BLACKFELLOWS' "HOMES"
One of the first things of which a little child takes notice is its
home. The pictures on the wall, the pretty things all around, the
flowers in the garden are a source of ever-increasing delight to its
growing consciousness. The older it grows the more it comes to know and
love its home. Some of those who read this book will, perhaps, have very
beautiful homes richly decked with all that art and money can supply,
others will have smaller and plainer ones, but the children of wild
Australia have scarcely anything that can be called a home at all.
A blackfellows' camp will consist of a number of the plainest and rudest
huts that one can either imagine or describe. Sometimes there is not
even a hut, but they live entirely in the open air on the bank of some
creek or stream with merely a breakwind of boughs to keep off the wind
and rain. During bad weather they will all huddle together as close to
the breakwind as they can, whilst their limbs shake and their teeth
chatter with cold.
More often, however, something in the way of a hut is made. A few
pieces of stick, which will easily bend, will be driven into the ground,
covered with sheets of bark and a few boughs and perhaps plastered over
with mud. Sometimes, where kangaroos are plentiful, some dried skins
will be used instead of bark and boughs. There will, of course, be
nothing in the way of chairs or tables, a few skins and a pitchi or two
will probably be the only furniture, but a miscellaneous assortment of
odds and ends will lie around. Some eight or nine souls may claim the
hut as home.
These huts are arranged according to a fixed plan. Some will face in one
direction, some in another. Thus a man's hut must never face in the same
direction as that of his mother-in-law and certain other of his
relatives.
A native camp always has a most untidy appearance. All kinds of things
are left lying about, but as the black people are very honest nothing is
ever stolen. They will give their things away freely but they will never
think of taking what is not their own. Most of their time is spent out
of doors. They only use their huts in wet and windy weather or when the
nights are cold. Their food is always cooked and eaten outside, and
bones and all kinds of remnants are littered about everywhere, but as
they usually have several dogs these things do not remain for long. How
thankful you and I ought to be for our homes and our home comforts,
however plain and humble those homes may be!
If food is becoming scarce the people will often leave their camp
altogether and migrate further up the river where it is more plentiful,
for their camps, you must remember, are nearly always built upon a
river's bank. Sometimes there may have been heavy rain in one part of
their country and very little in another. Then they will move to where
grass and game are more plentiful. We expect our food to be brought to
our home, but the blacks take their homes to their food. Sometimes after
a death, too, they will desert their settlement and encamp elsewhere.
The dead man may have been a very troublesome person to get on with when
alive, and they think if they bury him near his old camp and then move
away themselves his ghost will not know where to find them and they will
be rid of him altogether. This frequent moving of their homes is in many
ways a very good thing. If they stayed too long in one place their huts
would soon become very insanitary and diseases would begin to work havoc
among them.
In the camp the old man's word is law. They even decide what food may be
eaten and what must be left alone. They manage to forbid all the more
delicate morsels to all the younger members of the tribe and so secure
the best of everything for themselves. Women and girls are of little
account among them. They are in fact but the "hewers of wood and drawers
of water" for the men, and their life is one of terrible and
never-ending drudgery. The little girls, of course, do not have to work,
but they are seldom made such pets of as are the little boys. At
fourteen they are girls no longer and their life of drudgery begins.
[Illustration: ABORIGINAL CHILDREN AND NATIVE HUT]
Where, as on the mission stations, the Gospel is preached to this poor
people it brings new joy and hope to the women. There is no other hope
for them, nothing else that saves them from the slavery in which they
are compelled to live. On the mission stations are real homes, houses
like our own, into which love has entered and where woman is no longer
slave or chattel, but a queen. Each family on these settlements has its
own little holding fenced and cleared in which fruit, flowers, and
vegetables and, perhaps, rice and maize are grown. The cottages are
patterns of neatness both without and within, so tremendous is the
difference the religion of Jesus Christ makes to this poor degraded
people. If we had more missionaries we should have many more such homes
and many more of the black women would enter into the meaning of those
words in the twentieth chapter of St John--"The disciples went away
again _to their own home_" and found the Resurrection light shining
there in all its beauty.
Perhaps nothing would give us so good an idea of the position of women
and girls among this people as to take our place in a native camp on the
morning of some aboriginal girl's wedding day. The poor little bride,
she will probably not be more than about fourteen, will have been told
that her husband has come to fetch her. She has very likely never seen
him before, although she was engaged to him as soon as she was born, and
he will probably be much older than she. She will cry a good deal and
say she does not want to go, but she knows very well that by the laws of
her tribe she must do so. Her father, expecting rebellion, will be
standing by her side with a spear and a heavy club in his hand. The
moment she attempts to resist her capture (for it is really nothing
less) a blow from the spear will remind her she must go. If she tries,
as she probably will, to run away the heavy club will fell her to the
ground. Her husband may then begin to show his authority. He will seize
her by her hair and drag her off in the the direction of his _mia_. She
will very likely make her teeth meet in the calf of his leg, but it will
be no good. She will only receive a kick from his bare foot in return.
Arrived at her new home she has to cook her husband a dinner and then
sit quietly by his side while he eats it. When he has finished she may
have what is left, although he, not improbably, has been throwing pieces
to the dogs all the time.
Such are the marriage ceremonies in wild Australia.