THE ABORIGINES
The Australians call the aborigines “blacks,” and “blackfellows,” and
they sometimes use the word “nigger,” but the few natives I have seen
were chocolate brown rather than black. Their hair is curly, but not
woolly, and they have neither the thick lips nor the very flat nose of
the African. Some of the aborigines are quite fine looking; they are
generally straight and well formed, although often lean. In Townsville,
Queensland, I saw a “gin,” as the women of the aborigines are called,
who would have passed without notice in any mixed crowd of coloured
people of our Southern States. She was about eighteen years old, with
the skin of a mulatto, high cheekbones, a slightly receding chin, and a
big mouth. Her hair was fine, smooth, and glossy.
This girl had on European clothes, but in the interior of northern
Australia both men and women go naked, or at most have only a few
ornaments in their noses and ears, with perhaps a string or two
about their waist for carrying their crude weapons. In northwestern
Queensland the natives put on belts of human hair for certain
ceremonies. They wear grass necklaces and often stripe their bodies
with paint. Sometimes they have several opossum skins about their
shoulders. They make their hair stiff with fat or clay and tie bands
about it to keep it from falling into their eyes. Hair grease is
profusely used everywhere and the native gives himself a coat of fish
oil when he can get it. This envelops him in a rancid smell which is
very offensive to Europeans. The methods of dressing the hair vary.
Sometimes it is bound up with cloths, and the knuckle bones of the
kangaroo are so fastened to it that they hang down over the ears, or
kangaroo teeth are tied to the forelocks, so that they dangle between
the eyebrows.
About Port Darwin in northern Australia the blacks wear nose pins,
some of which are ten inches long. The nose is pierced in the centre,
and the pins are thrust through so that they stand out for five inches
beyond the nostrils. They are made of the bones of turkeys, kangaroos,
or emus. Occasionally parrot quills are used with the bright-coloured
feathers sticking out on each side of the nose. Some of the natives
pierce their ears and insert kangaroo bones as plugs.
Nearly all the aborigines have scars upon their bodies and the bigger
the scars the prouder the owners. To make ornaments the skin is cut
with flints or shells, powdered charcoal is dusted in, and the wounds
are kept open for months, so that when they heal they leave ridges on
the body as thick as your finger. These scars are found on the native’s
back and chest, on the biceps muscles, and sometimes on the thighs and
stomach. Among certain tribes the men are scarred by having little
pieces of skin cut out to the tune of the victim’s yells of pain.
The scars on the women are not always voluntary, but are often the
result of the cruel treatment inflicted upon them by their husbands.
The men regard their wives as their slaves and when angry, club them
and cut them with their stone hatchets or jab them with their hardwood
spears. If a woman is killed in this family discipline, it is not
considered a matter of consequence. The aboriginal wife has no rights
that the men are bound to respect, and if she is caught away from home
any one may maltreat her. As a daughter she is sold or given away by
her father or brothers, and after marriage she is a drudge and slave. A
husband can lend his wife to a friend or give her away. He can forbid
her speaking to another man, and in some tribes she is not allowed to
exchange a word with her grown-up brothers. She is often a bride at
the age of ten, and is usually married before she reaches sixteen.
There are many bachelors among the blacks, but no old maids, for even a
homely girl can work.
When a man dies his widows become the property of his eldest brother,
who can keep or dispose of them, as he pleases. The eldest brother has
the right to give away or trade off his sisters, and the father often
exchanges the females of the family for wives for his sons.
The native woman of Australia cannot complain that all the professions
of her tribe are not open to her. She does all the work, from building
the house to getting the food and nursing the baby. Most of the tribes
are nomadic. They build little shelters of bark or skins wherever they
camp, making a new village at each stopping place.
