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CHILDREN OF WILD AUSTRALIA
[Illustration: BOY SPEARING FISH]
CHILDREN OF WILD AUSTRALIA
BY
HERBERT PITTS
AUTHOR OF
"THE AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH"
[Illustration: Decoration]
WITH EIGHT COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
OLIPHANT, ANDERSON & FERRIER
PRINTED BY
TURNBULL AND SPEARS,
EDINBURGH
TO
DEAR LITTLE MARY
THIS LITTLE BOOK
ABOUT
THE LITTLE BLACK BOYS AND GIRLS
OF A FAR-OFF LAND
IS DEDICATED BY
HER FATHER
MY DEAR BOYS AND GIRLS,
All the time I have been writing this little book I have been wishing I
could gather you all around me and take you with me to some of the
places in faraway Australia where I myself have seen the little black
children at their play. You would understand so much better all I have
tried to say.
It is a bright sunny land where those children live, but in many ways a
far less pleasant land to live in than our own. The country often grows
very parched and bare, the grass dies, the rivers begin to dry up, and
the poor little children of the wilderness have great difficulty in
getting food. Then perhaps a great storm comes and a great quantity of
rain falls. The rivers fill up and the grass begins to grow again, but
myriads of flies follow and they get into the children's eyes and
perhaps blind some of them, and the mosquitoes come and bite them and
give them fevers sometimes.
Yet though much of the land is wilderness--bare, sandy plains--beautiful
flowers bloom there after the rains. Lovely hibiscus, the giant scarlet
pea, and thousands of delicate white and yellow everlastings are there
for the eyes to feast upon, but the loveliest flowers of all are
frequently the love and tenderness and unselfishness which bloom in the
children's hearts.
I have left Australia now and settled down again in the old homeland,
but the memories of the eight years I spent among the dear little
children out there are still very delightful ones, and they, more than
anything I have read, have helped me to write this little book for you.
Your Sincere friend,
HERBERT PITTS
DOUGLAS, I.O.M., 1914
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTORY LETTER 7
I. INTRODUCTORY 11
II. PICCANINNIES 17
III. "GREAT-GREAT-GREATEST-GRANDFATHER" 23
IV. BLACKFELLOWS' "HOMES" 26
V. EDUCATION 31
VI. WEAPONS, ETC., WHICH CHILDREN LEARN TO
MAKE AND USE 35
VII. HOW FOOD IS CAUGHT AND COOKED 40
VIII. CORROBBOREES, OR NATIVE DANCES 44
IX. MAGIC AND SORCERY 47
X. SOME STRANGE WAYS OF DISPOSING OF THE DEAD 56
XI. SOME STORIES WHICH ARE TOLD TO CHILDREN 60
XII. MORE STORIES TOLD TO CHILDREN 65
XIII. RELIGION 68
XIV. YARRABAH 72
XV. TRUBANAMAN CREEK 79
XVI. SOME ABORIGINAL SAINTS AND HEROES 85
XVII. THE CHOCOLATE BOX 89
ILLUSTRATIONS
BOY SPEARING FISH _Frontispiece_
PAGE
HUNTING PARROTS AND COCKATOOS 12
ABORIGINAL CHILDREN AND NATIVE HUT 28
LEARNING TO USE THE BOOMERANG 42
YOUTH IN WAR PAINT 52
GIRLS' CLASS AT YARRABAH SCHOOL 73
BATHING OFF JETTY AT YARRABAH 78
THE FIRST SCHOOL AT MITCHELL RIVER 84
CHILDREN OF WILD AUSTRALIA
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
This little book is all about the children of wild Australia--where they
came from, how they live, the weapons they fight with, their strange
ideas and peculiar customs. But first of all you ought to know something
of the country in which they live, whence and how they first came to it,
and what we mean by "wild Australia" to-day, for it is not all
"wild"--very, very far from that.
Australia is a very big country, nearly as large again as India, and no
less than sixty times the size of England without Wales. Nearly half of
it lies within the tropics so that in summer it is extremely hot. There
are fewer white people than there are in London, in fact less than five
millions in all and more than a third of these live in the five big
cities which you will find around the coast, and about a third more in
smaller towns not so very far from the sea. The further you travel from
the coast the more scattered does the white population become, till some
hundred miles inland or more you reach the sheep and cattle country
where the homes of the white men are twenty or even more miles apart.
Further back still lies a vast, and, as far as whites are concerned,
almost unpeopled region into which, however, the squatter is constantly
pushing in search of new pastures for his flocks and herds, and into
which the prospector goes further and further on the look-out for gold.
This country we call in Australia "the Never-Never Land," and it is this
which is wild Australia to-day. It lies mostly in the North and runs
right up to the great central desert. It is there that the aboriginals,
or black people, are found. The actual number of these black people
cannot be exactly ascertained, but there are probably not more than
100,000 of them left to-day.
Much of wild Australia is made up of vast treeless plains and huge
tracts of spinifex (a coarse native grass) and sand. Sometimes in the
North-west one travels miles and miles without seeing a tree except on
the river banks, but in Queensland there is sometimes dense and almost
impenetrable jungle, and mighty, towering trees, with many beautiful
flowering shrubs. All alike is called "bush," which is the general term
in Australia for all that is not town.
