CHAPTER XVIII
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.
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.
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.