FORAGING AND COOKING
It is very strange to me to hear the average white person speak of the
blacks collectively as having no individuality, for really they are as
diverse in characteristics as possible; no two girls I had in the house
but were totally different.
There has been too much generalisation about the blacks. For instance,
you hear some people assert all blacks are trackers and good bushmen.
That there are some whose tracking power is marvellous is true, but
they are not the rule, and a black fellow off his own beat is often
useless as a bushman.
So with their eyesight; what they have been trained to look out for
they see in a marvellously quick way, or so it seems to us who have not
in their lines the same aptitude. Of course, for seeing things at a
distance a black has the advantage, unless the white has had the same
open-air life. Some white bushmen are as good as any blacks.
Nimmaylee, a little black girl who lived in the house, used to tell me
all sorts of bush wonders, as we went in the early summer mornings for
a swim in the river. She was a great water-baby, with rather a contempt
for my aquatic limitations. Then she thought it too idiotic to want to
dry yourself with a towel,--just like a mad white woman!
White people were an immense joke to Nimmaylee. She conformed to their
rules as one playing a new game. She has a little brother as black as
herself. She has a substantial pair of legs, but his are so thin and
his little body so round that he looks like a little black spider.
Nimmaylee is quite an authority on corroborees, knowing ever so many
different steps, from the serpentile trail of the codfish to the mimic
fight. The songs she knows too. She used, when she lived in the camp,
to marshal in a little crowd of camp children, and put them through a
varied performance for my benefit.
These performances were of daily occurrence when the fruit was ripe,
for Nimmaylee's capacity for water-melon was practically unlimited.
Nimmaylee was a wonderful little fisherwoman; she delighted in a
fishing expedition with me. Off we used to go with our lines, worms or
frogs for bait, or perhaps shrimps or mussels if we were after cod. If
we were successful, Nimmaylee would string the fish on a stick in a
most professional manner, and carry them with an air of pride to the
cook. She attributes her fishing successes to a charm having been sung
over her to that end as a baby.
Accompanied by some reliable old 'gins' and ever so many piccaninnies,
I used to take long walks through the 'bush.'
How interesting those blacks made my bush walks for me! Every ridge,
plain, and bend had its name and probably legend; each bird a past,
every excrescence of nature a reason for its being.
Those walks certainly at least modified my conceit. I was always the
dunce of the party--the smallest child knew more of woodcraft than I
did, and had something to tell of everything. Seeing Oogahnahbayah, a
small eagle-hawk, flying over, they would say, 'He eats the emu eggs.'
He flies over where the emu is sitting on her eggs and makes a noise
hoping to frighten the bird off; having done so, he will drop a stone
on the eggs. If the emu is not startled off the nest, the hawk will fly
on, alight at some distance, and walk up like a black fellow, still
with the stone in his beak, to the nest; off the emu will go, then the
hawk bangs the eggs with the stone until he breaks them. He throws the
stone on one side, has a feed of emu eggs, and goes off, leaving poor
Moorunglely, the sitting emu, to come back and find her eggs all
destroyed. As the narrative ended, the little {aborigines} would look
quite sad, and say 'Nurragah!' 'Poor thing!' at the thought of the
domestic tragedy in bird life.
I had to hear the stingless little native bees humming before I could
see them; and as to knowing which tree had honey in it, unless I saw
the bees, that was quite beyond me, while a mere toddler would point
triumphantly to a 'sugar-bag' tree, recognising it as such by the wax
on its fork, black before rain, yellowish afterwards.
This honey is good strained, but as the blacks get it, it is all mixed
up with dirty wax and dead bees.
I deplored the sacrifice of the bees one day, but was told it was all
right. Whoever had chopped the nest out would take home the waxy stick
they had used to help get the honey out; they would throw the stick in
the fire, then all the dead bees would go to a paradise in the skies,
whence next season they would send Yarragerh Mayrah, the Spring Wind,
to blow the flowers open, and then down they would come to earth again.
One year the manna just streamed down the Coolabah and Bibbil trees; it
ran down like liquid honey, crystallising where it dropped.