In travelling, the woman carries all the belongings of the family. She
is laden down like a pack horse and walks along bent over behind her
husband, who, perhaps, carries nothing but his clubs and boomerangs. If
she falls behind the rest of the party she is pretty sure of a whipping
from her lord and master. As soon as they come to a new camp the woman
cuts the bark and builds the hut. She then goes out and digs roots,
picks fruit, and climbs the trees to chop out the larvæ of worms,
which she cooks for breakfast. She often carries her child with her,
laying it on the ground as she digs. As a result of such treatment she
ages rapidly, her hair soon grows gray, her face wrinkles, and she dies
at about thirty. Even the men seldom live to be more than fifty.
The lives of the aborigines are shortened by exposure, poor diet, and
contact with civilization and its vices. They are said to be the least
developed people of the world. I am told that they live more like
animals than human beings. Their food is largely vegetable, including
all sorts of roots. They collect wild fruits, and for bread they make a
sort of paste of grass seeds moistened and ground between stones into
a flour. This they make into dough and eat it either cooked or raw. A
favourite dish is wild honey, which they find in the hollow trees by
following the bee to its hoard.
They are fond of ants, worms, and snakes. There are ants in all parts
of Australia, and certain varieties are caught by the aborigines. The
native stands upon an ant hill and stamps with his feet, whereupon the
insects run up his legs. After his shanks are well coated he scrapes
the ants off and eats them. The larger kinds are roasted or dried in
the sun.
Another delicacy is the beetle, which is consumed both as a worm and
as a matured insect. The worms are picked out of the rotten trees and
cooked in red-hot ashes. Foreigners who have eaten them say that so
served they are not at all bad, and that they look and taste like an
omelet.
Snakes and lizards of all kinds are roasted. The enormous iguana lizard
is especially liked. This reptile tastes much like a young chicken, and
its legs are greedily devoured by the Australian aborigines. It is
eaten also throughout South America.
The natives are fond of grasshoppers and locusts, which sometimes come
in great swarms. At such times the women gather them by the basketful
and the people have a great feast. They first throw the grasshoppers
into the fire to burn off the wings and legs and then drag them out
and roast each one separately. The flesh so prepared tastes not unlike
roasted chestnuts.
There seems little doubt that the Australian aborigines are cannibals.
The records show that they were cannibals in the past and according
to credible stories the eating of human flesh continues among them in
parts of Australia to-day.
The government reports give instances of cannibalism. Some years ago a
man named Edwards saw the natives roasting an infant in one of their
ovens. He watched the blacks open the body and begin eating the flesh,
but the sight made him so faint that he was not able to continue his
observations. In his book, “Among the Cannibals,” Carl Lumholtz says
that the natives consider nothing so delicious as the flesh of a black
man, although any human flesh is a delicacy. In parts of Queensland
children who die suddenly are roasted, and there is proof that they
have even been killed for food. In western Queensland the flesh of the
full-blooded blacks is preferred, but half-caste children are roasted
and eaten. The blacks are said to prefer the flesh of the Chinese or
the Malays, who are vegetable eaters, to that of meat-eating Europeans,
whose flesh is tougher and more salty.
Many Australians have told me that the blackfellows have more
intelligence than is generally supposed. They show evidences of
reasoning powers and marvellous skill in trailing men and animals.
Their children are taught to trace snakes and lizards over bare rocks.
Even the tiniest track on the hardest ground does not escape the
really untamed aborigine. For this reason blackfellows are regularly
attached to the bush police force, like so many bloodhounds, to track
escaped criminals or men lost in the desert. The black tracker almost
invariably gets his man, even when the criminal is mounted and his
pursuer afoot.
The Australian bushmen have a saying: “Get a black and you’ll find
water.” Parties going into unknown dry lands in the west take along an
aboriginal, for when there is no water to be had from sandy basins or
deep hollows in granite rocks which still hold some of the last rain,
the blackfellow is able to find roots of desert trees with which to
quench thirst. He draws water from these roots by cutting them into
short lengths and letting them drain, a drop at a time, into a wooden
bowl.
