known to us, and we have fragments of the myths. But, till Mrs. Langloh
Parker wrote this book, we had but few of the stories which Australian
natives tell by the camp-fire or in the gum-tree shade.
These, for the most part, are KINDER MARCHEN, though they include many
aetiological myths, explanatory of the markings and habits of animals,
the origin of constellations, and so forth. They are a savage edition
of the METAMORPHOSES, and few unbiased students now doubt that the
METAMORPHOSES are a very late and very artificial version of
traditional tales as savage in origin as those of the Noongahburrah. I
have read Mrs. Parker's collection with very great interest, with
"human pleasure," merely for the story's sake. Children will find here
the Jungle Book, never before printed, of black little boys and girls.
The sympathy with, and knowledge of beast-life and bird-life are worthy
of Mr. Kipling, and the grotesque names are just what children like.
Dinewan and Goomblegubbon should take their place with Rikki Tikki and
Mr. Kipling's other delightful creatures. But there is here no Mowgli,
set apart in the jungle as a man. Man, bird, and beast are all blended
in the Australian fancy as in that of Bushmen and Red Indians. All are
of one kindred, all shade into each other; all obey the Bush Law as
they obey the Jungle Law in Mr. Kipling's fascinating stories. This
confusion, of course, is not peculiar to Australian MARCHEN; it is the
prevalent feature of our own popular tales. But the Australians "do it
more natural:" the stories are not the heritage of a traditional and
dead, but the flowers of a living and actual condition of the mind. The
stories have not the ingenious dramatic turns of our own MARCHEN. Where
there are no distinctions of wealth and rank, there can be no
CINDERELLA and no PUSS IN BOOTS. Many stories are rude aetiological
myths; they explain the habits and characteristics of the birds and
beasts, and account in a familiar way for the origin of death ("Bahloo,
the Moon, and the Daens"). The origin of fire is also accounted for in
what may almost be called a scientific way. Once discovered, it is, of
course, stolen from the original proprietors. A savage cannot believe
that the first owners of fire would give the secret away. The inventors
of the myth of Prometheus were of the same mind.
On the whole the stories, perhaps, most resemble those from the Zulu in
character, though these represent a much higher grade of civilisation.
The struggle for food and water, desperately absorbing, is the
perpetual theme, and no wonder, for the narrators dwell in a dry and
thirsty land, and till not, nor sow, nor keep any domestic animals. We
see the cunning of the savage in the devices for hunting, especially
for chasing honey bees. The Rain-magic, actually practised, is of
curious interest. In brief, we have pictures of savage life by savages,
romances which are truly realistic. We understand that condition which
Dr. Johnson did not think happy--the state from which we came, and to
which we shall probably return. "Equality," "Liberty", "Community of
Goods," all mean savagery, and even savages, if equal, are not really
free. Custom is the tyrant.
The designs are from the sketch-book of an untaught Australian native;
they were given to me some years ago by my brother, Dr. Lang, of
Corowa. The artist has a good deal of spirit in his hunting scenes; his
trees are not ill done, his emus and kangaroos are better than his men
and labras. Using ink, a pointed stick, and paper, the artist shows an
unwonted freedom of execution. Nothing like this occurs in Australian
scratches with a sharp stone on hard wood. Probably no other member of
his dying race ever illustrated a book.