The old blacks said, 'It is a drought now, but it will be worse. Byamee
has sent the manna by the little Dulloorah birds and the black ants,
because there will be no flowers for the bees to get honey from, so he
has sent this manna.' Each time he has done so, a great drought has
followed, and indeed it was followed by one of the worst droughts
Australia has ever known. Byamee, it is said, first sent them the manna
because their children were crying for honey, of which there was none
except in the trees that Byamee, when on earth, had marked for his own.
The women had murmured that they were not allowed to get this; but the
men were firm, and would neither touch it nor let them touch it, which
so pleased Byamee that he sent the manna, and said he always would when
a long drought threatened.
A great chorus of 'My Jerhs' would tell something was sighted.
It might be the track of a piggiebillah porcupine. This track was
followed to a hollow log; then came the difficulty, how to get it out,
for porcupines cling tightly with their sharp claws, and all a dog can
do where a piggiebillah is concerned is to bark, their spines are too
much to tackle at close quarters. But the old gins are equal to the
occasion: a tomahawk to chop the log, and a yam-stick to dislodge the
porcupine, who takes a good deal of killing before he is vanquished.
They say a fully initiated man can sing a charm which will make a
piggiebillah relax his grip and be taken captive without any trouble.
The piggiebillahs burrow into the sand and leave their young there as
soon as the faintest feel of a spine appears. The baby piggiebillahs
look like little indiarubber toys.
The opossums all disappeared from our district. When we were first
there they were very numerous and used to make raids at night to my
rose-bushes--great havoc the result. It is said a very great
wirreenun--wizard--willed them away so that his enemy, whose yunbeai, or
personal totem, the opossum was, should die. This design was frustrated
by counter magic; two powerful wizards appeared and, acting in concert,
put a new yunbeai into the dying man; he recovered.
When the opossums were about the blacks used to see their scratched
tracks on the trees, and chop or burn them out. They miss the opossums
very much, for not only were they a prized food, but their skins made
rugs, their hair was woven into cords of which were made amulets worn
on the forearm or head against sickness, and with no modern instrument
can they so well carve their weapons, as with an opossum tooth.
Naturally their desire is to see Moodai, the opossum, return; to that
end a wirreenun is now singing incantations to charm him back.
Opossum hunters had a way of bringing them home strung round their
necks; very disagreeable, I should think, but custom, that tyrant,
rules it so. The old gins dug out yams vigorously; some were eaten raw,
others were kept for cooking.
To cook them they dug out a hole, made a fire in it, put some stones on
the fire, then, when the stones were heated and the fire burnt down,
they laid some leaves and grass on the stones, sprinkled some water,
then put on the yams, on top of them more grass, sprinkled more water,
then more grass and a. thick coating of earth, leaving the yams to
cook.
Several other roots they cooked and ate. Raw they ate thistle tops,
pigweed, and crowfoot, with great relish. Their game they cooked as
follows. Kangaroo were first singed, cleaned out, and filled with hot
stones, then put on the top of a burnt-down fire, hot ashes heaped all
over them. The blacks like their meats with the gravy in, very
distinctly red gravy. Emu were plucked, the insides taken out, and the
birds filled up with hot stones, box leaves, and some of their own
feathers. A fire was made in a hole; when it was burnt down, leaves and
emu feathers were put in it, on top of these the bird, on top of it
leaves and feathers again, then a good layer of hot ashes, and over all
some earth.
The piggiebillahs were first smoked so that their quills might be
easily knocked off. This done, the insides were taken out, then the
piggiebillahs were put in little holes made beside the fire, and
covered over with hot ashes, as were also opossums, ducks and other
birds, iguanas and fish.
Ducks were plucked by our tribe, but in some places they were encased
thickly in mud, buried in the ashes to cook, and, when done, the
plaster of mud would be knocked off, and with it would come all the
feathers.
The insides of iguanas and fish are taken out all in one piece. Each
fish carries in its inside a representation of its Minggah--spirit
tree; by drying the inside and pressing it you can plainly see the
imprint of the tree.
When we go bathing, the blacks tell me that the holes in the creek
filled with gum leaves are codfish nests. They say too, that when they
beat the river to drive the fish out towards the net waiting for them,
that they hear the startled cod sing out.