As hunters the blacks get the largest game without firearms. They
trap emus, hunting them with dingoes, and driving them into nets and
pitfalls. In the wilds, hunters station themselves near the water holes
and wait until the emu comes down to drink. They then rig up a net
across its path, drive it in, and when it has become entangled, kill
it with their spears or clubs. They imitate the call of the bird by
pounding on a piece of hollow log. Sometimes a man will cover himself
with bushes and thus creep up on an emu and kill it.
The aborigines catch kangaroos in nets or run them down with dogs and
spears. They go into the water with bushes about their heads and sneak
up on ducks and cranes. To get fish they sometimes poison the water
with certain plants and capture them as they rise to the surface. The
native way of taking catfish is to wade the streams and feel for them
with their feet. They kill the fish by biting deeply into the flesh
just back of the head.
I bought several boomerangs the other day for fifty cents apiece. The
boomerang is merely a flat curved piece of wood, about two inches
wide and from twenty inches to a yard long. It is so shaped that when
correctly hurled it will return to the thrower. The natives display
great skill in throwing boomerangs, but do not, as I had supposed, use
them as weapons. They sometimes kill small birds with them, but usually
the sticks are merely playthings. For fighting and for all heavy
hunting the blackfellows prefer spears and lances, some of which weigh
as much as four or five pounds and are nine feet in length. They are
barbed with bone, flint, iron, or hard wood.
As far as I can learn, the aborigines reverence no Great Father as do
our Indians, although they believe in a future state and happy hunting
grounds. They have a great dread of ghosts and demons, and think that
certain places, such as caves and thickets, are haunted by them. Their
witch doctors are supposed to cure diseases, which they are sure are
caused by spirits. The doctors pretend to locate the demon, and to
suck pieces of wood out of the body where the pain is. The blacks are
convinced that most of their woes are due to sorcery, and that certain
men can cause others to fall sick and die. They believe their medicine
men can make rain and so hold them responsible for drought as well as
for any other suffering of the tribe. The aborigines use all sorts
of charms to ward off evil spirits. They have an idea that the white
settlers are dead natives come to life again and claim that they
themselves will appear as white men after death.
[Illustration: In their fondness for any kind of sport the Australians
sometimes shoot turkeys from an airplane. The males of one variety of
this bird always tend the nest when it contains hatching eggs.]
[Illustration: A full-grown kangaroo standing on his hind legs may
be taller than a man, but his newborn infant is often only an inch
long. The baby is almost transparent and must stay a long time in the
mother’s pouch.]
As the future state of the aboriginal is thought to depend largely on
how he is buried, the natives are very careful to inter their dead
fellows with certain rites. The men are usually trussed up before
burial. The knees of the corpse are bent up to its neck and tied
there, the arms are bound to the sides, and the calves forced up to
the thighs. Then rugs of skins or pieces of bark are fastened about
the body, and it is buried three or four feet deep in the sand, a
mound covered with logs being erected above it. As for the women and
children, they are considered of no account, either dead or alive, and
their remains are usually rolled up between sheets of bark and covered
with earth.
In some parts of Australia the aborigines practise cremation, while
in others the dead bodies are dried before fires until they turn into
mummies. Some tribes lay the dead out upon platforms in the trees,
and allow the birds to clean the bones, just as the bones of Parsees
are cleaned by the vultures when the dead are exposed in the Towers
of Silence at Bombay. Afterward the bones are buried in the earth or
dropped into hollow trees.
The aborigines of Australia are a dying race. Nobody knows how many
were here two centuries ago, but it is estimated that there are now
only sixty thousand of them left. Of these perhaps a fourth are in
Queensland, a half in Western Australia, and ten thousand in the
Northern Territory. There are only about one hundred in the state of
Victoria, and only about fifteen hundred in New South Wales. South
Australia has sixteen thousand. The native race of Tasmania is entirely
extinct, its last member having died in 1876. These figures are not
exact, for no accurate census of the aborigines has ever been taken.
They live in the wilds, and in the vast regions of unexplored Australia
no one can tell how many there are.