The animals of wild Australia are most interesting and numerous. Several
kinds of kangaroo (from the giant "old man," five feet or more in
height, to the tiny little kangaroo mice no larger than our own mice at
home), make their home there, and emus may often be seen running across
the plains. Gorgeous parrots and many varieties of cockatoos are found
in great numbers, snakes are numerous, whilst the rivers and water-holes
teem with fish. Wild dogs, or dingos, too, are very numerous.
[Illustration: HUNTING PARROTS AND COCKATOOS]
For hundreds and hundreds of years the aborigines had this vast country
to themselves, for though Spaniards, like Torres and De Quiros, and
Dutchmen, like Tasman and Dirk Hartog, had visited their shores, and an
Englishman named William Dampier had even landed in the North West in
1688, it was not till exactly a hundred years afterwards that white men
first came to make their homes in their land.
The aborigines are a Dravidian people, and, some think, of the same
parent stock as ourselves. Thousands of years ago, long, long before our
remote ancestors had learned how to build houses, make pottery, till the
soil, or domesticate any animal except the dog--long years, in fact,
before history began, the aboriginals left their primitive home on the
hills of the Deccan and drifting southward in their bark canoes landed
at last on the northern and western shores of the great island
continent. There they found an earlier people with darker skins than
their own and curly hair, very much like the Papuans and Melanesians of
to-day, and they drove them further and further southwards before them
just as our own English forefathers, coming to this land, drove an
earlier people before them into the mountain fastnesses of Wales and
Cumberland and into Cornwall. Some time afterwards came a series of
earthquakes and other disturbances which cut Tasmania away from the
mainland, and there till 1878 that early Papuan people survived.
As the blacks grew more numerous they began to form tribes, and to
divide the country up among themselves. Thus each tribe had its own
hunting-ground to which it must keep and on which no other tribe must
come and settle. But at length the white men came and they recognized no
such law. They settled down and began to build their own homes upon the
black men's hunting-grounds and to bring in their sheep and cattle and
turn them loose on the plains. The blacks did not at all like the white
man's coming, and sometimes did all they could to prevent their settling
down. They speared their sheep and cattle for food, they burned down
their houses, they threw their spears at the men themselves, and did all
they could to drive them back to sea. Sometimes hundreds of them would
surround a new settler's home, and murder all the whites they could see.
We must not blame the blacks. They were only doing what we should do
ourselves if some invader came and settled in our country and tried to
drive us back. But the white men were not to be driven back. They armed
themselves and made open war upon the black people and I am afraid did
many things of which we are all now thoroughly ashamed. For a few years
the struggle between the two races went on and at length the blacks had
to own themselves beaten, and so Australia passed into the white man's
hands.
The blacks to-day may be divided into three classes:--
1. The _Mialls_, or wild blacks, still living their own natural life in
their great hunting-grounds in the North, just as they lived before the
white men came. It is chiefly about these that this little book will
tell.
2. The _station-blacks_, living on the sheep and cattle stations and
helping the squatters on their "runs." They are fed and clothed in
return for their work, and are given a new blanket every year. The men
and boys ride about the run looking after the sheep, bring them in at
shearing time and help with the shearing. The women and girls learn to
do housework and make themselves useful in many ways. They seem very
happy and comfortable and are usually well treated and well cared for by
their masters. Once or twice a year, perhaps, they are given a
"pink-eye," or holiday, and then away they go into the wild bush with
their boomerangs and their spears, or perhaps visit some neighbouring
camp further up or down the river's bank. Their houses are just
"humpies," made of a few boughs, plastered over with clay or mud, with
perhaps a piece or two of corrugated iron put up on the weather side. In
this class, too, we ought to include those blacks, some hundreds, alas!
in number, who spend their time "loafing about" the mining camps and
the coastal towns of the North, living as best they can, guilty often of
crime, learning to drink, and swear, and gamble, and often making
themselves a thorough nuisance to all around. More wretched, degraded
beings it would not be possible to see--such a contrast to the fine,
manly wild-blacks. The pity and the shame of it all is that it is the
white man who has made them what they are.
3. The _mission-blacks_, that is the blacks on the mission stations such
as Yarrabah, Mitchell River, and Beagle Bay. These will have some
chapters to themselves later on and you will, I hope, be much interested
in them. There are not very many of them, perhaps not more than six or
seven hundred in all, but new mission stations are being started and so
we may well hope that their number will soon increase. There are some
splendid Christians among them, some of them quite an example to
ourselves. Of those you shall hear more fully by and by.
As you read this little book your heart will be stirred sometimes with
strange feelings that you cannot quite understand. Those strange
feelings will be nothing less than the expression of your own
brotherhood with them. Their skins may be "black" (though they are not
really black at all), and their lives may be wild; but they have human
hearts beating within them just as we have, and immortal souls, like
ours, for which Christ died. Never forget this as you are reading. It is
so easy to forget--to claim brotherhood with those who are wiser and
greater than ourselves, and to forget that just that same brotherhood
unites us one by one with the countless thousands who make up what we
call the wild and primitive peoples of the world.