Mussels and crayfish are cooked in the ashes.
The seagulls, which occasionally we used to see inland, are said to
have brought the first mussels to the back creeks.
Emu eggs the blacks roll in hot ashes, shake, roll again; shake once
more, and then bury them in the ashes, where they are left for about an
hour until they are baked hard, when they are eaten with much relish
and apparently no hurt to digestion, though one egg is by no means
considered enough for a meal in spite of its being equal to several
eggs of our domestic hen.
Not only are the blacks very particular in the way their game is carved
or divided, but also in the distribution of the portions allotted to
each person. The right to a particular part is an inherited one. No
polite offering of a choice to an honoured guest, no suggestion of the
leg or wing. You may loathe the leg of a bird as food, but at a black
fellow's feast, if convention ordains that as your portion, have it you
must; just as each rank in society had its invariable joint in early
mediaeval Ireland.
The seeds of Noongah--a sterculia--and Dheal, were ground on their flat
dayoorl-stones and made into cakes, which they baked, first on pieces
of bark beside the fire to harden them, then in the ashes. These
dayoorl, or grinding-stones, are handed down from generation to
generation, being kept each in the family to whom it had first
belonged. Should a member of any other use it without permission, a
fight would ensue. Some of these stones are said to have spirits in
them; those are self-moving, and at times have the power of speech. I
have neither seen them move nor heard them speak, though I have a
couple in my possession. I suppose the statement must be taken on
faith; and as faith can move mountains, why not a dayoorl-stone?
The so-called improvident blacks actually used to have a harvest time,
and a harvest home too. When the doonburr, or seed, was thick on the
yarmmara, or barley-grass, the tribes gathered this grass in
quantities.
First, they made a little space clear of everything, round which they
made a brush-yard. Each fresh supply of yarmmara, as it was brought in
by the harvesters, was put in this yard. When enough was gathered, the
brush-yard was thrown on one side, and fire set to the grass, which was
in full ear though yet green. While the fire was burning, the blacks
kept turning the grass with sticks all the time to knock the seeds out.
When this was done, and the fire burnt out, they gathered up the seed
into a big opossum-skin rug, and carried it to the camp.
There, the next day, they made a round hole like a bucket, and a square
hole close to it. These they filled with grass seed. One man trampled
on the seed in the square hole to thresh it out with his feet; another
man had a boonal, or stick, about a yard long, rounded at one end, and
nearly a foot broad; with this he worked the grass in the round hole,
and as he worked the husks flew away.
It took all one day to do this. The next day they took the large bark
wirrees, canoe-shaped vessels, which when big like these are called
yubbil. They put some grain in these, and shook it up; one end of the
yubbils being held much higher than the other, thus all the dust and
dirt sifted to one end, whence it was blown off. When the grain was
sufficiently clean, it was put away in skin bags to be used as
required, being then ground on the large flat dayoorl-stones, with a
smaller flat stone held in both hands by the one grinding; this stone
was rubbed up and down the dayoorl, grinding the seed on it, on which,
from time to time, water was thrown to soften it.
When ground, the grain was made into little flat cakes, and cooked as
the tree-seed cakes were. When the harvesting of the yarmmara was done,
a great hunt took place, a big feast was prepared, and a big corroboree
held night after night for some time.
The two principal drinks were gullendoorie--that is, water sweetened
with honey; and another made of the collarene, or flowers of the
Coolabah (grey-leaved box), or Bibbil (poplar-leaved box) flowers,
soaked all night in binguies (canoe-shaped wooden vessels) of water.
Just about Christmas time the collarene is at its best; and then, in
the olden days, there were great feasts and corroborees held.
The flat dayoorl-stones on which the seeds are ground with the smaller
stone, are like the 'saddle-stone querns' occasionally found in
ancient British sites. These primitive appliances preceded the circular
rotatory querns in evolution, and as the monuments prove were used in
ancient Egypt. I cannot say whether, amongst the Euahlayi, there was a
recognised licence as to exchange of wives on these festal occasions,
or at boorahs. If the custom existed, I was not told of it by the
blacks; but it is quite possible that, unless I made inquiries on the
subject, I would not be told.